How did the color tone develop?

Colored tune, also known as tune, tea picking and harmony opera, belongs to the lantern drama system, which originated from the "opposite tune" derived from rural song and dance and rap in Guilin, and is one of the main operas widely circulated in urban and rural areas of Guangxi. It is widely circulated and has different names. Guilin is called Caidiao, some counties in Liuzhou, Hechi and Wuzhou are called Tidiao, Pingle and Lipu are called Tea-picking Opera and Lantern, and Ningming and Baise in the left and right rivers are called Big Tea-picking Opera and Hehe Opera. After 1955, they are collectively called color carvings.

The tone is lively and easy to understand, and the content of the play is very close to people's lives, with strong national style and local characteristics. Known as "a happy drama full of earthy fragrance".

Absorb the tone of folk art

In the early years, tea-picking songs and lanterns were popular all over Guangxi, but they did not form a drama. In the middle of Qing Dynasty, Hunan immigrants moved to counties in northern Guizhou and introduced Hunan Flower Drum Opera into Guangxi.

During the period when Quju was spread all over Guangxi, it gradually enriched by absorbing folk songs and minor tunes in northern Guangxi. Finally, in the late Qing Dynasty, a kind of tonal drama originated from ancient painting drama and was different from it.

Tone was originally in the form of "double-spring egg", that is, a single person plays both men and women at the same time. Later, with the introduction of flirting into Guangxi, the color tone developed into "opposite tone" and men and women performed on the same stage.

The earliest plays performed by Caidiao are mostly based on myths and legends, Zhang Hui's novels or anecdotes, and artists often use Guilin dialect when performing. Due to the adoption of local dialects, all ethnic groups in this area can not only understand, but also stimulate people's love for color tones and cultivate their own color tone actors.

During the light years of the Qing dynasty, with the gradual familiarity of color tones, it became a popular entertainment for local people. Performers of color tone began to teach in counties in northern Guangxi and Xinning area in southern Guangxi, and made a living by teaching color play. These artists gradually became professional performers of color tones.

Colorful opera is a local opera popular in northern Guangxi, which mostly reflects the life, love and labor reality of working people. It has a strong vitality and is an art form loved by the people in northern Guangxi and southern Hunan.

Color tones first evolved from folk songs and dances and rap. It consists of a pair of men and women singing and dancing, a man dancing a fan and a woman waving a square towel, showing the joy of mutual love. The content of singing is mostly to praise nature or love, and the tunes used are folk songs, ballads and minor tunes.

At that time, the rural towns around Guilin were bathed in simple folk customs. At that time, there were no entertainment activities in towns and villages, and people liked to watch colorful songs best.

There is a colorful artist in Sujia and Hejia, Zhemu Town. He is a famous lottery owner in Yanshan, Zhemu, Mamianwei, Liutang and other neighboring towns. His representative works include Mother to Daughter, The King Strikes Three Birds and Three Visits to Prison. Every time his troupe performs "Mother to Daughter", the audience under the stage will be filled with tears, moved by the affection of their mother and daughter, and sigh for their daughter's helplessness.

After the performance of Mother to Daughter, the troupe of the old artist put on an ugly play. When performing a clown, the old artist wore rags and trousers, wore a black clown hat, held a broken cattail fan, his trouser legs were up and down, and his face was painted with a messy beard. This image is very interesting. At the same time, the old artist also whispered:

Strange, strange, strange. There are so many quirks now. I jump on trees and fish, men play with babies and women. ...

Listening to the humorous lyrics of the old artist, people laughed.

Later, the old artist yawned, got drunk and fell cross-legged on the stage.

The audience applauded, whistled and laughed. The clown played by the old artist was unanimously recognized and became the talk of the villagers after dinner.

During the Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty, the tune spread from north to south, forming a main distribution area centered on Guilin, Liuzhou and Yishan, and continued to spread to the south. Influenced by the ancient paintings and operas in Hunan during Daoguang and Guangxu periods in the Qing Dynasty, flirting gradually developed from the "second small play" by the clown and Xiao Dan to the "three small plays" with characters by Xiao Sheng, the clown and Xiao Dan, that is, the so-called "thirty-six plays in the Jianghu".

There is a kind of "seven tight, eight loose and nine happy" in the rural areas of northern Guangxi, that is, a "mountain-crossing class" composed of seven, eight and nine people. Such a mountain-climbing class requires artists to specialize in a variety of skills before the troupe can tour the countryside in northern Guangxi.

Later, through the long-term performances of Shanban artists in rural areas and festivals and temple fairs, artists gradually created and accumulated double visits to fortune telling, double shops, fortune telling for the blind, three strings of birds, three visits to parents and begging for money on the basis of local operas such as "tuning" and "picking tea".

At this time, Qupai music initially formed three distinctive categories, namely, tune, board and tune, which has been said as "nine tones and eighteen tones". At the same time, artists have also made some reforms in makeup, performance and business.

During the Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty, the most famous Cao Tou broke the old habit of "women don't sing tunes" for Xu Diaoban, and the first batch of female roles appeared in color-coded dramas.

As most of the tunes of China opera were mature in Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty, tune tune was a kind of drama developed from other operas in the early stage.