This year is the Year of the Dragon, the natal year of Mr. Changrong, a famous Peking Opera artist. Speaking of dragons, Mr. Shang has witty words, such as good luck in the Year of the Dragon, auspicious dragons, clouds rising dragons, and dragons leaping and ......tiger leapingThis 84-year-old man who has read the vicissitudes of the world is like a big child who has a red face illuminated by the fireworks of Chinese New Year's Eve, happy and brilliant.
Figure: Mr. Shang Changrong.
More than 20 years ago, Shang Changrong once recorded the famous words of Zhang Heng in the Eastern Han Dynasty's "Ying Q": "A gentleman does not suffer from disrespect for position, but from virtue without respect; There is no shame in not partnering, and shame in wisdom", in order to admonish and encourage self-examination. In the past few years, he has taken this as his creed, and is pouring his lifelong attachment and understanding of art into the collation and revision of his personal oral history......
01 Be a person who is neither arrogant nor humble
In 1940, the Year of the Dragon, a chubby boy was born in a pear orchard family. On the twentieth day of the lunar month in 1945, this doll, who had just turned five, followed his father to the big stage of the famous Sanqing Theater in Beijing. This stunned baby plays the role of Xiao Yang Zongbao in "Shiro Visits His Mother". To this day, this baby still clearly remembers the candy and purse thrown by the audience that night, and the chilled orange water that his parents rewarded him with.
Figure: Shang Xiaoyun embraces Shang Changrong for 100 days.
Shang Changrong's father is Mr. Shang Xiaoyun, one of the four famous men. Chinese culture places special emphasis on mentorship and family style. Shang Xiaoyun is extremely strict in governing his family, art, and studies. The peach and plum do not speak, and the next is its own. Yan's father's personal rumors taught Changrong that although he was born in a famous family, he must not be a gentleman. If you want to learn serious things, you can only endure hardships. He came to power at the age of five, and officially learned to face at the age of ten. On the road of learning art, he successively turned to many teachers, and finally worshiped under the disciple of Hou Xirui, a famous master. At the same time, Evergreen subtly inherited from his father a cultural spirit that was not informal, and accumulated steadily. Dramas, movies, and anything that inspires acting, he almost never refuses. This makes him particularly clever and precocious artistically. The roles he plays always reveal his unique freshness and spirituality.
In 1962, Shang Xiaoyun played Hu Shi and Shang Changrong played the golden-eyed leopard in "Lost Son and Crazy".
Just when he was refining and maturing his art, a sudden storm interrupted the beautiful movement of his artistic growth like a rough dissonance interval. In those ten years, Evergreen did not sing on stage. He repaired bicycles, pulled yellow croaker carts, and wandered from place to place, without flowers, applause, and cheers, but he experienced the heat and coldness of the world, tasted the ups and downs, and understood what society and life were. Decades later, he sat across from me and told me calmly and indifferently that he had both sorrow and bitterness in those ten years, as well as the warmth from the selfless concern of the people, and had experienced his strength in the face of heavy pressure. Life has cultivated in him an attitude towards life that is neither arrogant nor humble. Evergreen's self-confidence and non-conceited decency in dealing with the world and art in the future also stemmed from the suffering of those ten years of hardship.
In September 1973, Shang Changrong went to Shajiadian Grain Station in northern Shaanxi to experience life.
Despite the long overdue arrival, the spring of the people has come. When the red good news was plastered on the streets of Chang'an in October, he quit drinking without saying a word. October in the north is already cold. He got up at five o'clock every day and shouted at the long sky and the bright moon and the wind and snow that hit from time to time. Evergreen, who has been holding back for ten years, wants to do something. He was filled with the tremendous energy of a second burst of artistic life. He sang the new Peking Opera song "** Then I Returned to Yan'an" with passion, and received dozens of letters from all over the country at once. When people reach middle age, Evergreen is like an autumn field, reaping the maturity of art.
At this time, Evergreen had an enviable and generous living treatment. But he is neither a pampered person, nor an artist who is content with the status quo, lying under a halo, wearing a laurel crown and self-absorbed. He told me that he had never envied the laurels and titles of "masters", and that it should be an objective praise rather than a subjective pursuit. What he pursues is a great realm in art that is like the sea flowing across the sea and the stars are brilliant, a new realm that hits the water, constantly opens up, and echoes with the times. On the issue of how to deal with the genre of opera, he has always been very sober, and he must learn the technique and spirit, and he cannot stick to the genre and hold on to the remnants. The old students learn from Tan Xinpei, but they blindly guard Tan and dare not take a step beyond Lei Chi, where can Yu Shuyan come, how can he come to the four major students. The four famous men are all from the disciples of Chen Delin and Wang Yaoqing, but at the age of 20, they surpassed their teachers one after another and became their own faction. What is Genre? It is the art style performance school derived from the flow.
02 Push an iconic "trilogy".
1988 is also the Year of the Dragon, and it is also a October, Evergreen carried the script of "Cao Cao and Yang Xiu" and made a strategic choice in his life's career. He "knocked on the door knocker of the Shanghai Peking Opera Company" and achieved the first era of his Peking Opera career. In the past 20 years, it has successively launched the "Shang Changrong Trilogy", which is a landmark milestone in the history of contemporary Peking Opera, "Cao Cao and Yang Xiu", "Zhenguan Grand Event" and "Honest Officials in Jackie Chan".
In 1988, "Cao Cao and Yang Xiu" was born. Evergreen rejects the tradition of Cao Cao, a traitor who portrays flat characters on the stage of old Peking Opera operas, and uses Shakespearean psychology to penetrate the greatness and humility of human nature, and reproduce the thrilling dramatic conflict between power and culture and human nature, which subjectively wants to reconcile but cannot be reconciled. At the same time, Evergreen thus pioneered a style of drama that mobilized all opera means to portray and amplify the spiritual world of the characters, which I call "psychological realism". He contributed to our interpretation of a new image of Cao Cao that is both inside and outside the opera stage, unseen and unheard of. As a pure actor with a frame and a copper hammer, he has activated the contemporary vitality of Zhou Xinfang's "Qi School" performance art, and we can regard him as the spiritual successor of the contemporary Qi School. One stone stirs up a thousand waves. While "Cao Cao and Yang Xiu" was widely and enthusiastically welcomed, it also encountered some misreadings and criticisms. In fact, Cao Cao and Yang Xiu was inspired by the reality of the march, and was an eager and artistic response to the urgent need to adjust the policy of intellectuals at that time.
In 1999, "Zhenguan Grand Event" continued to be brilliant. In the play, Evergreen performs with a kind of weightlifting and slightly light comedy performance, focusing on the solemn theme of "abstaining from luxury and advocating honesty" and harmonious governance in the prosperous era, and the performance is full of ups and downs. Evergreen naturally lived up to his expectations and played the hideous but charming generation of famous Wei Zheng. From this, we can touch the warm heartbeat of Evergreen's "people-oriented". The play still caused a ripple of small controversy. Some people think that the contradiction in the drama of "Releasing the Palace Maid" is not major enough, so I wrote an article in "People**" to affirm the people-oriented idea of "Zhenguan" "The people are noble and the monarch is light" and the artistic presentation of daring to speak out for the beautiful ideal of social harmony.
In 2002, "Honest Officials in Jackie Chan" ended perfectly. At this time, Evergreen had already entered the realm of the extreme of brilliance, which was bland, self-contained, and lawless. Yu Jackie Chan is dressed in a clear suit, a hat, a big cigarette bag, no water sleeves, no hook face, no thick-soled boots, just like an old man in a field. For more than 1,000 years of Chinese opera, the program accumulated by Chinese Peking Opera for more than 200 years has been integrated into his character creation like "an antelope hanging its horns, without a trace". The face is dressed plainly, and it has reached the "inseparable" transformation of life and art, characters and actors. In particular, the scene of Jackie Chan and Prince Kang's "wine fight", from sober to feigned drunk to drunk, is humorous and natural, which is not only the history of contemporary Chinese Peking Opera, but also a classic passage of the long history of Chinese opera.
The robe and ribbon opera is the main body of Peking Opera repertoire and performances. Shang Changrong's trilogy uses contemporary consciousness and strong radiation to inject strong vitality into the once-declining robe and belt play. When people fall into the misunderstanding of the dispute between "word of mouth" and "gold cup", the trilogy won the people's word of mouth and the gold cup of awards at the same time. Evergreen himself became the winner of the Plum Blossom Award. At a time when opera is in difficulty, we need noble and tenacious watch. But the nobility of culture is by no means a spiritual aristocracy that is high up and ignores the people's misery and self-righteousness. On the contrary, the cultural value of Shang Changrong's Peking Opera performing arts tells people that nobility is a kind of humanistic feeling that is attached to the people, worried about the world and the country, and compassionate.
03 Be a senior who "helps and doesn't add to the chaos".
Peking Opera is a cultural style with a strong pedigree connotation. The vein of Evergreen art is the inheritance of the Liyuan culture inherited from its ancestors, and behind it is the 3,000-year-old Chang'an culture, the 1,000-year-old Beijing culture, and the 100-year-old modern Shanghai culture. Xijing and Beijing filled him with a fascination with history, while Shanghai pushed him to use the spirit of the times to activate history and broaden the way and style of traditional art. And this is the essence of Evergreen's positive Shanghainese culture. In each of his plays, you can get a glimpse of the traditional procedures and profound traditional cultural skills that he has worked hard to cultivate, and at the same time, there are artistic innovations that are consistent with the roles and in harmony with the current aesthetics.
Evergreen and I have met and interacted for decades, and since then, we have become close friends in art. Over the decades, I have learned a lot from Evergreen. In 1998, Evergreen created the 50th anniversary of the gift drama "Zhenguan Grand Event". At that time, I had just been transferred to the Creation Center of the Municipal Bureau of Culture, and I went to the Shanghai Peking Opera Company twice in three days to participate in the whole process of "Zhenguan" from creativity to rehearsal to performance. I have witnessed his artistic refinement, and the delicacy of art is a science.
The author of this article is Shang Changrong.
In the five years from the creation to the success of Zhenguan Grand Event, he repeatedly revised his lines, singing, figure and details day and night. Almost every time I met him, he would tell me excitedly like a child with a new toy, which lyric, which tune, and which detail had been changed. There are hundreds of changes before and after the play "Zhenguan". He is the kind of artist who does not hesitate to devote himself to art and devotes himself with enthusiasm for his life. I'm a straightforward person. As a friend, every time he discusses his pre-creations, I will self-righteously put forward a bunch of criticisms and suggestions. He is always happy to listen and take everyone's opinions.
As a well-known actor in the Chinese opera industry, he is humble and easy, never behaves properly on the rehearsal ground, respects the director, and sometimes even conducts sketch training according to the director's requirements like a drama school student. Before entering the role, he read a lot of historical materials and made sufficient desk preparations. When the old play is performed again, he will re-sit in the rehearsal, sit and sing, and rehearse the ...... like the new playHe is meticulous in his art and never slackens. In front of the young actors, he is like a father and friend, both strict, loving, and more lenient. So much so that everyone affectionately compared him to the "midfield engine" of the team's soul. For public welfare performances, he works tirelessly, every time he is invited, every time he comes, every time he comes, every performance must be invested and sensational, but he never cares about the role and remuneration. He has a wide range of hobbies, listening to **, learning calligraphy, watching movies, and cooking food ...... in the kitchen
He has a sense of humor and likes to greet people in Shanghainese with a Beijing accent, which often makes everyone cry and laugh. A round face, squinting and smiling, naïve, touching and joyful. He is sincere and emotional. Whatever is requested, it will be answered. In December last year, when I was engaged in the 50th anniversary seminar of literary and art criticism, before rushing to the China Peking Opera Festival in Chengdu, he carefully recorded a three-minute video**, enthusiastically encouraging me, calling me "a friend who dares to speak and tell the truth".
Mo Dao mulberry night, for the sun is still full of sky. The life of the stage is always limited, but the life and spirit of art is unlimited. In the eyes of many people, Shang Changrong in his natal year has already achieved fame. But he repeatedly told me that he is no longer on the front line of art, and what he wants to do after the age of 80 is to avoid hype, and to help for the development and future of Peking Opera art.
The Shanghai Peking Opera Company established the Shang Changrong Art Training Base, where he devoted himself to mentoring and helping young and middle-aged talents, and unreservedly passed on his life's accumulation to students. He successively taught "Cao Cao and Yang Xiu" and "Honest Officials in Jackie Chan", including his lifelong understanding of art, to Yang Donghu, Dong Hongsong and some young artists. was worried that young people did not have a solid foundation in tradition, and taught the classic play "Serial Set" with a flower face. After Evergreen's words and deeds, Yang and Dong, two young talents, have new insights and improvements in shaping characters, and have outstanding performances in the new modern Peking Opera "Red **" Substitution Room.
I look forward to his serious memoirs, which will bring you the joy of reading and a lot of artistic wisdom. I also look forward to the bright and cheerful smile on his face after the release of his imperial tome, as well as a hearty laugh like Huang Zhongdalu......(Mao Shi'an).