When the ancient Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara, pottery figurine dancers and handed down famous paintings dance and come alive on the contemporary stage
Dance for a Thousand Years: How Cultural Relics Create Popular Dance Works
In the Year of the Dragon CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the excerpt "Porcelain Shadow" from the dance drama "Only Blue and White" with the theme of porcelain was unveiled, which was stunning.
In recent years, dance works such as "Tang Palace Night Banquet", "Longmen Grottoes", "Avalokitesvara with Thousand Hands", and dance dramas such as "Only Green" and "Five Stars Out of the East" have frequently appeared in the industry and are well-known overseas. Behind them, there is a common creative thread. The performance idea is the "activation" of cultural relics.
These dance works use scientific and technological creativity and cultural imagination to activate historical memory through the shape of the dancer's body. They not only become a "historical guide" that the audience likes to watch and understand, but also displays the spirit of China's excellent traditional culture in the form of dance art. Identification and powerful actions to enhance cultural confidence. During the viewing process, the audience traveled through thousands of years, not only feeling the story of the historical stage to which the cultural relics belong, but also gaining aesthetic enjoyment.
From "Flower Rain on the Silk Road" to "Only This Green": The dance creation and performance process of "activating" cultural relics
Judging from the practice of dance art creation and performance, in the opera "The Goddess Scatters Flowers" performed by Mei Lanfang around 1917, attempts have been made to put the flying image of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes on the stage. The pas de deux "Flying Sky" created by Dai Ailian in 1954 also borrowed the image of the flying goddess of fragrance.
In May 1979, "Flower Rain along the Silk Road" premiered, giving birth to a new type of dance called "Dunhuang Dance". The dance postures of Dunhuang Dance are based on the Mogao Grottoes. Through a large number of dance figures in the grottoes, the static murals are creatively shaped Transformed into a dynamic dance language. Along with the reform and opening up, this dance drama was like a spring thunder, giving rise to new opportunities in the entire dance world, and thus began what dance scholars call the "great wave of antique music and dance". Various provinces and cities in China have begun to organize and excavate historical relics and cultural relics, trying to "resurrection" ancient Chinese music and dance through imitation of ancient music. Representative works include "Dunhuang Colored Sculpture" (1980), "Imitation of Tang Music and Dance" (1982), "Chimes Music and Dance" 》(1983) etc.
After the premiere of "Flowers on the Silk Road", Gao Jinrong, then the principal of the Gansu Provincial Art School, paid attention to the value of Dunhuang dance creation and performance. She once again went deep into Dunhuang to create "Dunhuang Dance Tutorial", which laid the foundation for the cultivation of Dunhuang dance talents. Base. Around 1980, Sun Ying, who had long studied the history of ancient Chinese dance, was full of confidence in rediscovering Chinese Han and Tang dances. While teaching at the Beijing Dance Academy, he created the dance dramas "Bronze Sparrow" (1985) and "Ta Ge" (1997). ), "Chu Yao" (1997) and other dance works, proposed "Han and Tang Dance" and "Han and Tang Classical Dance Talent Training Model", and determined to create an art system belonging to Chinese dance.
Full of self-esteem for the reconstruction of national dance, the predecessors continued to excavate and organize ancient music and dance, so that cultural relics no longer serve as materials for creation and performance, but also have a new mission of exploring ancient Chinese music and dance culture. Dunhuang dance, Han and Tang dances, together with opera dance, have become the three major schools of Chinese classical dance.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the development of modern and contemporary dance in China inspired the creations of choreographers during this period. Taking CCTV Spring Festival Gala's "Thousand-Hand Guanyin" (2005) and "Flying Sky" (2008) as examples, the stage installation and body The expression is more novel and creative. With the new opportunities brought by the development of the Belt and Road Initiative, the modern dance drama "Lotus" (2014) and the ballet "Dunhuang" (2017) have provided new forms of different dance types for the dance "activation" of Dunhuang Grottoes art. Focus on the present The creation and performance methods of dance works such as "Tang Palace Night Banquet" (2017), "Longmen Grottoes" (2021), "Only This Green" (2021), and "Sanle Tu" (2023) have broken the inherent model and no longer Focus on "shape" and "image", but pursue in "emotion", "meaning" and "situation".
From ideological emancipation to stage creation: dance creation and performance methods of "activating" cultural relics
In the century-old development from "The Goddess Scatters Flowers" to the present, the dance creation and performance method of "activating" cultural relics basically revolves around the following three elements.
First, the emancipation of the mind has opened up a freer creative space for the director. The key to creative transformation in the creation process is to use the dancing body to express the image of cultural relics; and the difficulty in innovative development is how to use dance language to express the traditional cultural and spiritual connotations of the cultural relics themselves. For example, how does the image of Ji Letian in the Dunhuang murals break through the barriers between humans and "gods"? How does the Han Dynasty brocade armband "Five Stars from the East Benefit China" interpret the exchanges and integration between various ethnic groups in ancient times? How does the famous painting "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" lead the audience to the depths of human emotions through dance? This requires the director to constantly emancipate his mind, continue to learn, and conduct deeper research and understanding of Chinese traditional culture.
The second step is to achieve the “activation” of cultural relics by imitating their typical images. The theory of imitation is the starting point of many artistic theories. Zhang Jigang, the choreographer and director of "Thousand-Hand Guanyin", went to Yungang Grottoes, Shangxia Huayan Temple, Taiyuan Chongshan Temple and other cave temples many times to view murals and statues during the creation, and was inspired to dance. The opening look is derived from the typical image of the Buddhist statue Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara; "Tang Palace Night Banquet" is also based on the typical image of the Sui Dynasty music and dance figurines unearthed from the tomb of Zhang Sheng in Anyang, Henan, and absorbed a large number of archaeological discoveries of music and dance in the Sui and Tang Dynasties to create The music and dance of the Tang Dynasty have a strong atmosphere of life; and the dance in "Only Green", in addition to the simulation of the dance body shape, also uses the bun of the headdress, the sleeves of the costume, etc., to bring the audience a sense of mountains and rocks. , the texture of mountains, the imagination of mountain waterfalls.
The third element is to use cultural imagination to make cultural relics "alive" through the language of dance. How to make the stationary "Thousand-Hand Guanyin", "Pottery Dancer" and "Famous Paintings" dance? It is necessary to learn from the laws of Chinese dance and the comprehensive literacy of ancient history and culture, and transform it into stage dance through the imagination and creativity of the choreographer. For example, the experience in "Flower Rain on the Silk Road" is to use the law of movement in classical Chinese opera and dance of "want to move forward, move left before right", and inject the logic of the body movement language of opera dance into the dance images of Dunhuang murals, so that The static Dunhuang mural shapes "dance"; "Five Stars Out of the East" unfolds historical combing and cultural imagination from the brocade armbands of the Han Dynasty, recreating the music and dance scenes of multi-ethnic interactions and blending in the Western Regions. The dance segment "Lamp Dance" refers to today's The "living" remains of folk dances of ethnic minorities in the northwest use rotation, hip twisting, and S-shaped curve movements to express the gracefulness of ancient Western music and dance, making dance creations not only flat and dependent on imagination, but also rich in "living" Based on this, we neither lose tradition nor maintain a certain degree of innovation.
Ancient poetry, music and dance literature also inspired creation. There are descriptions of music and dance in a large number of poems in the Tang Dynasty, such as Bai Juyi's "Song of Neon Clothes and Feather Clothes", Yuan Zhen's "Hu Xuannu", Liu Yuxi's "Guanzhe Branch Dance", etc. The music and dance of the Tang Dynasty widely absorbed multi-ethnic music and dance culture and refined it. Produce dance items with superb skills and diverse talents. In "Song of Neon Clothes and Feather Clothes", "Floating and whirling back to the snowy light, sending off the wandering dragon with grace" is written in contrast with "whirlwind" and "returning to the snow lightness", "beautiful" and "the wandering dragon is startled", depicting the ancient times The stylistic characteristics of music and dance are "hardness and softness, both form and spirit". These characteristics are reflected in dance works such as "Tang Palace Night Banquet" and "Flying Sky"; for another example, in "Only Green", the dancers simulate the mountains through their bodies The visual images of mountains and mountains are vaguely like Su Shi's "Inscribed on the Wall of the West Forest", "Viewed horizontally, there are ridges and peaks on the side, with different heights from far and near", and Lu You's "Visiting Shanxi Village", "Mountains and rivers lead to no doubt, and there is another village with dark willows and bright flowers." "", the group dance "peaks" on the stage are given personified characteristics. I believe that during the creative process, the choreographer was also infected by the poetry, and used the group dance to "activate" the spirituality and vitality of the mountains in "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains". Dance allows the audience to experience the Song people's understanding of life in the realm of unity between man and nature.
From representation to performance: the evolution and limitations of dance creation and performance through the “activation” of cultural relics
With the development of the times, the evolution of dance creation and performance through the "activation" of cultural relics is mainly reflected in three levels: body language, content and theme, and expression form.
In terms of body language, it is mainly reflected in the expression of opera movements in "The Goddess Scatters Flowers", to the dance language of "Flying Sky", to the dance language represented by "Flower Rain on the Silk Road" and "Take Song", and finally in "Only This green" and "Tang Palace Night Banquet" are examples of the evolution process of "dance elimination". In terms of content and subject matter, most of the early content used people to perform "gods", such as dancers performing the image of Feitian; the second stage used the image of "gods" to shape people, such as the image of Ying Niang in "Flowers on the Silk Road" etc.; the third stage is to perform "secular figures" in cultural relics, which are created based on the cultural relics' imagination of ancient secular music and dance, such as "Tap Song", "Tang Palace Night Banquet", etc.; the fourth stage is to use people to express "things" , such as "Only Green" (representing mountains in ancient paintings), "Horse Picture" (representing horses in painters' paintings), etc. In terms of form of expression, "long silk" was initially used to express the image of Feitian, which was mainly lyrical and presented through small programs such as solo dance and duet dance. After the birth of Dunhuang dance, a suitable dance language was developed to serve the narrative. Solo dance, group dance, dance drama and other forms; finally, there is the reconstruction stage represented by the modern dance drama "Lotus" and the dance drama "Only Green". The editor strives to transcend the inherent limitations of physical expression and role, and pay attention to the history and history behind the cultural relics. Spirit and emotion establish a time-space connection between contemporary people and history.
Although the forms and types of works are diverse, they also face certain challenges. Mainly reflected in the lack of creative imagination in the narrative mode. Basically, the narrative mode of "Wonderful Night in the Museum" is adopted, that is, from the form of "cultural relics-resurrection-cultural relics", which makes many works only stay in the "reproduction" stage. , but failed to enter the "performance" level. At the same time, the spirit of etiquette and music culture in different periods of ancient times is not sufficiently reflected. Historical theory should be more closely integrated with dance practice. When building a Chinese dance school today, how about exploring the true appearance of ancient Chinese dance from examples of cultural relics? Or can we, through dance research and artistic practice, tap into the already existing artistic exchanges between neighboring countries and ethnic groups: "I am among you, and you are among me?" These should be the unremitting pursuit and efforts of contemporary dancers. (Wen Wei Po)
(The author Guan Yingli is an associate professor at the Dance School of Northwest Normal University)
>>>Specially published by Shanghai Literary Criticism Special Fund