What are the characteristics of exploration dramas in the mid-1980s?

First, break through the stage boundaries and strengthen performance exchanges. In 1980s, dramatic art was in trouble and faced with challenges. The grim reality urges playwrights to seriously reflect on the essential characteristics, ecological environment and competitive advantages of this artistic style. They once again agree that the so-called drama is the art of actors playing roles and performing stories in front of the public, and actors, audiences and scripts are the basic elements of drama. Therefore, in order to get rid of the "crisis", drama should especially find the reasons and make a fuss about the "three elements". They also realize that drama in modern society has many disadvantages compared with sister arts such as movies and television, but it also has its own special advantages, that is, direct communication between audiences and actors. As Yu Shizhi, a famous performing artist of Beiren Art, said, "Compared with TV and movies, drama is the only art that can be created with the audience. The audience likes to see a live person performing a live role face to face. " This vivid communication between the creator and the audience is the unique advantage of the drama art. Therefore, the drama exploration in the 1980s paid special attention to this advantage and advantage of the drama itself. In order to strengthen the direct communication between the audience and the actors, some dramatists have made some modifications to the original theater and stage design, such as "Old B Hanging on the Wall", which changed the stage performance into a plane performance, arranged the audience in front of the performance area, and the actors and the audience were on the same level, thus narrowing the spatial distance; "Mother's Song" and "Road, Between You and Me" were performed in the form of Center Stage, and the audience sat around the stage. Absolute Signal was performed in a small theater, which narrowed the distance between the audience and the actors. In addition, some actors sit in the audience, talk to the stage from the audience, or walk on the stage from the audience, which maximize the intimacy of the performance. Another example is "Mayor Chen Yi". The director is committed to creating a fiery drama atmosphere so that the audience can feel immersive. At the beginning of the performance, the actor who plays Chen Yi stood on the platform of Taikou and gave a report directly to the audience, as if the cadres and soldiers of our army were sitting in the audience who were about to launch a general attack on Shanghai, creating a kind of "overlap between the drama environment and the real environment", strengthening the direct communication between the audience and making the stage and the stage integrated. Furthermore, in order to change the relationship between the actors and the audience on the traditional stage, break through the boundary of "framing the stage" and stimulate the audience's participation and thinking, many artists introduced the narrative factors of literature, increased the narrators, and used the "alienation effect" to break the "stage illusion" and strengthen the exchange of viewing and performance, which received touching results. Like the investigation and analysis of Fifteen Divorce Cases, the author specially set up two narrators, male and female, who not only played a role in the play, but also played a role in it like the host of the party, connecting the whole play, adding narration, making the finishing point and constantly inspiring the audience's thinking. Like the Rubik's Cube, there is also a "host" who sometimes stays in the play and sometimes leaves the scene of the play, holding a microphone to invite the audience to express their feelings impromptu and guide the audience to think about the people and things in the performance. Another example is The True Story of Ah Q, which is adapted from Lu Xun's novel of the same name and also has a "commentator". From time to time, he appeared on the stage, or evaluated the characters' behavior, or revealed their inner world, or introduced the development of the plot, or lamented characters experience, sometimes introducing the audience into the play, and sometimes pulling the audience out of the play, which is obviously a reference and application of Brecht's "alienation effect". This ingenious combination of the serial plot of characters and the "separation effect" not only adds the philosophical and lyrical nature of the work, but also creates the unique artistic charm of the play.

Second, break the traditional concept of "the scene is divided into two" and expand the space-time field of the stage. As we all know, drama art is a relatively complete movement process to express tangible things. Like life itself, it extends in two dimensions: time and space. It is a typical space-time art, so it is bound to be restricted by the space-time of the stage. In this regard, China's dramatists in the 1980s also made unremitting efforts. They are not satisfied with the so-called "unification of time, place and events" in order to comply with this restriction, but try to expand the restricted time and space with the help of the assumptions and imagination of drama, and strive to guide the audience to a broader and more free situation. The specific methods are as follows: First, break through the long structure of four or five acts and two or three acts in traditional drama and increase the number of repertoires, so as to speed up the change of performance time and place and expand the scope. For example, when playing "Late Flowers", the scene changed eleven times; For example, Atoms and Love adopts the structure of large span (fifteen years before and after), multiple scenes (nearly thirty scenes) and large sections; For example, the whole drama "Hot Blood is Always Hot" is divided into seventeen paragraphs, which completely breaks the traditional law of scene separation, scene concentration and sequential development; Like Liu Shugang's multi-scene stage play "Soul and Meat", "trying to break the traditional concept of separating scenes from time and space, demanding more freedom in the transformation of scenes, the whole play has dozens of scenes". Even The True Story of Ah Q, adapted by the old playwright Chen, is contrary to the centralized cohesion law of traditional drama, and "Close to the novel" is transformed into multiple scenes roughly according to the chapter order of the original. The second is to divide the stage, increase the performance area, expand the stage space, and even perform several performance areas at the same time, so as to save time and space. Like "There is Heat Flow Outside", the lighting of the performance area is processed and cut, so that the present and the past, reality and dreams, people and ghosts are concrete and abstract, changing freely and connecting smoothly. For example, in the drama "Blood Story", the connection and transformation of paragraphs and scenes are realized by means of light and shadow. Some paragraphs (such as the tenth paragraph) have changed scenes more than ten times, and sometimes three performance areas are still going on at the same time. Especially Absolute Signal, Savage, Nie Pá n @ ① of Dog Dad, and Chronology of Mulberry Tree. Make full use of light cutting means to make a variety of performance areas with different time and space appear on the same stage, and the time and space of the stage change from fixed to moving, from narrow to wide, from single to multi-level. It is precisely because of this ingenious interweaving of vertical time and horizontal space that the hypothesis of drama is fully utilized, and the seemingly simple scene presents colorful levels. The third is to learn the techniques of western modernism, learn from the assumptions and fictional means of China's traditional operas, ignore the creation of illusory time and space, and advocate the use of non-illusory time and space. Like a drama stage, the huge, luxurious and beautiful naturalistic scenery is abolished and replaced by the decoration of a neutral stage, just like an empty stage where actors perform; Only platforms and building blocks with different heights are placed on the stage, and the plot space is marked in combination with the performance; Like using patterns and words to express space, these have greatly expanded the expressive power of the stage. In addition, the introduction of space-time forms of character psychology, that is, the intuitive display of characters' inner activities, such as memories and dreams, has greatly enriched the creativity of drama art. Dramatists can insert drama actions in time according to the psychological state of characters, externalizing the inner world of characters into visible entities, and all these can be combined according to the conscious flow of characters or subconscious and unconscious activities, without being bound by the space-time logic of the development of things in daily life, thus enjoying greater freedom.

Third, strengthen the comprehensive consciousness of drama and enrich the means of drama expression. "Drama is a comprehensive art", which is a common view of Chinese and foreign dramatists. Because judging from its activity process, it is the product created by writers, directors, actors, stage art designers, technicians at all stages, theater managers and audiences. Judging from its composition, it is a synthesis of literature, plastic arts, music and actors' performing arts. It can be said that comprehensiveness is the inherent essence of drama art, and it is no exception at all times and in all countries. The drama in ancient Greece is a synthesis of poetry, sculpture, chorus, dance and action, while the traditional drama in China is a combination of songs, dances, acrobatics, comedies, rap and other artistic categories. However, I don't know when and why, China's plays gradually lost their comprehensive characteristics and eventually became the art of "dialogue" dominating everything. As a result, the appearance of drama is becoming more and more single and rigid, and its expressive force is becoming more and more exhausted. In order to change this decline, China dramatists in the 1980s made up their minds to "retrieve many artistic techniques that have been lost for more than a century", believing that "masks, songs and dances, folk rap, lip-synching and sumo wrestling, and even puppets, shadow puppets, magic and acrobatics in primitive religious ceremonies can all be put into the play." (Gao Xingjian's Drama Collection) As a result, there has been a development trend of singing, dancing, poetry and drama in the drama circle. For example, the dead visit the living, Rubik's Cube, Savage, Dark Horse and other dramas boldly absorb and use artistic elements such as music, dance, film and folk art as their own organic means of expression. Another example is "Taking the Wrong Bus" by Shenyang Repertory Theatre, which has been performed thousands of times and caused a sensation. People call it "the phenomenon of taking the wrong bus" One of the important reasons is that they pay full attention to and give full play to the "comprehensive" characteristics of drama, and organically combine singing, dancing and speaking. In particular, the chronicle of mulberry trees is more prominent. The popularity and praise of this drama, known as the "new harvest of ten years' exploration", is not only related to the deep excavation of the ecology and mentality of farmers in China by the script, but also related to the pursuit of strengthening the comprehensive consciousness of drama and expanding the artistic expression forms of drama by the majority of drama workers. In the performance of the script, the lingering and rendering of the theme song "The Effect of Separation" and "When will the Dragon of the East suddenly wake up" of the modern dance team dressed in bright costumes not only makes people think deeply, but also adds infinite poetry and charm to this work.