Original article: Print Media by Wenhui Daily (1) http://whb.cn/zhuzhan/xinwen/20210815/415430.html and (2) http://whb.cn/zhuzhan/xinwen/20210815/415432.html
Table of Contents
Xiao Zhan Performs in “A Dream Like A Dream”, What Traffic has Injected into Theater
Original author: 帕帕拉佐
Preface
Whether the traffic celebrity is capable is a problem, it is also another problem when there is no traffic celebrity in the theater scene. This time, because of Xiao Zhan, another group of people who are unrelated to theater started going into it. Perhaps after the indescribable wonderful 8 hour experience, some of them would truly fall in love with theater, some may continue to fork out money for her idol’s next scheduled event. But is it really that important to separate the “I’m in the same room with him for 8 hours” crowd from the theater audiences?
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Theater, which used to be a niche form of art, had been breaking through its circle these two years, and causing a lot of discussions. The most recent would be “Top Traffic Celebrity” Xiao Zhan’s participation in “A Dream Like A Dream”.
In between the midst of filming a period fantasy drama “The Longest Promise”, Xiao Zhan performed as Patient No. 5, a role which Hu Ge had once performed. After the performances in the 3 stops Wuhan, Qingdao and Chengdu, at every play’s curtain call, the theater would be filled with endless applause, there was even once even covered with rousing ovation. In the cheers of nearly a thousand people, the voices of young ladies were particularly distinct.
Actually, this is not the first time Xiao Zhan’s participation in “A Dream Like A Dream” created a revelry in his fans. Early this year in March, once the official announcement that Xiao Zhan would participate in the Tour of 9 Cities, it went onto hot search immediately, and until now, Xiao Zhan’s participation in “A Dream Like A Dream” has accumulated a staggering 4.2 billion views.
Over thousand tickets were sold out in seconds, an 80 RMB ticket was scalped to over a 1,000 RMB, the tickets of the “lotus pond seats” were scalped to more than 20,000 RMB. Although Chris Li and Hu Ge both performed in this play in 2013, but since it birth 9 years ago, this magnitude of furor only happened this year.
In the midst of anticipation and suspicion, Xiao Zhan finally walked on stage. The trials of theater revealed the sincerity in him and this sincerity is Xiao Zhan’s base color, or it could even be said to be the reason he is surrounded by so much love.
This innate sincerity is a scarcity in a stage created by glorious vocals and technical construction. Many experienced actors with strong foundations would be working hard for this, but they never had it.
No one could deny that Xiao Zhan created a unique Patient No. 5, who threaded the whole play as a core character. For the actor to be a good Patient No. 5, he would need precise acting, thorough understanding of the role, firm control of emotions, and of course the blending of both the actor’s self and the character.
That year, the tranquility that Hu Ge had after coming back from his tribulations became his key to unlocking Patient No. 5; whereas for Xiao Zhan, who had went through the growth from an “idol” to a “top traffic celebrity”, who had a “unique” experience in cyberspace, the things that happened to him these few years, became his natural advantage in portraying Patient No. 5.
Last year, Yanghua held “Cao Yu’s Special 110 Year Old Commemoration Event”. Then, Xiao Zhan was still in the eye of the storm, and he had a conversation with Cao Yu’s daughter, Wan Fang, and in this conversation, Xiao Zhan did a tremendous amount of homework, and wrote down a few dozen questions regarding Wan Fang’s script “Winter Journey” and “You and I”, his questions were simple but impressionable, it gave people the feeling that he seemed to have reached the edge of theater.
In this conversation, he dazzled Wang Keran, the producer of “A Dream Like A Dream”. He seemed to have found the common point between Xiao Zhan and Patient No. 5: the impermanence nature of fate.
And once again, it proves that instincts were very useful. The intersection between the actor and the role’s life would become the crux to whether the actor is able to infuse a soul to his character. The reason he was able to establish his character was not entirely from his ability to craft roles, but more of the source came from what happened to him. In addition, Xiao Zhan’s intelligence and hard work left a deep impression on Wang Keran during the initial stages of rehearsal – while many actors had not memorized his lines, Xiao Zhan had already memorized all of his lines, and this is especially difficult given that “A Dream Like A Dream” was an 8 hour long performance and there are about 3 to 4 times more lines than a standard play.
Whether the traffic celebrity is capable is a problem, it is also another problem when there is no traffic celebrity in the theater scene. As the theater market becomes more mature operationally, more traffic celebrities would cross over to this foreign scene. At the same time, there would be controversy as well. Can the boundaries between theater and general public be broken through by “traffic celebrities”? When will theater become a “reality TV theater”? Would the audiences be looking at celebrities instead of the play? These kinds of debates had always existed. At this, Lai Shengchuan did not care too much about it. He spoke of an incident in the past, when “A Dream Like A Dream” invited Chris Li to perform, her fans did not simply watch a show, but they watched 10. During the intermission, Lai Shengchuan spoke with her fans, and he realized that hey had been watching for 5 days straight, saying “the play was awesome”.
To him, despite the difference between how traffic celebrities shine on stage and how theater is like, or perhaps foreign to then, he just has to look at how they work to know that it took a lot of talent and hard work to come this far! “Hence, don’t be too particular about whether traffic celebrities are suitable for theater.”
No matter how loud the controversy is, it is fact that theater trains people – a performance of a few hours, there is no pause, no post production, there is only one take with no chance of a retake. Hence, there has always been a hierarchy in the artistic circle, theater actors would be above movie actors, movie actors would be above TV drama actors. No matter what the actual reasons for celebrities to join theater are, Lai Shengchuan’s story proved a point, when a top traffic celebrity joins theater, an art form with high entry requirements, it would inject more vibrancy and attention to this art.
This time, because of Xiao Zhan, another group of people who are unrelated to theater started going into it. Perhaps after the indescribable wonderful 8 hour experience, some of them would truly fall in love with theater, some may continue to fork out money for her idol’s next scheduled event. But is it really that important to separate the “I’m in the same room with him for 8 hours” crowd from the theater audiences?
Let us not think too much about it, and watch the show first!
Xiao Zhan, This “Newcomer” to Theater
Original author: 贾行家
Preface
I do not see the problem with Xiao Zhan’s decision to perform, just like I do not see how anyone would be damaged by this incident. If it had a specific “influence” (I do not see how that is, it is just the decision by a theater group), then to me, the influence is – it allowed more audiences to walk into theaters, and let more platforms notice theater.
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9 years ago, Yanghua Theater placed a huge bet on “A Dream Like A Dream”, it came from Wang Keran’s observations based on the changing times – China’s industrialization and urbanization created its first “middle-class” life, and for the first time the first generation who had completed education but yet who are also stuck in the “modern conundrum” – who am I, where did I come from, where do I go from here? The old answers were no longer effective. This generation’s problem was – how to face the coming of death, and how to face the loneliness that came with the inevitable death? In the hands of Yanghua, this question became – how do you use a touching story, outside of religion or philosophy, to give its audience the love of life and a sense of comfort?
As such, there exists such a different theater group, with a producer with very “un-modern” methods: front stage and backstage, regardless of matters, as long as it could not be clearly defined to a job, it belongs to Wang Keran only. He called himself an “artist + businessman”, the nature of a businessman was to be in-charge of investments, ensure profitability, so he had to consider from the business angle – whether this play could fulfill the extreme and common spiritual requirements of the current generation, while at the same time be able to continue running for a long time; he also had to consider from the artistic angle, taking risks while ensuring profitability, and create the play from his heart. The purity of drama is as such, those who are passionate about it would stake their lives for it.
The author of “A Dream Like A Dream”, playwright Lai Shengchuan had a performance principle technique called “guide the cause, not the effect”, which meant that when the director explains the scene, he does not explain the effect he wants, but instead he would explain the reasons behind this scene clearly, that is, the character’s experience and emotional state, so as to allow the actor to create a natural performance after understanding. This was very different from the rush that is in TV dramas, which would often film out of sequence, the actors might not be clear about what he is acting as, and they could only use exaggerated actions to cover their loss of direction. Worst still, there are also actors who could only count 1, 2, 3, 4 to the camera in place of lines.
However, there are also good directors who do not like to film according to logic, and film as they wanted, while the actors did not know what they were portraying, but yet they could still create a masterpiece, Xu Haofeng’s movie review on Li An’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” spoke about this – Li An felt that Chow Yun-fat’s eyes were too sharp and alert, so he kept shouting “CUT” repeatedly, until Chow Yun-fat lost confidence and his gaze became scattered, so as to get the scene he wanted. Why did he not explain the “cause” at this point? Perhaps it was hard to explain, it was like a fisherman, he had to fish for the right gaze, to wait for the right sequence.
What we said above was to explain two simple things.
The first thing: Art can be, or even must be, done in an autocratic manner, it has to set its goal based on its audience, but how the play will be like, only one person will know, and in that creative space, there is only his method.
The other thing: The status created by an actor for the role is actually very brittle, they usually only know the outcome but they rarely know the cause. The difficult part in rehearsing “A Dream Like A Dream” came from these 31 actors who had to take on more than 100 characters, besides autocracy, there was a need to protect them from interruption and confusion. Xiao Zhan, who joined in this new version, he only had Patient No. 5 on the door of his dressing room, the other roles and burden were removed.
When we were discussing Xiao Zhan, we actually saw many versions of Xiao Zhan. Going back to basics, he is a young actor and singer. I found similarities between him and Patient No. 5: They both had the same unsettling impermanence in their fate, there were things that were not caused by them, they were merely caught in between – when you take a step back, impermanence is neither good nor bad. The problem is, which Xiao Zhan is the one standing on the stage of “A Dream Like A Dream”? If we took him as actor Xiao Zhan, then there is nothing wrong with it.
As an audience, my judging criteria is very simple: How did this new theater actor Xiao Zhan do? Based on his age and experience, Patient No. 5 is an extremely complex and hard to control character, and after 3 stops of Yanghua’s tour, the audience would probably have felt: Xiao Zhan created a brand new, intricate Patient No. 5, this character was well established onstage, this meant that his understanding and analysis was also well established.
I also prepared an observer angle, that was to see if he could blend into the strict system of theater, would be he outshone by actors who had a lot more energy, foundation and experience. The result exceeded my expectations, he not only did it, he displayed clear precision in his pace and control, and realized a complete theater experience.
I do not see the problem with Xiao Zhan’s decision to perform, just like I do not see how anyone would be damaged by this incident. If it had a specific “influence” (I do not see how that is, it is just the decision by a theater group), then to me, the influence is – it allowed more audiences to walk into theaters, and let more platforms notice theater. Chinese theater really needed more exploration in terms of content and operation. As for what influence this would have on the theater scene, audiences are very simple, as long as it was a good show onstage, they would buy tickets to watch it. As an outsider, I would also want to exclaim another statement: there were those who always said they wanted to revive the theater, but when someone really worked hard at doing it, these people would always come with their senseless controversies.
From my point of view, after I met Xiao Zhan’s “A Dream Like A Dream”, I felt that my soul had been cleansed by the waters in the lotus pond, been carefully cleaned by the fluttering spotlights and shadows akin to a bright moon, I seemed to have understood many things, there were less confusion, more courage, and a lot of gratitude to lives of those from front stage and backstage of the theater.
According to Sigmund Freud’s theory, play is a child’s unique way of gaining experience in handling matters, the function of play is to vent, venting is the purification of emotions, this is slightly different from those who take themselves as the audiences’ guide to purification. Theater has created a space to help the audience to vent what is in their hearts. After becoming an adult, it seemed like besides dreaming, there are not many methods to self-purify; besides dreaming, we could also watch “A Dream Like A Dream”.
