According to the older generation of villagers in Gaozhou, as early as twenty or thirty years ago, every holiday or wedding, the villagers would invite a puppet troupe to perform for fun. At that time, there were more than 2,000 puppet troupes in Gaozhou, performing more than 10,000 performances a year. Decades ago, Gaozhou puppet show won the love of the majority of villagers with its beautiful shape and unique Gaozhou singing. Then, with the popularization of television and even computer network, and the diversification of cultural market consumption, what will the living state of rural puppet shows in Gaozhou be like?
Audiences seldom play alone.
Now, on holidays, especially in Gaozhou every January and February, you can still hear the gongs and drums of the village puppet troupe and the puppet songs with Gaozhou singing characteristics. Just outside the crowded theater of Ghost Head, there were few listeners. There are probably only two kinds of audiences, old people and children. Nowadays, there are very few old people who can sit outside the theater with stools and wait for the theater to start early, and few people can insist on listening to the whole game. When asked about the old people who went to the theatre, they all said that they liked to listen to this kind of "ghost play". If they listen carefully, they will still smell. They just want to come out and listen for a while, so they have to go home, because there may be other things to do at home. Another kind of audience that brings aura laughter to the periphery of this quiet theater is children, but playful children don't come to see the play, but think that these "doll heads" are fun and "greedy". In the puppet shows we visited, we found that the children just played with their partners around the theater, or played with puppets they could touch. Young people and middle-aged people just pass by and don't look. Occasionally, someone stops to listen and then leaves.
Puppet artists don't seem to care much about the audience. Some people will continue to sing without watching the performance. They said they were used to such a performance scene, so they were invited to perform, and they were responsible for singing a few plays that should be sung. Please go on to say that they invited artists to perform puppet shows for "Bodhisattva". We noticed that most of the puppet shows in rural areas were built in front of temples. If invited by the neighborhood office, there will be several cases in front of the theater and incense burners for sacrifice. When asked why the middle-aged generation didn't go to the puppet show, most of them replied that they didn't have that leisure. Besides, there is a TV at home, who would want to see these "ghost plays"? If a Cantonese opera troupe is invited in the village every year, the puppet show can only be performed by one person in the sun, in the dim light and in the noise in the distance.
It is difficult to continue without a successor.
China does have many excellent traditional folk arts. In the past, they all had glorious and popular periods. However, with the development of information technology today, the younger generation has gone to learn new technologies and knowledge, and the middle-aged and elderly people only enjoy the new trend brought by economic development at home, so the traditional folk art has no new interest, so most of them are in danger of extinction. The same is true of the puppet show in Gaozhou, which also faces the situation of no successor.
In the investigation, we visited Zeng Qinghui, a puppet artist who lives in Shan Mei, Gaozhou. Ceng Bo is over 60 years old and has more than 30 years of puppet show experience. His former team was invited to perform in Germany. This matter has always been the honor of folk puppet shows. As one of the traditional folk characteristics of Gaozhou, Zeng Qinghui said that the leaders of the Municipal Cultural Center also attached great importance to it, urging all the theatrical troupes to carry forward this cultural cause. However, despite the official support, it is difficult to restore the former glory of the puppet show. A very important reason is that no young people are willing to learn this art now. Zeng Bo had an apprentice in his early thirties named Dong Xue. Ceng Bo said that he is currently the youngest artist in Gaozhou Puppet Troupe. When we asked Dong Xue why he wanted to learn this art, his answer was just "greed". Perhaps the answer of Dongxue is too simple, but after investigation, we found that even young people like Dongxue who can learn puppet show because of their "gluttony" are unique, and the puppet show performance echelon can be said to be broken at present.
Content, vulgarity and drama are hard to heat up.
Gaozhou Puppet Troupe is the most orthodox and famous puppet show in Gaozhou, which has performed many times all over the country and even abroad, and its performances have also been well received by all parties. However, the performances of small and medium-sized troupes in rural areas all over the country are not as wonderful as the orthodox norms of big troupes. Puppet actors, a skilled opera troupe, can beat gongs and cymbals and dance with puppets. They can also let puppets open and close fans, dress, wear hats, pour wine, take books, write, bow and shoot arrows, etc. , the action is accurate and natural. According to our investigation, there are about four people in a class, and the performance tasks are divided into singing and beating musical instruments. Those who play gongs and cymbals and wooden bangers can change in turn, but they also have to take on the role of singing, that is, singing while knocking, which reduces the sharing of roles. However, because there is no fixed person to sing the roles of "life, Dan, quietness and ugliness" respectively, this artist used to sing a drama, but when the artist is tired, another artist can sing a drama, which makes the voice of the role confused and a little confused. Moreover, in our visiting class, we found that the performances of rural puppet troupes are mainly singing, knocking and simple puppet dancing, and there are no wonderful and magical actions such as taking books, writing and pouring wine like orthodox troupes. In addition, most of the middle-class performances of country troupes have no fixed lyrics, which is "explosive" in the words of an artist, that is, just remember the general outline of the story, and the specific clues and singing methods can be smoothly strung together. For good luck or to meet the tastes of local villagers, you can add local place names and scenic spots. At any time, and the lyrics are also very casual, mainly rhyming and catchy. This kind of performance singing caters to the tastes of local villagers to a certain extent, and the dialogue expression in dialect is also funny and interesting. However, we find that the artistic content of this kind of performance is really not high, and the content is mostly popular stories of champions and beautiful women. The language lacks both elegance and popularity, and it is easy to make historical events inaccurate because of changing the place names at will. Nowadays, young people know the basic knowledge of history, and puppet shows do not attract them mainly because they think that listening to the village puppet shows is just for fun, and it is difficult to learn the traditional history they want to know. Moreover, now the leisure ways are diversified, and people's entertainment ways are also changing accordingly. If puppet shows are regarded as their entertainment, it is still difficult to meet people's requirements.