In 2022, when many performances are suspended, many cast members are still pedaling alone in the rehearsal hall and theater. Under the lights that are not fully turned on, you can see the fine dust on the ground, which flutters from time to time, like a windy Beijing. Winter shrank under the feet of this group of people.
During the time when the mood is bored and waiting for change, every day is like this winter, and everyone has made embarrassing jokes, but when the change really comes, it is full of an unknown atmosphere.
The past year is like a rubber band that has been pulled apart, and time is slowly unfolding. When the rubber band is suddenly restored to its original shape, some people will scream out in pain.
But this kind of pain couldn't be called pain at all, and that exclamation didn't make much sense.
The repertoire will definitely become more and more abundant, and the audience will have more and more choices. Just like the strong wind after the end of winter, the dust, chaos, and fear will be suppressed. In the chaos where the sky and the earth are bare, the bells continue to ring and the lights shine rise.
In a way, the end of 2022 is also the end of a normal state of theater in the past few years, but what the theater is facing is not a one-click restart.
Some people also say that it is the absence of foreign repertoires in the past few years that has made domestic repertoires live a "splendid" life. This is a bit too extreme.
In the past few years, performances have been hit by the epidemic, and there are still plays that sincerely spend time with the audience in the predicament.
The two different external brilliance and internal brilliance before and after, in the interweaving, see the difference in the end.
After years of hard work in the market, different drama forms have a clearer portrait of the audience.
However, in 2022, when the market is tough, it is inevitable that some producers will try to attract traffic, but the results are often unsatisfactory. The best results are two-two stunned, one wide and two wide, and few typed and vertical audiences are willing. Entering the "wider or more subdivided theater" imagined by the producer, the expected "audience increase" is naturally a mirror image.
In addition to the producer, the creator is not without confusion.
In recent years, the term "pleasing personality" has become popular, and the answer to "How to overcome the pleasing personality?" has received hundreds of thousands of praises. They all compare the characteristics one by one with different attitudes, and pat their legs and say straight: "Isn't this just me!" There is pain in it Those who make up their minds to modify their character also have those who look at themselves in the mirror and feel sorry for themselves.
Dramatic works also have this trend.
Works are the shadow of the creator's personality. If "pleasing personality" is everywhere in the past few years, it is inevitable that there will be fewer and fewer creators who are tough and self-sufficient. With the power of workshops, there will be more and more people who have completed industrialization and try to bridge or abandon differences. , to satisfy the audience as my own mind, goodness.
But in the final analysis of drama, there should always be some things that are not only "beautiful and passionate", but also beautiful and more passionate.
The audience is willing to pay several times the price of other cultural products to enter the theater, and what they deserve most is the real connection between people.
Drama is the self-consciousness of the human heart and the natural reaction of people to the world. The heart on the stage is like a stone in clear water, and the audience is also in the ripples. This is the most beautiful moment of the theater.
People who are obsessed with what the audience wants to see, why not ask yourself, what do you want to tell the audience?
In the past year, it was not easy to be a theater performer, nor was it easy to watch a theater. The following is just a small part of what I have watched.
Beijing Dahua City Performing Arts Center: Our Own Theater
Walking in the mainstream world with an old-school and tough experimental attitude, using hallucinatory music, light and shadow, and spectacle to draw the audience into his stern thinking, this is the impression that director Yi Liming left on the audience.
Among directors of his generation, he enjoys walking alone, wandering at will, without feeling insecure.
In 2022, after Yi Liming served as the dean and art director of Beijing Dahua City Performing Arts Center, he changed his previous stern posture, and his attitude was as calm and gentle as the dark green gate of the theater. He took the trouble to explain to the media the theater and individuals, streets and communities , The relationship between the city, I am eager to provide the audience with a relationship like a friendly neighbor, and I am satisfied with it.
The phrase "our own theater" has rarely regained the warmth of art, and it has also made the center the most watched new theater in Beijing in 2022.
But returning to director work, Yi Liming's personality remains unchanged. His most interesting work in 2022 is the "Medical Trilogy". Different ways of traditional parlor dramas, endoscopically, interpret medical themes as observations of power systems, and even try to propose the possibility of people breaking free from power relations.
"Between the World" and "Two Capitals and Fifteen Days": Small theater director Steady Commercial Theater
Both Li Jianjun and Zhao Miao are directors who have grown up in small theaters, and will steadily enter the commercial theater in 2022.
Putting old movies on the stage was once a popular choice, but most of them are commercial productions with emotional nostalgia. I never thought that Li Jianjun would also choose this choice, and use real-time projection, green screen keying and pre-recording technologies to wrap up the last century. The fantasy of the 70s for today.
This inevitably has outdated concerns, which is not pleasing.
However, Li Jianjun used the nested form to make the text more meaningful by designing the narrative, turning a movie into a theater work.
Compared with Li Jianjun's previous works, "Between the World" has a more stable appearance, but the emotion is coherent, still singing about the world where ordinary people work and the hidden shadows under the work.
"Two Capitals and Fifteen Days" is the waste heat of the development of IP, and it is also the most representative IP drama in theaters in 2022.
The copyright owner removed Gao Zhisen's three-sided LED, turned around 180 degrees, and invited director Zhao Miao, who is famous for his body, to bring the direction back to the theater.
Although the original party is dissatisfied that the original work has become fragmented, but for such a long story and the need to preserve the complete story to satisfy non-theatre audiences in IP development, Zhao Miao constructed a complete narrative framework with imagery, which is the best choice currently available.
Huang Ying's "This Half of My Life" Yi Yang Qianxi's entry into the storm
Huang Ying didn't release "This Half of My Life" until 2022, telling the story of Lao She, but Huang Ying herself can be seen everywhere.
If many of the lines were spoken by Huang Ying herself, it would not violate the harmony.
At the end of the play, Huang Ying fabricated a scene in which Chang Shun (Lao She) meets his father at the gate of hell.
His father never raised Chang Shun, but he became the most important role in Chang Shun's life through a sentence before the gate of hell: "Next time I see you, I hope you don't look so ashamed." This is a typical image of a father. , appearing behind Lao She is actually a concept that Huang Ying wants to convey through "This Half of My Life": "I think everyone has an end, you can never predict how you end, but we can do it, That is, when the end comes, we can walk through it without shame."
"This Half of My Life" tells the story of the first half of Lao She's life.
It is said that a masterpiece written by Lao She in the second half of his life was expected to be rehearsed in 2023, starring Yi Yang Qianxi, who was rumored to be in trouble.
The admission of stars to national performing arts groups has been a source of controversy over the years.
From praising stars for their love of the stage to criticizing stars for occupying system resources is also one of the changes that will take place in 2022.
In fact, the audience does not underestimate the respect of the stars for the stage. What is behind it is the anxiety of young people about the reduction of personal opportunities and their doubts about the necessity of art in a difficult life.
The Korean version of "Camel Xiangzi" is well received
Many audiences watch the show (I often do too), and they can't help but ask "good guys and bad guys", hoping to anchor the world in front of them.
But it is often difficult to read Lao She's works, because the stories written by Lao She, especially "Camel Xiangzi", are close to our flesh and blood, and we rarely ask ourselves - am I a good person or a bad person?
South Korean director Gao Yixiong's "Camel Xiangzi" can meet the needs of the audience to "distinguish between good and bad".
Just like the exaggerated lines and performances unique to the play, the Korean version of "Camel Xiangzi" does not toss the audience back and forth between despair and hope, but draws laughter and tears in a very everyday way.
The Korean version of "Camel Xiangzi" met the audience through high-definition screening.
In the last year when foreign dramas were absent, the cultural centers of various countries continued to make efforts to show online and offline. After watching the St. Petersburg drama season online for free in the Russian cultural center, they launched the Chekhov Night event, and the "volume" was terrible.
"Preliminary Evidence" by the British National Theater "comes" to Beijing while it is fresh and hot.
The screening at the French Cultural Center commemorating the 400th anniversary of Molière's birth allowed Beijing audiences to appreciate the almost boring traditional French comedy, but it is actually very solid, highlighting the charm of the play itself.
Science and technology art festival in the middle theater of the one-man show in the west of the Drum Tower
In 2022, one-man shows will attract attention again.
Drum Tower West Theater first launched three "one-man show", and then planned "one-man show festival".
In the hot summer, "Report of an Ape", "The Story of Chess" and "Guitar Man" brought a breath of calm, enough to make people cool.
The few dramatists at that moment are not so much occupying a foothold in a turning point in time and space, it is better to say that they have to stand even for a moment in a world that has just formed and is about to disappear.
After three years of live and online performances in the performance industry, the Science and Technology Festival will naturally receive more attention in 2022.
However, under the theme of technology + art, the Science and Technology Art Festival of the Intermediate Theater has always focused on the exploration of self-identity. Each play not only has the experiment of applying technology to the theater, but also the projection of the theater people's self-development trajectory in the current society, awakening What matters is the self-awareness of people in technological equipment.
This kind of technology's rapid and sound transition to gentle and silent transition has quietly imprinted in the traces of the great era change, and once again has a symbolic meaning.
Yan Xiaoping, young playwright and theater director.
(Beijing Daily)