The 2024 Guilin Festival, jointly organized by the Publicity Department of the CPC Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Committee, the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Guangxi Autonomous Region, the Guilin Municipal Government and the Central Academy of Drama, concluded successfully after nine days of continuous activities.
The "Legend of the White Snake" by the Puppetry Department of the Shanghai Theatre Academy's College of Traditional Chinese Opera successfully participated in this festival. The play was co-directed by Yin Wuwei, Director of the Puppetry Department, and Dai Zhengkun, a teacher at the Affiliated Chinese Traditional Opera School. Zhu Zhiyu served as the producer, and young teacher Xu Qian led the puppetry students in a brilliant performance.
This year's Guilin Festival, themed "Looking Back and Moving Forward," aimed to inherit Guilin's historical context and continue the glory of the "Southwest Theatre Festival." It reflected both a respect for history and a pursuit of future aspirations.
The puppet play "Legend of the White Snake" reconstructs the story of the White Snake, exploring issues of the id, ego and superego from a modern perspective, posing the question, "What is a human, and why be human?" The performance combines human and puppet acting, integrating various theatrical forms across genres. The bold breakthroughs in design, especially in some classic scenes, fully leverage the advantages of puppetry, making the scenes vividly lifelike.
The integration of human and puppet acting is a major feature of this play. The actors' delicate performances are transmitted to the puppets, making them almost one entity, responding to each other and adding a new dimension to the audience's appreciation. More than 40 uniquely styled puppets are used. The protagonists, White Snake and Xu Xian, are presented in a "handsome" style of traditional Chinese opera, matching the actors one-to-one, while characters like the Toad Spirit, Judge, and Meng Po are portrayed with exaggerated and grotesque designs, creating a grand visual feast. The entire work adopts a "puppetry + traditional Chinese opera" approach, incorporating elements of traditional Chinese opera music, martial arts and physical movements, respecting the traditions of both traditional Chinese opera and puppetry. It retains the beauty of traditional Chinese art while innovating and breaking through, reflecting the principles of creative transformation and innovative development of excellent Chinese traditional culture.
The puppet play "Legend of the White Snake" was supported by the National Arts Fund's Young Artistic Creation Talent Program 2020 and won honors such as the Excellent Work Award at the 8th China Campus Theatre Festival. The performance at the Guilin Arts Festival received rave reviews immediately upon its debut.
During the performance, the excellent interaction between the actors and the audience created an exceptionally lively atmosphere. The actors skillfully guided the audience into the plot, making them active participants in the story rather than passive viewers. The audience's emotions rose and fell with the development of the plot, which formed a strong emotional resonance with the actors. Many audience members expressed that the unique charm and nationalized expression of the play endowed the story of the White Snake with a new expressive power. The actors' exquisite manipulation and the lifelike puppets transported the audience into a fantastical mythological world, providing an unprecedented sense of novelty.
