On January 20, in Bozhuang Village, Linfen, Shanxi Province, the village road leading to the Bozhuang Stage was blocked by traffic. Today is the local market day. Specialties such as apples and yams, snacks such as popcorn and nuts, and whole fans of pork and mutton are lined up on both sides of the road. What's more important is that this afternoon, the "Linfen in the Sound of Drums" village evening begins!
Posters with red paper and black characters have long been plastered all over the village’s publicity boards and prominent white walls. It snowed heavily the day before and the melted snow on the ground was a little slippery, but the actors who always performed in the fields didn't mind, and the audience didn't mind either. Even before the performance started, the venue was already surrounded by enthusiastic villagers, making it difficult for even the vigorous big yellow dog to squeeze in.
Oh, by the way, why "fight"? Because the absolute protagonist of the entire "Village Evening" program is Shannan's majestic gongs and drums. This folk skill, which was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage representative projects as early as 2006, still has a lot of popularity in the countryside today. Fans young and old. In the noisy gongs and drums of the first program "Drum Rhythm and Dragon Teng", the footsteps of the Spring Festival are really coming.
Anchor organizes "Village Gala" to bring intangible cultural heritage back to the stage of life
In the memory of Zhang Yong, the initiator of the "Village Evening" in Bozhuang Village and the inheritor of the prestigious gongs and drums in southern Shanxi, the most lively time in the village when he was a child was when the gongs and drums sounded. In the village, the first thing you hear is the sound of gongs and drums in the village.”
Zhang Yong started studying at a professional drumming school at the age of 15 and has been studying for more than 30 years. In order to preserve these tunes that have been passed down for thousands of years, Zhang Yong traveled to more than 300 villages in Linfen in the past 15 years and recorded more than 1,500 gong and drum tunes. “Many of them are from the notes written by old artists on cigarette paper and soap paper shells. Copied from it."
I have memorized the tune, who can I show it to? Zhang Yong began to test the live broadcast in 2020. From only sporadic viewers at the beginning, to more than 600,000 people watching one live broadcast at most, Zhang Yong found a new stage in the live broadcast room for Wei Feng Luo Gu. The gongs and drums became popular online, and then they went offline again. "The purpose of organizing the 'Village Gala' with the theme of gongs and drums this time is to bring back the disappearing sound of drums," said Zhang Yong.
The traditional song "Tiger Descends the Mountain" interprets the walking posture of a tiger. This program was led by Zhang Yong's "disciple", 13-year-old Gao Yale, who led more than a dozen villagers to fight vigorously. Interestingly, while the drumming was going on, a five- or six-year-old boy appeared on the scene, and his drumbeats matched perfectly with the "big army". Even Zhang Yong didn't know whose child this was. But don't worry about these details, the majestic gongs and drums are being passed down to the next generation.
Xiao Fang, professor at Beijing Normal University and director of the Department of Anthropology and Folklore of the School of Sociology, said: "Most of China's intangible cultural heritage is in rural areas, and part of it is on stage as a 'village evening' program, which is actually a kind of living inheritance. Intangible cultural heritage Only when it enters life and circulates in life can it have vitality. Now when protecting intangible cultural heritage, special emphasis is placed on organizational protection, which not only protects the skills of intangible cultural heritage, but also protects the people and environment related to it. From this perspective, 'Village Evening' 'The form is very effective."
According to the relevant person in charge of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Department of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, intangible cultural inheritors from all regions will participate in mass cultural activities such as "village evenings", mass gatherings, and condolence performances. According to incomplete statistics, during the Spring Festival this year, more than 10,000 intangible cultural heritage exhibitions and performances will be held in various places.
The Spring Festival was included in the first batch of national representative intangible cultural heritage projects in 2006. At the same time, the Spring Festival is also an important time node for the inheritance, practice and centralized display of many intangible cultural heritage projects. In order to better tell the vivid stories of Chinese traditional culture to the world, China has applied to UNESCO to include the "Spring Festival" in the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The children and the elderly are all actors, and the dustpans and hoes are all props
More than 1,200 kilometers south of Linfen, in Laershan Town, Fenghuang County, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Hunan Province, a "Village Gala" with the theme of "I am doing well in my hometown" was held on the same day. The initiator is a band composed of four Miao guys born in the 1990s, music anchor "Miao Sanman", drummer and leader Shi Jichang, lead singer Long Yanhua, guitarist Wu Jinwu and bassist Long Hekun. Before forming the band, they worked as chefs, drivers, plumbers, and farmed in their hometown.
In Luotuoshan Village, Laershan Town, the "Three Miao People" rented a small courtyard that was remote and did not disturb the people. They wrote songs, sang and broadcast live during the day, and went back to their homes at night. "The four of us are all Miao people in western Hunan. Our hometowns are very close to here. It's very convenient for us to take care of our families or work during the busy farming season," Shi Jichang said.
In addition to the singing and playing performances by the "Three Barbarians of the Miao" themselves, this "village evening" also brought together more than 70 villagers from multiple villages in Laershan Town: Miao drum performances by villagers in Duoxi Community, Daigao Village in Lianglin Township , the lion dance of the Miao ethnic group in western Hunan in Baguo Village, the folk songs sung by young migrant workers...the programs were all "auditioned" from the villagers' voluntary registrations, and the competition was fierce.
There are many Miao special programs in the "Village Evening", such as Miao drums. "We Miao children all grew up listening to Miao drums. There will be Miao drum performances every lively festival, and people watching can also volunteer to play a piece of music. Now schools in Laer Mountain have Miao drum classes, and they teach Miao dialect, playing Miao drums, and singing Miao songs are the 'three-piece set' for Miao children," Shi Jichang said.
"Village Evening" inherits traditions and creates fashion unique to the villagers. In the Miao costumed farm tools show, about 20 women, children and elderly people from Daigao Village, Lianglin Township, were dressed in Miao costumes. Some were holding hoes, some were carrying fish baskets, and some were holding loach catching tools. They were full of energy and enthusiasm. The pace is confident, stepping out of the international catwalk style.
"There is no need for everyone's performance to be professional. I hope that the big gathering of the 'Village Gala' will make everyone feel happy." "Three Barbarians of the Miao People" understand the psychology of the audience very well. They set up a question and answer session at the "Village Gala" and prepared glutinous rice cakes. , live duck as a gift. Seeing the lively performance and having fun by the villagers, Shi Jichang felt that their purpose of holding the "village evening" had been achieved.
In one of the programs of Bozhuang Village's "Village Evening" - the majestic traditional music of gongs and drums "Ran Tearing Ma", 19 fellow villagers in their 60s and 70s took the stage. They are farmers, masons, machinery maintenance workers, professional cattle farmers, and also gong and drum artists. The eldest among them is 77 years old, but he still wields the drumsticks with great momentum, and the deep and vigorous drumbeats resound throughout the countryside.
The actors of "Village Evening" come from the countryside, and the content of the program is rooted in life. The creative program "Dustpan Music", arranged with farm tools and soybeans, was inspired by Zhang Yong's inspiration at the home of a fellow villager when he went to a village in Hongdong County to collect tunes.
"I saw a dustpan hanging on the wall, covered with dust. I grew up in the countryside, and every harvest season I would follow my elders to sift grain with a dustpan. This dustpan immediately brought back many of my childhood memories." Zhang Yong thought of the sound of his fathers working at that time, and suddenly thought, could it also become a kind of percussion music? There happened to be a pile of soybeans next to the dustpan, "I put some in and tried shaking it, and I really found the rhythm."
At the "Village Evening" scene, the soybeans in the dustpan were shaken by the villagers, making a "rustling" friction sound. Then the high-pitched suona joined in, and the villagers used the dustpan to shake the beans to "shake" "Men Should Improve themselves" and " The rhythm of pop music such as "The Lonely Warrior".
“Village Evening” shows a vibrant and steamy China
On February 3 (Southern New Year), the 2024 Spring Festival "Village Gala" and "Spring Comes to Ten Thousand Households" mass cultural main venue activities will be held in Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, Liuzhou, Guangxi.
"There is a distant place in your heart, but you don't know that it is in Sanjiang; there is a Drum Tower in your dream, but you don't know that it is in Chengyang..." Dongxi, winner of the 11th Mao Dun Literature Award and chairman of the Guangxi Federation of Literary and Art Circles, wrote for Sanjiang in Liuzhou The theme song "Beautiful Mountain Country" was written for the "Village Evening" held in the Dong Autonomous County. The song describes the more than 10,000 Dong people living in the local Chengyang Bazhai.
This year, the Southern New Year, Dong rural areas will follow the unique traditional customs of their own nation to welcome the New Year. "Maigeng" (a Dong girl) is busy pounding glutinous rice cakes, making rice dumplings, frying oil fruits, making oil tea, and making five-color glutinous rice. Sanjiang Dong's big songs, Duoye songs, pipa songs, etc. will be written, directed and performed by the masses in the drum tower and stage of Chengyang Bazhai, taking turns to be performed. Nearly a thousand people from Sanjiang participated in this "village evening".
In recent years, the Public Service Department of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has continued to carry out "Village Gala" demonstration and display activities, combining village, New Year and agricultural flavors into a unique rural cultural feast. These two "village evenings" in Laershan Town, Fenghuang County, Xiangxi Prefecture, Hunan Province, and Pozhuang Village, Yaodu District, Linfen City, Shanxi Province, are exactly the "I want to host village evenings" launched by the Chinese Cultural Center Association and Douyin under his guidance. The first launch of the live broadcast support plan for rural cultural talents. Anchors such as Henan's "Win the Championship" and Jiangsu's "Caojiaban Suona" organize their own "village evenings", which will also be staged lively across the country.
In addition to the live audience, more than 15.57 million netizens watched these two performances in the live broadcast rooms of "Tang Yao's Gongs and Drums and Zhang Yong" and "Miao Three Barbarians". Previous data is that from December 2022 to December 2023, about 5,000 "Village Evening" themed live broadcasts were staged on Douyin, with a cumulative number of viewers reaching 22.97 million.
Xiao Fang said that the name "Village Gala" comes from the "Spring Festival Gala", but the history of the Spring Festival Gala is only more than 40 years ago. In fact, historically, villages have their own entertainment traditions. Today's villagers watching "village evening" are equivalent to their ancestors going to the theater. Many traditional villages still retain the stage architecture. "Especially during the Chinese New Year, watching a play is an important entertainment activity. However, the ancients were busier during the New Year. Usually, after they were busy during the New Year, the show would start. Of course, it was usually performed during the day, after all, there were no lights at that time. "
Xiao Fang believes that in the past, we often "sent" plays to the countryside, but the plays "sent" may not be in line with the people's aesthetics and preferences. The "Village Evening" written, directed and performed by the villagers tells local stories, spreads local culture, and subtly instills local ethics. The villagers completed self-appreciation and self-education in the process of acting and watching plays.
"At the same time, 'village evening' is also the reconstruction of village collective life. Everyone communicates in this space and time and recreates village traditions." Xiao Fang noticed that some villages have now repaired old stages and renovated old ancestral halls to make them more popular. It will become a public cultural space to cultivate the cultural life of villagers.
"Village Evening" explains people's pursuit of beauty and happiness, and also shows a vibrant and steamy China.
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Jiang Xiaobin Source: China Youth Daily