The Yue opera “New Dragon Inn” opened in August and all the shows were sold out. Why are most of the people who came to watch it young?
The audience is also a part of the play, and there is a scene where Hu Bing “plays tricks”
“The heavens and the earth are vertical and horizontal, and the demon moon rises to the west. The stars in the universe turn the wheel with one hand.” Cao Shaoqin, governor of the East Factory, sang, and the audience burst into exclamations. Audiences who have watched the martial arts movie “New Dragon Inn” are deeply impressed by this ultimate villain with high martial arts skills. I didn’t expect this domineering character to appear on the stage of Yue opera.
In March this year, the environmental-style Yue opera “New Dragon Inn” launched by Butterfly Theater officially opened, welcoming a steady stream of young people. On social platforms such as Douban and Xiaohongshu, “New Dragon Inn” has become a popular play in Hangzhou, with Damai scoring as high as 9.8.
“All the performances on sale in August have been sold out, and non-traditional Yue opera audiences accounted for 70%, basically young people, which was unimaginable in the past.” The relevant person in charge of the Butterfly Theater revealed.
Going to the theater, an activity that sounds a bit old-fashioned, is now a way of life for young people. In the past two years, Hangzhou’s performing arts market has become more and more lively, and new performance spaces such as immersive theaters and variable theaters are full of young people who are watching theatres for the first time.
The audience is also in the play
There is a scene where Hu Bing “plays tricks”
Before “New Dragon Inn” “turned out”, the most popular in Hangzhou in the past two years was the immersive drama “Polar Night” created by the Big Box Theater Troupe, which told a suspenseful story that took place in the Republic of China.
There are no audience seats in the audience, and the audience follows the leading actor through various scenes throughout the process. The ticket price is divided into 299 yuan for ordinary audience tickets and 399 yuan for in-depth experience tickets according to the degree of participation of the audience. Different directions of the plot.
“In an immersive drama, you are both an audience and a person in the play.” Xiao Ou, who likes to play script killing, bought herself the identity of a dancer, but she did not follow the script. Starring in the impromptu drama of “Third Master”, “What I admire is that the third master was not disturbed by me, he took my lines naturally, and finally opened a new ending. No one in the audience felt that it was against harmony.”
Last year, Mao Weitao, known as the “No. 1 female student in Yue Opera”, teamed up with the Shanghai “One Good Show” team and decided to adapt the martial arts movie “New Dragon Inn” into a Yue opera. The screenwriter is born in 1995. In her writing, Shaoxing opera is no longer a gifted scholar or a beautiful woman who sings for more than ten minutes. A charming walking posture stands up the figure of the proprietress inlaid with gold and jade.
The environmental drama is “happening on the spot”, and all the stories take place in a “black shop”. They dismantled the traditional proscenium stage and transformed the small theater on the fourth floor of the Butterfly Theater into an antique inn, where the audience and actors are guest officials.
How to make the audience more “immersive”? An impromptu interaction was added to the play. General Qianhu took the portrait of Zhou Huai’an’s “Wanted Warrant” and walked around the inn to “face the head”. In one scene, Qianhu called the audience sitting on the sidelines and asked him to go to the sidelines to give a military message. It was only at the curtain call that everyone discovered that this tall man was a well-known model Hu Bing.
