Why dance dramas frequently break the circle and become explosive
2021-08-23 11:49:50Source: Guangming Daily
In the traditional Chinese festival “Tanabata” that just passed, Henan Satellite TV’s dance show “Dragon Gate King Kong” once again blasted the circle of friends, just like the previous dance works such as “Tang Palace Night Banquet” and “Luo Shen Water Fu”, which aroused hot discussion . Since the beginning of this year, the dance drama “The Radio Waves That Never Fade” touring in many places is still hard to find because of the ticket-grabbing boom. Since the start of the show in December 2018, the “radio waves” have “broken the circle” and become a “phenomenon in the field of stage art.” Grade works”.
Since July, the large-scale folk dance dramas “Li Bai”, “Confucius” and “Zhao Jun” of the China Opera and Dance Theater have been jointly performed for the first time, using the unique body language of Chinese folk dance to interpret and portray the three famous historical figures, attracting young people to compete. Achieve a double harvest of word-of-mouth and market.
Encounter familiar Chinese stories
Before the Shanghai Song and Dance Troupe’s “The Electric Wave That Never Elapses”, there had never been a spy war theme in dance dramas. The story of “The Electric Wave That Never Dies” is well-known and has a huge audience, but its subject matter itself lacks dance. In general, the dance drama is “longer than lyrical and less narrative.” The screenwriter Luo Huaizhen first took the story. The public space of the city has been redesigned and adapted, adding newspapers, cheongsam shops and Shikumen that are not in the movie. Later, the group dance in the cheongsam shop really became a classic passage widely circulated in “The Electric Wave That Never Dies”. The newspaper office area is a flat hall with tables, which is suitable for dancers to dance.
The dance drama “The Electric Wave That Never Elapses” created in this way often has multiple narrative points juxtaposed in parallel on the stage in a fast-paced manner. Some review articles believe that it has made an important breakthrough in the narrative of dance drama and broadened the extension of dance art expression. .
Compared with drama, dance drama mainly relies on music and body language to express. Therefore, it is difficult for many dance dramas to show complex narrative stories. However, the most popular dance dramas in the past two years have shown themes that are familiar to the audience, allowing the audience to re-understand their “understood stories” through new forms, with less reliance on language. The ballet history theorist Norville once said that the narrative ability of dance makes it independent from opera dances and backing dances. The essence of dance narrative in dance drama is not about how “new” things are to be told, but how “new” (form) what is said-dance narration emphasizes the newness of “narration” rather than the newness of “things”. Undoubtedly, the creators of the popular dance dramas have successfully demonstrated the mellow flavor of the old Chinese story with the new style of innovative dance expression.
“Li Bai”, “Confucius”, “Tang Palace Night Banquet” and other dance dramas based on traditional Chinese culture and character stories, draw lessons from the meaning and beauty of traditional culture, and use the unique “immersive experience” of stage art to combine Chinese historical stories and ancient times. The combination of poems and delicate and elegant dance moves transforms the inner world of historical figures into concrete and sensible artistic images on the limited stage space.
The attempts of local song and dance troupes are also particularly eye-catching. The dance drama “Du Fu” by the Chongqing Song and Dance Troupe and the “Water Moon Luoshen” by the Zhengzhou Song and Dance Theater are more representative works. In the dance drama “Du Fu”, the audience can see Du Fu’s poems everywhere, but most of them are not displayed in the form of words. In the popular dance section of “Beauty Walk”, the dancers are like slim, first blooming hibiscus. The thin gauze dress, light and graceful dance posture is full of languidness, reproducing the scene in Du’s poems that “the state is strong and the meaning is far and gentle, the texture is fine and the flesh is even. The embroidered Luo clothes are in the late spring, and the golden peacock and silver unicorn…” . The creator also boldly used twin dancers to play Du Fu and his shadow separately, allowing the two Du Fu to have a dialogue in a space, highlighting the ambivalence of the characters.
Encounter with multiple stage technology
In the field of drama art, the “fusion communication” with virtual reality technology as the starting point is in full swing. In the stage performance, because the actors and the audience are in a relatively closed physical space at the same time, face-to-face, there is “interpersonal communication”. With the characteristics of “, the audience is more likely to be immersed in the plot and achieve the same frequency resonance with the mood of the stage. However, with the popularization of VR and AR technologies, stage performances are gradually losing the advantage of “immersive communication”. The audience even feels that they are “closer” to the actors while watching dramas in home VR glasses. It is an inevitable trend for stage performances to keep the audience in the theater, integrate multimedia methods into the narrative, and create a multi-dimensional stage.
The advantage of dance moves is to express emotions through images, especially strong emotions, but the promotion of certain complex plots requires more diversified forms. In the dance dramas “Li Bai” and “Du Fu”, the poems corresponding to the scenes at the time were played through multimedia screens, laser projection, etc. to help the audience understand the plot background and the emotions of the characters. In the dance drama “The Electric Wave That Never Elapses”, a large number of scenes are set up on the stage to match the scene projection, and a large number of stage cutting and montage techniques are used to carry out multi-line parallel narration, which is an innovation in the stage form.
Although “Tang Palace Night Banquet” was originally broadcast in the form of a TV program, its stage application of virtual reality technology provided a successful reference for the choreography of dance dramas. The smart and playful dance cleverly integrates keying, 3D, AR and other virtual technologies, interacting the “Tangren” played by the actors with the historical scenes in the VR screen display, realizing the combination of virtual scenes and real stages. Based on full consideration of the current public aesthetic habits, it tells the traditional era more than 1,300 years ago, allowing the audience to successfully travel back to the Tang Dynasty in five minutes.
Technology empowers the cultural relics displayed in museum showcases and the characters recorded in ancient books to “live”, bringing vivid artistic images of characters into the hearts of the audience, making the program both a strong sense of national trend and history and “high-end” “Modern technological sense. In the dance drama, the modern expression of classical culture, the relaxed expression of heavy culture, and the expression of abstract cultural image have been realized, attracting more and more young people to approach and understand the excellent traditional culture of the nation.
Encounter with the era of national rejuvenation
Effective stage communication must be “audience-centered” communication. In the new era of national rejuvenation, the audience’s national self-confidence and pride have reached a new height, forming a huge demand for the aesthetics of excellent national cultural works, carrying the national traditional culture, and can convey to the audience a strong sense of national pride. “Fire” from time to time.
“Tang Palace Night Banquet” brings together a variety of cultural symbols such as the figurines of Tang music and dancing, the three colors of the Tang Dynasty, the picture of a lady with a hairpin, the picture of a thousand miles of rivers and mountains, the owl statue of a woman, the square pot of lotus and cranes, and other cultural symbols to awaken the audience’s memory of the prosperous Tang Dynasty. These works showing Prosperity China have aroused strong resonance from the audience, which not only demonstrates the cultural self-confidence that the audience has in their hearts, but also condenses and strengthens the national identity.
Chen Feihua, head of the Shanghai Song and Dance Troupe, believes that “The Radio Waves That Never Die” has the advantage of the theme: “Every Chinese has a red gene in his heart, and it is activated at the moment of watching the’radio wave’.” As it is said, The success of the literary and artistic works represented by “Tang Palace Night Banquet”, “Li Bai”, and “The Electric Wave That Never Dies” is not accidental. It embodies the encounter between the profound national culture and the self-confidence of the Chinese nation.
After “Tang Palace Night Banquet” became a blockbuster, Tang Palace Night Banquet hand-painted, imitation makeup, emoticons, dynamic input method skins… and even live video broadcasts of traditional skills such as face men and pottery figurines became popular. Traditional culture has formed a multi-dimensional communication matrix in the great era of national rejuvenation through chain innovation of expression. This is an unexpected contribution of dance drama innovation outside of art.
The charm of China is spreading to the world
This year, the ballet “Red Detachment of Women” was staged again. This masterpiece, which has been popular for decades, has been absolutely recognized by the Western art world with the imported art form of ballet. Nowadays, more and more recognizable dance dramas are going to the world through multiple innovations in content and form, promoting the in-depth dissemination of Chinese stories and Chinese culture. They combine the stories of historical figures with the graceful dances of Han and Tang Dynasties, expressing Chinese tolerance, and become stage classics in China and the world.
Expressing China in a multi-stage form is an important way to strive to achieve cultural empathy, explore common aesthetics, and break down the barriers of cultural circles. Focusing on the needs of the audience, introducing more attractive narrative strategies on the premise of adhering to the core of excellent traditional culture, and expressing the core of Chinese culture through stage art with unique Chinese charm are important to demonstrate the confidence of Chinese culture and build China’s international communication capabilities. Make it harder.
(Author: Wang Jingyu, a special researcher at the Beijing Xi Jinping Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era, Lecturer at the School of Language and Communication, Beijing Jiaotong University)
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