In the 30s of the 20th century, Dai Wangshu, the "poet of Rain Lane", walked in the squares, taverns or villages of Spain, and his ears always heard the beautiful ballads composed by García Lorca. The poems of this "son of Andalusia" were translated by Dai Wangshu and influenced several generations of Chinese poets. Compared with the popularity of poetry, many Chinese readers are still slightly unfamiliar with Lorca's plays. Lorca once organized the "Thatched House Drama Society", driving an open-top car and carrying simple props, to build his own theater in the Spanish countryside and perform for laborers and peasants. His plays "The Wedding of Blood", "Yerma" and "House of Bernarda Alva" have been widely circulated and have become popular plays.
Shii Theatre has selected Lolca's play "The Wedding of Blood" and tried to collaborate with Japanese directors and Spanish dancers to present a poetic flamenco play "Silence in the Blood Wedding" to the audience. Previously, Shirige Theater has launched nine wonderful plays, including "Open Couple", "Poison", "Breathing", "Babbitt the Scribe", "Little Pony", "Daddy's Bed" and "Silence", because of the in-depth presentation of the living conditions of people in "intimate relationships", which impressed the audience.
At the beginning of the show, the floor was strewn with roses, and it was a messy scene of the wind blowing. The juxtaposition of bright red roses and dirty garbage lays the tragic implication of the wedding turning into a funeral in the whole play. Later, the echo of horses' hooves, the whimper of the guitar, and the symbolic imagery begin to be resurrected, recreating Lorca's surrealist "Ballad of the Sleepwalker" or "Song of the Knight". Primitive and mysterious, warm and magnificent gypsy style permeates the stage.
On July 24, 1928, Lorca read a news item in the ABC newspaper "Neha**". The farmer's daughter, on her wedding day, eloped with her cousin. As a result, the cousin was killed by the groom's brother. Lorga adapted this true event into a three-act and seven-scene play, The Bloody Wedding, which presents the imprisoned lust of a closed society, family feuds, and economic interests. Lorca wrote realist dramas and also explored surrealist melodramas. He was not satisfied with melodramas that reflected the mood of bourgeois life, and no melodrama was once considered an "impossible to perform" drama. Even Borges bluntly said that he could not appreciate Lorca's plays. Borges felt that his play was just lucky. "Blood Wedding" does not separate the relationship between unreality and reality, lyricism and narrative, no plot and plot, and is relatively easy to accept by the audience.
Shii Theater's "Silence in the Blood Wedding" does not explain the background of the story too much, reduces the number of appearances in the original play, and focuses on the inner emotional world of three women (the bride, cousin, and the groom's mother) and one man (Leonardo). The appearance of the three women refers to the three stages of life, namely marriage, pregnancy and motherhood. Compared with the groom, Leonardo is the bride's lover and cousin's husband, and the ** who kills the groom has a bond effect, becoming the only male in the audience. The groom, who was quite important in the original work, never appeared on the stage, but as a functional figure, replaced by a puppet figure. At the moment when the puppet groom was brutally killed, the audience's eyes focused on the groom's mother who was holding the puppet and crying bitterly. The actor Sophia Monreal, who plays the mother, vividly expresses the sadness, despair, and loneliness after losing her son. When it comes to the mechanical movements and silent simulations of puppets, Lorca has a soft spot for them. He wrote puppet scripts, and also deliberately learned about the production and operation of puppets, the expressions and movements of puppets, and the interaction between puppets and the theater environment. This knowledge influenced his poetry and plays, with each poem in The Gypsy Ballads being static like an illustration art and the drama having a sculptural and quiet beauty.
The perfect silence of the night on the infinite staff of a note", is a verse from Lorca's The Hour of the Stars. In Lorca's poems, the word "silence" often appears. In the night of silence, the nightingale sings louder. Similarly, Japanese director Hiroshi Koike adheres to the aesthetic concept of "silence is everything". In the performance, the director used a stop-motion animation to freeze the actors' expressions from dynamic to instantaneous, causing the audience to fall silent. This technique is used repeatedly, especially at the end of the performance, when the conflict that lasts for several minutes is momentarily still, and the climax is flattened by the loss of time. Instead of advancing the plot in a fast-paced narrative, the director slows down or even stops the characters' movements, slowing rather than recreating the bloody killing scenes. The silence is a bit prolonged, and the audience's minds may wander away from the theater. However, in the unusually quiet scene, the sound of water ticking on the stage was exceptionally clear. The audience let the sound of dripping water take away time for the time being, patiently waiting for the actors to make their next move.
The deep song of the gypsies, with strong lyricism. The singing passages of the four actors and the singing voices of the guitarists convey the impressions of the scenery and emotions written by Lorca, and the language is beautiful and moving, the voices are melodious, the piano sounds are beautiful, and the emotions are rich and abundant. "A guitar hides boundless pain" ("Guitar"), which expresses the rhythmic beauty and pathos of Lorca's poetry. Flamenco is the most everyday way of life of Andalusians throughout the play. The charm of flamenco lies in the fact that no matter how passionate and wild the actor's body movements are and how unbridled the dancing skirt is, the actor's face always exudes an expression of pain and indifference. The celebratory wedding, the unrestrained love and the dying life repeatedly flashback and alternate on the stage, making the dance movements and facial expressions of each character full of contradictions and quite tension. In the variations of love and unlove, new life and death, countless elves seem to fly out of the stage to comfort those who have lost their loved ones. Every time the lights come on, the poet Lorca, as an absent presenter, always illuminates the people in pain.
Lorga plays the stage of the drama of flesh and blood, and longs to be sublimated in poetry. Shii Theater's "Silence in the Blood Wedding" uses stylized artistic elements and lyrical scenes such as dry roses, guitar whimper, whirling horses' hooves, gypsy songs, and Andalusian flamenco to open up the cramped and monotonous narrative space. Of course, the literary theater we are looking forward to also needs to see the whole metaphorical effect in the broken poetic imagery, and get the sublimation of emotions in the performance form with an overly strong sense of form.
Author: Zhai Yueqin.
Text: Zhai Yueqin (Associate Professor, Department of Drama and Literature, Shanghai Theater Academy) Editor: Xu LumingEditor: Shao Ling.
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