Traditional Culture Accumulation Shadow Play

Shadow Play

Basic Overview

Shadow Play, formerly known as "Shadow Play" or "Lamp and Shadow Play", is a kind of folk theater in which silhouettes of characters made of animal skins or cardboards are illuminated by lights to perform stories. During the performance, the artists manipulate the characters behind a white curtain while singing the story with local popular tunes, accompanied by percussion instruments and stringed music, which has a strong local flavor. In Henan, Shanxi, and rural Shaanxi, this humble Han folk art form is very popular.

Its performers manipulate silhouettes, sing behind the scenes, or set to music. In the past, when movies, television and other media were not yet developed, shadow play was one of the most popular folk entertainment activities. Shadow play is an ancient traditional art of Chinese Han folklore, and old Beijingers called it "donkey shadow".

For thousands of years, this ancient art has been accompanied by generations of ancestors and spent many happy times. Shadow not only belongs to puppet art, but also a kind of authentic handicraft. It is made of cowhide, donkey, horse and mule skin through several processes, such as material selection, carving, coloring, sewing and painting. The shadow production is elaborate, the craft is exquisite, and the performance is full of fun and vivid. Influenced by the external environment and differences in the texture of the animal skin materials and other factors, the shadow puppet modeling style varies from place to place.

Cultural status

At present, the status of shadow puppetry is not optimistic. The production and performance artists of the time are now over 100 years old, and this exquisite skill is about to be lost. Nowadays, more and more ways of entertainment make the shadow theater in people's minds in the status of a decline. What are the reasons that prevent shadow puppetry from continuing to develop in China? How can we save this brilliant art and give it a new vitality? Undoubtedly, the traditional shadow play in many ways there are unavoidable limitations, which is the biggest obstacle to its adaptation to today's fast-paced society.

The elaborate and colorful shapes of shadow puppets have captivated countless artists, but have made their production extremely difficult. The production of a shadow figure involves more than 10 processes, including skin making, tracing, carving and coloring, which are complex enough to take a craftsman several weeks, not including the possibility of any small mistake during this period that may result in no modification and the loss of the work.

At the same time, the preservation of the finished product is also a challenge, as prolonged exposure to the sun can cause the pigments to fade, and hot and humid temperatures can cause the shadows to distort. These are all undoubtedly fatal weaknesses for an industrialized society that emphasizes mass production.On November 28, 2018, the General Office of the Ministry of Education announced Zhengzhou University as a base for the inheritance of Chinese outstanding traditional culture in shadow puppetry.

Photographs from all over the world

Because of the vast geographical area in which shadow play is circulated in China, different genres have been formed in the course of long-term evolution in different regions, and it is common to see Sichuan shadow, Hubei shadow, Hunan shadow, Beijing shadow, Tangshan shadow, Shandong shadow, Shanxi shadow, Qinghai shadow, Ningxia shadow, Shaanxi shadow, and the northern Sichuan shadow, the eastern Longdon shadow and other styles of distinctive local Shadow. The style and rhythm of the music and singing of the shadows of different places have absorbed the essence of their respective local operas, tunes, folk songs and music systems, thus forming a multitude of genres with a wide variety of colors.

There are Shinyang Shadow Opera, Tangshan Shadow Opera, Ji'nan Shadow Opera, Xiaoyi Shadow Opera, Fuzhou Shadow Opera, Haining Shadow Opera, Lufeng Shadow Opera, Huaxian Shadow Opera, Huayin Laoqiang, Agongqiang, String Plate Cavity, Huanxian Daoxiang Shadow Opera, Lingyuan Shadow Opera and so on. Hebei, Beijing, Northeast, Shandong, the various shadow singing, although the same originated in Jidong Luanzhou Leiting shadow, but their respective singing in the Beijing Opera, drop, drums, clappers and folk songs under the nourishment, and the formation of different genres. Smooth flat tune, gorgeous flower tune, mournful sad tune to name a few.

And among them, the Tangluan region is very unique in the way it pinches the voice and sings. Shadow is a combination of theater, music and other artistic means of performance, it has a long history of the form is also the earliest introduced to the West of the traditional Chinese art. During the Song Dynasty (960-1127), shadow puppets were extremely popular, and there were a large number of shadow puppet shows during festivals. In the Ming Dynasty, there were as many as 40 to 50 shadow puppet theater groups in Beijing. In the thirteenth century AD, the Mongolian military camps at that time also performed shadow theater, as a kind of entertainment, and later also with the army to bring the shadow to Persia, Arabia, Turkey and other countries. After that, shadow puppetry was spread in Southeast Asian countries. Chinese shadow puppets began to spread to Europe from the middle of the eighteenth century.

According to records, in 1767, French missionaries brought Chinese shadow plays back to France and performed them in Paris and Marseille, which were called "Chinese lanterns and shadows", and were a sensation. It was later transformed by the French and became the "French Shadow Theater". Chinese shadow play has made a unique contribution to the enrichment of the world art scene. A shadow puppet has to be manipulated by five bamboo sticks, and the artist's fingers are so flexible that he often dazzles the audience. Not only are their hands skillful, but they also have to speak, read, play and sing, and brake the gongs and drums under their feet. The screen for the shadow play is made of a 1-meter-sized piece of white gauze. The white gauze is polished with fish oil to make it bright and shiny.

During the performance, the shadows move close to the screen, and the hollowed-out figures and colorful colors are really moving. The singing voice used by the artists to perform the shadow show is their own original creation, in addition to the traditional singing voice of the region. Although the shadow play looks simple, but clumsy in the clever, contains the working people's rich imagination and ingenious artistic creativity. It is small props, easy to perform, and is not restricted by the venue, the actors do not need formal training. In areas where shadow puppetry is prevalent, when this lightweight art form is mentioned, people will affectionately refer to it as the "one-quart pick" art, or call it the light cavalry of cultural life.

Representative works

Shadow play performances include historical drama, folklore, martial arts, love stories, myths and fables, fashion and modern theater, and so on, and the repertoire of folded plays, single plays, and serial plays is too large to be counted.

The common traditional plays include The Legend of the White Snake, The Jade Bangle, The Story of the Western Wing, Qin Xianglian, The Cowherd and the Weaving Maiden, The Generals of the Yang Family, The Legend of Yue Fei, The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and The Founder of the Gods, and so on. From the revolutionary war era to the liberation, the new development of fashion theater, modern theater and fairy tale fable drama, common plays are brother and sister to open up the land, the White Hairy Woman, Liu Hulan, Xiaoyi black marriage, the little son-in-law, Lin Hai Xue Yuan, the Red Lanterns, turtles and cranes, the two friends, Mr. Dong Guo and so on.