1. Night, heavy rain, Morse code poured like rain, dozens of black-clad people holding black umbrellas, silently scurrying. Two young men, helping each other into the rainy night. They brought a touch of light to the rainy night, and they were Li Xia and Lan Fen.
2. For the next 12 years, every day was like the tip of a knife, during the day, the figures were staggered, and one piece of intelligence was transmitted; at night, the radio waves pierced the night sky and transmitted thousands of miles.
3. The dawn is coming, the rainy night is even colder, the comrades-in-arms fall one by one, Li Xia knows that the only result of continuing to send reports is sacrifice, but he put on his headphones without hesitation, ushered in the dawn in the sound of "Didi Didi", and said goodbye to his comrades forever.
The suspenseful and exciting plot conflicts, tear-jerking camaraderie, visually stunning stage design, just the right soundtrack, and movie-like picture texture have created the ace dance drama "Eternal Electric Wave" under the blessing of silent and sound dance.
Like the film of the same name, the dance drama is based on the martyr Li Bai and his wife Qiu Huiying, telling the "latent" story of underground party members Li Xia and Lan Fen. Before entering, I originally thought that the storyline of the dance drama was the same as the movie, but it was a different way of expression, but I did not expect that this idea of "laziness" had never appeared in the mind of the dance drama choreographer.
The dance drama "The Eternal Airwaves" adopts a new plot setting, Li Xia is no longer the owner of the candy shop, but an editor of the newspaper, and Lan Fen becomes a female worker in the Shanghai Silk Factory. Different from the movie, the number of characters and scenes in the dance drama is limited, and the new character background setting makes the entire plot conflict more concentrated.
This is a successful suspense drama, the first half of the whole preparation, the characters appear one by one: newspaper secretary, photojournalist, tailor, apprentice, rickshaw driver, flower girl... Who are they? In the second half, the plot started "acceleration", the agents revealed their identities and hunted everywhere, the entire Shanghai intelligence organization suffered a serious blow, the comrades died to cover Li Xia, and he himself finally resolutely decided to say goodbye to the comrades forever.
Without spoilers, the only thing that needs to be reminded of the audience is to be "patient" about it.
However, there are a few details that can still be said, they truly restore the year: every day Li Xia comes home, Lan Fen will pick up a broom to sweep the floor. The general audience may not know the meaning, according to Wu Desheng, the third honorary curator of the Li Bai Martyrs Memorial Hall, who previously introduced it to the "IT Times" reporter, this is to check whether Li Bai is being followed; when Li Xia sends the newspaper, he will pick up a radio on the table and go upstairs, and then make the action of the wiring circle, which is a simple radio invented by the party's flight attendant Tu Zuochao, only to do a simple transformation on the ordinary radio, it is a radio, once there is a situation, as long as the coil is torn off, no one can see it; when Li Xia was sacrificed, the dawn had arrived Lan Fen came out holding the child, which was also the real plot of that year. Qiu Huiying did not know that her husband had been killed by the enemy on May 7, and after the liberation of Shanghai, she had carried her child to Tilanqiao Prison to look for her husband.
Today's dance drama is no longer only expressed by movement, and non-dance factors such as stage, lighting, costumes, and music are equally important for the presentation of the effect of the whole work.
Using the effect of light and shadow, this dance drama "Eternal Electric Wave" actually performed a kind of cinematic texture on the stage.
The opening scene has both the sci-fi sense of "The Matrix" and the old Shanghai atmosphere of the Axe Gang in "Kung Fu", with a strong visual impact.
The "montage" technique commonly used in the film has also been brought into the dance drama and blended with its own art form, which some viewers call "concurrent parallel montage", while the choreographer calls it a "narrative cut in time and space of space".
After the death of his comrades- and comrades- and comrades-in-arms, Li Xia went to the scene to look for intelligence clues, while Lan Fen took a tricycle home. Two scenes that occur in different scenes, using lighting and invisible curtains, form two light zones on the stage and present them at the same time.
On the left stage, Li Xia is looking for clues, and his thinking even imitates the "camera-like memory" commonly found in detective movies, and the items that will be smashed to pieces by the agents will be restored to their original state, thus discovering the clues. On the right stage, the tricycle driver disguised as a secret agent aroused Lan Fen's vigilance, and then performed several actions such as getting off the bus, taking off the hat, and watching the hairstyle, which was actually a restoration of the thinking process of her brain.
The love story of Li Xia and Lan Fen adopts a more daring way, and four groups of "Li Xia and Lan Fen" simultaneously present the stories of the two people getting along in different periods on the same stage, from pretending to be husband and wife at the beginning, to slowly getting acquainted later, to getting married, joining the party, and lurking together.
In "Twelve Years of Fighting in Shanghai by the "Three Martyrs of the Radio" Li Bai", which was written by this reporter, the feelings of the two people were described as follows: From "pretending to be husband and wife" to real revolutionary partners, they have the deepest love and become the firmest faith, and their loyalty to the revolutionary cause and loyalty to each other has not changed.
Another classic picture is that when the comrade-in-arms covered Li Xia's sacrifice, Li Xia, who was in great pain, met with his comrades in a dream, and the warm-colored yellow overhead lights and black space formed a flashback of dreams and reality, while the double dance between Li Xia and his comrades-in-arms just right reflected the lament and nostalgia for the loss of young life.
The dance drama itself pays attention to the integration of time and space, usually using linear narrative, and the film is the art of time and space cutting, and the use of montage, flashbacks, narration, close-ups and other elements gives it the advantage of other forms that are difficult to compare, but "The Eternal Wave" breaks this traditional structure and allows the audience to enjoy a wonderful, cinematic stage performance in two hours.
At the Spring Festival Gala in 2020, a dance of "Fishing Light Song" surprised four seats, with fans, benches, cheongsam, long music, and a feminine Jiangnan women's posture... forming a classic Shanghai alley painting.
"Fishing Light Song" is the theme song of the 1934 film of the same name "Fishing Light Song", composer Ren Guang, in order to write this song, he deliberately went to the mouth of the Yangtze River - Wu Songkou to observe the hard work of fishermen. The melodious and soothing style of "Fisherman's Light Song" is like a wave of waves lapping to the shore, waking up the "Shanghai morning" in a faint sadness: Aunt And Aunt sits on a low stool, gently shakes the fan, sometimes gently blows the fire, sometimes gently raises the slender hand, erases the beads of sweat on the forehead, which is the most familiar picture of the old Shanghainese. As the sun rises higher and higher, the women stand up and walk forward, the swaying cheongsam skirt horns, elegant and graceful dance steps, and from the other side show the softness and beauty of Jiangnan women.
The group dance that appeared in "The Eternal Airwaves" has more meaning than the independent clips of the Spring Festival Gala. Li Xia and Lan Fen fought on the battlefield of "invisible smoke of gunfire", they had to deal with the secret agents at any time, with extreme vigilance, but also "lurked" in the downtown area and lived with ordinary people. Dance drama does not shape heroes in a face style like the traditional red repertoire, but through the details of life, let modern audiences understand the hero's side as an ordinary person, so as to more deeply understand the sentence: heroic bone tenderness is the real hero.
The same connotation is also reflected in other bridge sections of the dance drama, for example, in a dance that reflects the family life of Li Xia and Lan Fen, the two dancers' loving eyes are intertwined, and the lingering body language blooms out of the love rose in the fire of war, which is also the "soul mate" that young people today year yearn for.
What is more precious is that this presentation is not a simple artistic creation, but a true portrayal of the underground workers who fought in Shanghai.
In this newspaper's series of reports "Red Correspondence in Shikumen", the reporters learned many details of that year by sorting out historical materials and interviewing the descendants of the martyrs: Qin Hongjun, one of the "Three Martyrs of the Radio Station", in his busy work, would change magic for his children and play a harmonica once; during the Mid-Autumn Festival, Li Bai took Qiu Huiying to the shops on the street for a walk, pointed to the various mooncakes in the window, and said, This is bean paste, this is Lotus Rong," "We are full of eyes, and if we see it, it is equivalent to eating"; another martyr, Zhang Sleepy, He is honest and sincere, loves to read, has been a friend of books all his life, and is proficient in piano, chess, calligraphy and painting
The more you know about these "real" heroes, the easier it is to "love" such heroes. As it is said at the end of the play: the long river runs silently, but love and faith will always exist.
Author/IT Times reporter Hao Junhui
Editor/Lin Fei, Kicked Sister
Typography/Ji Jiaying
Photo/ "The Eternal Wave"
Source/IT Times public account vittimes