The blank wall suddenly turned into a huge screen, and the projection hit the wall, showing the streets of a certain European city with people coming and going. The picture was a little blurry, and then turned into the sky, with large clouds floating by accompanied by piano notes. A beam of light hits the piano in the center of the stage, and you can see clearly that there is only a curved bridge on the stage, the pianist and piano, a door, a sofa, and a floor lamp.
Singer Shen Yang pulled a suitcase and walked over. His melancholy bass echoed on the stage. He walked towards the piano with his back to the audience. The live camera focused on his shadow on the piano, and his face appeared on the screen. He picked up his suitcase and walked towards the bridge, his heavy feet showing on the screen. A fashionably dressed young man ran briskly past him onto the bridge and danced hip-hop to the background of classical piano and singing...
This is a clip of the "Chasing" crew performing in rehearsal. In order to simulate the stage effect, the rehearsal took place in a studio in Niulan Mountain, Shunyi. The studio was dark and very stuffy, and Shen Yang was wearing a suit with sweat on his face. "Chasing" is a presentation of Schubert's classic vocal suite "Winterreise", but from this short clip of less than ten minutes, we can see that it is not a simple vocal suite performance, nor is it an opera or a musical. There is no ready-made definition for it. It can only be described as "cross-border". Director Zou Shuang finally called it "multimedia vocal theater". It will premiere at the Beijing International Music Festival in October.
"Chasing" originated from a chat between Shen Yang and Zou Shuang. One is a bass-baritone singer who has won many international singing awards, and the other is a director who has participated in a series of domestic and foreign opera drama productions and multimedia designs. They chatted about Schubert's "Winterreise" while drinking coffee near the Coliseum in Sanlitun. Classical music formed a great contrast with the surrounding environment. They suddenly had an idea to bring the artistic conception of "Winter Journey" to the 21st century, to the modern streets, to Sanlitun, and to audiences who did not know much about classical music.
In Shen Yang's view, when the audience enters the performance venue, they enter an artistic conceptual "space" that integrates many aspects such as music, drama, stage design, sound effects, etc. More importantly, when the audience comes to Sanlitun and sees the bustling crowds and the fashionable men and women, they have already had an experience before entering this venue. The artistic conception of the performance brings the audience a feeling that is integrated with the Sanlitun Coliseum and even the whole of Beijing.
Schubert's "Winter Journey" was written in 1827. The lyrics come from 24 poems by the German poet Muller, describing a lonely journey of a lovelorn person in the winter. This work was completed before Schubert's death and can be said to be the work closest to the composer's soul. According to director Zou Shuang, the compassion, nostalgia and pain of love in this set of art songs, as well as the exploration and lamentation of the deeper layers of life, are the yearning for the pursuit of "exile" and "heroic romanticism" in a pure sense.
&ldquo"Escape" means exile and pursuit. "The so-called exile in Schubert's original works is actually not an escape, not an end to life, but a new beginning, which is actually a particularly heroic heroism. What kind of heroism is this kind of heroism? Whether it is better to die than live or to die without regrets, it is all very complicated, and it is all in the music," Zou Shuang said. "We want to use the characteristics and feelings of the information age to return to Schubert's artistic conception and emotion when he created it. ""Chasing" attempts to express people's sense of exile in the fast-paced metropolis of the 21st century.
The whole play is 75 minutes long. Originally Schubert's work was a fragment of songs with no dramatic conflicts and no obvious storyline. Zou Shuang first sorted out a clue to the artistic conception of each song, then found the story structure from the clues and created the script concept. I didn’t want to break the original musical sequence, but I wanted to match the music and express my own content. The script was dug out bit by bit through constant discussions and attempts by the crew members during rehearsals. It took about a dozen drafts.
Many inspirations for the script and story came from Shen Yang's personal experience. Zou Shuang once asked Shen Yang what he felt was the most lonely and helpless time. Shen Yang said that it was at the Beijing International Music Festival. He had just performed a great concert and was in a particularly high mood at the reception. Many managers came over to talk. Suddenly, a phone call came saying that your plane was about to take off and that you were waiting for you at the New York Metropolis. So before taking off his tuxedo, he had to go to the front desk to get his suitcase and rush to the Capital Airport. So on the stage we can see Shen Yang walking alone at night with his suitcase, which also expresses the loneliness of an artist.
Staging, lighting, photography, and multimedia are all vital components of "Chasing." Karl Crump, a multimedia designer from the Netherlands, said that what needs to be shown in the play is sometimes the protagonist's present, sometimes his memories, sometimes the real space, and sometimes the performance space. He tried to use multimedia switching techniques to create psychological changes. Lighting designer Chen Xiaji also said that he tried to use lighting to separate several spaces, including psychological space and real space, as well as distance and time. The stage designer Han Jiang uses the image of a bridge to present the visual image of the protagonist's life trajectory, and the central part of the stage refers to a hotel. The artist has been traveling abroad for a long time, and the hotel is almost his home. The stage design is both realistic and illusory.
For the three actors on the stage, this performance was a big challenge for them. Dancer Masi is a boy born in the 1990s. He never listens to classical music as a hip-hop dancer. This time he needs to dance to his own rhythm in classical music. For pianist Shao Lu, he is used to seeing Schubert's music as a particularly serious and rigorous work that needs to be performed very precisely. For the sake of dramatic effect, the director asked for various deletions, and he was not particularly adaptable at first.
Shen Yang has already recorded "Winter Journey" at the age of 22, and has sung countless songs on various occasions in the past 10 years.Several times, the biggest challenge this time was adapting to the new performance format. "The most difficult thing about the work is how to concentrate, both mentally and physically, but sometimes the performance will lead you to deviate. Unlike opera, many performances in opera have specific objects, and opera also has lyric poems, but what about singing a lyric poem from a child? We need to make up a reasonable story and have extended content. The difficulty is to express the content without ignoring the music."
"Actually, the adaptation of "Winter Journey" is a bit overstuffed," Shen Yang said. "From the current art world in China, we have no time to do this. In order to challenge a brand-new art form and experimental model, the energy expended is dozens or hundreds of times that of a normal concert." He said that in the end they were not for utilitarianism, the purpose was just to create a priceless art form and to create a good beginning to create a new artistic concept and artistic performance method.
Director Zou Shuang is still full of expectations for the premiere of "Chasing". "Beijing is a place uniquely endowed with cross-border performances, and the Beijing International Music Festival is a good platform for presenting, combining the most classical things with the most modern things," she said. "We have done many cross-border performances abroad, which are very mature, but foreign audiences are also very mature. There is no such excitement and a surging desire for new things." Therefore, she believes that "it is time" to develop such a cross-border performance form in Beijing.
"Chasing" will meet the Beijing audience during the Beijing International Music Festival, and will be performed for three consecutive days from October 26th to 28th.
