How to perform novelty?, Classic Tragic Character Camel Xiangzi in Textbooks | Stage Drama | Characters
On July 8th, the stage play "Camel Xiangzi" will premiere at the Shanghai Drama Art Center Art Theater, featuring an 11.5-meter-high turntable and a 3-story iron cage structure, with characters slowly swimming up an 8-degree slope. On July 2nd, the drama was unveiled to the media for the first time at the Yunfeng Theater.
The stage play "Camel Xiangzi" is adapted from the original work of the same name by Lao She, and tells the life experience of Xiangzi, a young and strong rickshaw driver in Beiping City, who rises and falls three times. The average age of the actors in the play is 31 years old. "Screenwriter Chen Lu and I spent half a month studying the original novel with the entire production team. The fundamental aspect of creation is respect first, and then innovation." He Nian revealed that the stage play starts with the end of the novel and goes back to the story, "first presenting the results, and then pushing forward the reasons, paragraph by paragraph. Everyone has their own way of life, in order to observe Xiangzi's fate and see how he gradually moves towards the final outcome."
The excerpt from the novel "Camel Xiangzi" is a Chinese textbook content. He Nian stated that the paragraphs he had read during his school years are now being read again as a director, and he has gained a lot. "Young people come to big cities with enthusiasm, slowly abandoning love and ideals, and finally turning themselves into cold machines. Xiangzi despises the bad luck of others selling him second-hand cars. When Tigress had a difficult childbirth, he was conflicted and didn't sell a car to hire a doctor. It wasn't until Tigress died that he thought of selling a car for a funeral. Xiangzi's worries about gains and losses, as well as his inner balance, are not uncommon. In his novels, Lao She said that foolishness and cruelty are some phenomena here, so foolishness leads to endurance, but there are other reasons."
The stage play "Camel Xiangzi" breaks the traditional linear narrative structure, uses the concept of body drama to present the surrounding environment and character psychology, and adds stylized props - mechanical camels, which not only participate in the narrative but also serve as the embodiment of Xiangzi, dancing with the actors. He Nian chose cyberpunk style music to run through the entire drama.
"The mechanical dog playing the role of a camel came to the rehearsal hall for the first time, and other crew members from the Drama Art Center gathered to watch." He Nian revealed that the mechanical dog is large and can reach the actor's thigh when standing up. It is not easy to operate the mechanical dog on stage to become a mechanical camel. "If it runs too fast, or the actor interacts with it too much, it will lose balance. Because the mechanical dog is controlled by a gyroscope internally, once it loses balance, it will collapse like getting drunk."
Wang Yicheng, the actor of Xiangzi, said with a smile, "It's very stressful to lead a play named after the character's name. After reading Mr. Lao She's" Camel Xiangzi, "everyone in the cast found that Xiangzi is not simply a man who only knows how to work. Our entanglement, balance, choice, and attitude to the world are the same as Xiangzi's. But Xiangzi's expression is slow and stupid."
When it comes to playing with the mechanical dog camel, Wang Yicheng said, "It's a kind of steel product, very hard. If you give it something, it will bounce back straight and make me softer. Sometimes I also need to wait for its reaction, which is different from the feeling of a real person playing."
Camel Xiangzi consists of two spatial movements: rotation and lifting. In the middle area of the turntable, there are also 12 iron plates that can rise and fall separately. The iron plates have iron doors and small windows, which can be used to combine images and cut space at multiple levels, smoothly transforming scenes. Dancing design Sangqi sets up a 6-meter diameter lifting board in the middle of the iron cage, which becomes the focus of the entire work. Actors can "fall from the sky" or rise from the ground, and the spatial movements of the lifting and lowering correspond to the fate of the characters. The central position of the lifting platform becomes the main performance space, and actors move around in this space.
The design of elevators and cage like spaces emphasizes the ups and downs, twists and turns of fate. Xiangzi's struggle, his youthful vigor and boundless expectations, and his compromise and helplessness towards fate in middle age are all magnified in this space. In addition to the design of spatial actions, the stage play "Camel Xiangzi" also uses wind, rain, scorching sun, and snow to symbolize and summarize the fate of Xiangzi's characters.
