I am engaged in drama art, and there are many problems in drama art, which should be explained by aesthetics.
Beauty and truth. Acting should be true, but the performance on the stage is different from real life. Crying in life is hard to restrain, crying is natural, and there is no need to study beauty; But on the stage, you have to cry beautifully and skillfully. Therefore, acting should not only be true, but also beautiful. Truth in drama, like truth in life, can't be sung. There should be beauty in truth, and there should be truth in Miri, Malaysia. Truth is not a copy of life, but a reproduction of life.
The central issue of the recent debate about "actor contradiction" is "stage emotion". This is manifested in the debate between "experience" and "performance" in stage art, which also involves aesthetic issues. Stage emotion is a poetic emotion? Feelings with the essence of beauty. This kind of feeling is not caused by the real stimulation of life, but what is aroused by the emotional memory of the actor's life experience when he feels or experiences the role in a hypothetical situation. The experience of stage emotion depends not only on the actor's strong enthusiasm and keen sensibility; Not only because I like this role or hate it, I shed tears of sympathy on the stage, or let out the passion of sharing common enemy.
It is good for an actor to have this kind of impulse and sincere stage attitude, but it is not enough. In this way, it can't complete the role creation task well. With the feelings of actors, we must create according to the rules of the stage. This kind of emotion is refined and visualized, and it is the work of stage artists, not the original state of emotion. Therefore, the emotional experience of actors is not an end, but a tool. Its purpose is to create a thoughtful artistic image that can reveal the objective truth in front of the audience. This stage emotion has aesthetic evaluation. This is the essence of stage emotion.
This kind of feeling with aesthetic significance cannot be without the essence of expression, and the emotional experience emphasized by the "experience" school only destroys the beautiful feeling. The actor's so-called "sincerity in China's form is external" should not be naturalistic, but should be created according to the law of beauty.
Since aesthetics is required, an actor should not only be integrated into the role, but also be above it. Without experience, you can't integrate into the role; If you can't be above the role (that is, beyond the role), you don't know how to evaluate the role with aesthetic attitude. In the past, Guangming Daily published an article entitled "Red Flag Holding High, Outstanding People and Outstanding People", which was the reason. I don't know if it's right. An actor on the stage, not for himself but for the audience, is to correctly shape the role for the audience. You love your role, praise your role, feel it from all aspects, experience it enthusiastically, your feelings are so rich, and you are really immersed in the role.
However, you don't know that you are full of feelings, your pronunciation is untrue, your voice and intonation are terrible, you just complain straight at your throat, your body is nervous, your whole body twitches, and you are not nervous at all. You are sincere, and the audience is very sad. Originally, you did this to sympathize with and praise the role, but as a result, you made the role ugly and ugly yourself. I just finished watching the play and lay down. If you don't follow the special stage rules and don't understand the application of aesthetic principles in specific art forms, these problems will appear. Actors in Chinese opera pay attention to fake acting, not to say that they should not experience or feel, but to know how to be "clever" and "lift the weight as easily as possible" "Clever" is one of the important aesthetic factors in creation. On the stage, it is really necessary to be able to "anger the tigers and rivers" and "ride Mount Tai across the North Sea".
In this way, it doesn't mean that an actor can only pretend to come up with an abstract form of joy, anger, sadness and joy when performing, and he can be indifferent to the role. If so, it's too fake. That kind of artificial performance will also destroy beauty. Beauty and beauty are inseparable. Simply emphasizing acting skills will lead to the destruction of art. The beautiful emotion of drama is a poetic emotion cultivated by excavating some emotions similar to the role on the basis of the actor's life experience and cultivating the seedlings of this emotion in the creation of stage illusion. It's beautiful, and it's kind of true. Only emphasize that performance is distorted, and only emphasize that experience is beautiful.
The above is the relationship between beauty and truth from the stage emotion. As a scientific understanding, beauty cannot be separated from truth. Generally speaking, artistic beauty is a reflection of the beauty of life. Then, how to correctly understand life in essence is the premise of artistic beauty. The concentration, generalization and refinement of life first depends on the scientific understanding of life, which is the basis of understanding beauty.
Art always expresses feelings, but unlike Tolstoy, art only aims at spreading feelings. Art is a social phenomenon that artists arouse their inner feelings and thoughts under the influence of reality and show them in a certain image. Artistic feelings, this psychological process, must be expressed in the form of material. Singing depends on the sound of flesh; Accompaniment depends on musical instruments and music scores; Painting, you must rely on Four Treasures of the Study to ink; Sculpture depends on things like mud, wood or marble.
Different materials and means will inevitably affect the image conception. When studying aesthetics with art as the object, we should take into account the characteristics of various art forms and expression methods. Understanding life and how to reflect life (artistic reproduction) are different because of different material means of art, and the aspects of life chosen by artists are also different, or from different angles. Generally speaking, artistic image is not combined with content, but must be combined with artistic material tools, which involves the problem of how to use technology. When colors, lines and acoustics are used as artistic means (artistic language), their technical operations are different and their conception methods are different.
Oil painting has more advantages than China's ink painting, and the beauty of lines in Chinese painting has its own special expressive force. Of course, this can't be taken too seriously. Art is not a copy of life, and the artistic imagination of the creator always depends on the associative function (aesthetic experience) of the appreciator to accept it. Therefore, if art reflects life, it can win more with less and summarize the whole with essence; You can draw water, you can draw its sound, you can draw flowers, you can draw its fragrance.
However, over-emphasizing the connection of this feeling will lead to problems and deny the inherent characteristics of each art form. For example, when singing the Eighth Route Army military songs, the accompaniment instrument must be a horn that can express the majestic and loud voice, in order to show the majestic aesthetic feeling. If China's Xiao Sheng is used instead, this feeling will be gone. On the other hand, if the lullaby is expressed by the corner of the ocean, its failure can also be expected. Therefore, it is wrong to ignore the characteristics of each art form and its limitations in reflecting life.
The art of summarizing the relationship between truth, goodness and beauty has its own characteristics because of its different material forms, and the influence of tradition has played a great role. Seeing the five colors with eyes and listening to the seven sounds with ears, Marx said that the richness of human feelings is partly innate and partly developed gradually. Seven emotions of people, aren't they? Aesthetic ability is both historical and national, and it is influenced by tradition. How to express feelings in art and how to summarize the beauty of such feelings naturally have their own characteristics. This kind of creation can not be separated from the aesthetic experience of the appreciator. The so-called musical ears only enjoy the beauty of music, that's all.
People in China have rich aesthetic experience in what they like to see and hear. The characteristics of China's traditional drama are closely related to the aesthetic concept of China people. The virtual techniques of China's traditional operas, such as the vast stage space in Zhangba Middle School, can show an infinitely broad situation and various forms of struggle in life, which is a kind of high wisdom reflected by the people of China in the creation of traditional operas. In the performance of China traditional opera, it is not too simple to pay attention to omissions, and the focus is not too complicated. It is most opposed to equalitarianism and naturalism. Just like Chinese painting pays attention to the truth of "hiding" and "revealing", the so-called "those who are good at hiding don't reveal the beginning, and those who are good at revealing don't hide the beginning". Omission is to show something more important, not to be hasty. Because only in this way can we draw three inches vertically and be one kilometer high; "Ink a few feet wide is a hundred miles long. For example, drawing a dragon, the dragon is in the clouds, depending on its overall picture, what do you think?
But "the dragon sees the head but doesn't see the tail", it will never be completely exposed, so it can only be expressed from its minions and scales. When we see its scales and claws, we will associate it with the whole picture. However, the claw scale angle must be dynamic in order to make people associate. It is from the dynamics of its exposed part that people associate it with the whole picture hidden in the cloud. For people, China's stage performance is like this. This is what people call a vivid way. For example, Song Jiang in "Sitting on a Building to Kill Cherish" came home from the strip and found the upstairs from the yard. These environments that are not available on the stage are all expressed through the performances of actors. This performance is not a mechanical comparison of the environment. Some details should be highlighted and some details should be omitted.
It is important to reveal this situation by combining the summarized stage movements. Just like painting a dragon, you can see the whole dragon flying in the summary of scales and claws. Therefore, vividness is very important. Vivid, but inseparable from the accurate shape. Freedom of speech is embodied in strict laws and regulations. As we all know, articles should be accurate, vivid and vivid. If vivid, it is important to ask for accuracy first. This also embodies the principles of freedom and necessity. This should be studied as a universal truth of aesthetics.
That's all for my speech. The question of beauty and ugliness, how to express ugliness in life in art, especially the aesthetic problem in traditional Chinese opera art, is very complicated and seems to be used to it, but it is not easy to tell the truth. Some comrades present here are engaged in this industry, and some are willing to accept this legacy. I hope to think more about this issue and carry it forward critically. In a word, combining aesthetics with concrete artistic practice, we will find many problems that need to be solved. Advocating aesthetic research is of great benefit to improving artistic quality and summing up artistic practical experience.