Yang Liping and her own niece waved their long hair and danced during the July 4 performance
Looking at her like that 10 years ago, and looking at her like that 10 years later, it seems that youth has been perpetuated in this person. On the fifth day of her performance in Beijing, Yang Liping accepted an exclusive interview with Youth Weekend to talk about her secret of youth. In her words, "I am carrying a flower in my stomach."
In "The Sound of Yunnan," a large-scale "diffraction ecology" dance set, Yang Liping made the best of the sounds from the south of the colored clouds, which was performed for six days from June 30 to July 5 at Beijing's Poly Theater, but Yang Liping said she didn't feel tired because she was enjoying the process.
Talking about "diffuse ecology" dance ◎ On the stage at all costs
July 4, 5 p.m., Poly Theatre, before the evening's performance, Yang Liping accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from "Youth Weekend". The conversation started with a few giants who have recently passed away.
"Michael Jackson is the singer I admire the most, and I like his dance very much." And then there was German modern dance master Pina Bausch, whose dance tapes were watched a few years ago, Yang said, "She just passed away, and I'm very sad."
"Do you yourself borrow things from Western modern dance?" The reporter asked.
"No, because it's not necessary. There are too many things in Yunnan folklore, too many to learn." Yang Liping thought nothing of it and blurted it out.
Yang Liping, a Bai from Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, whose childhood memories are mostly related to villages and poverty, grew up with a passion for dance and didn't go to any dance school, yet with her amazing talent, she created the peacock dance, "The Spirit of the Sparrow," which became an instant hit in the last century.
This day, the newspaper photographer to take pictures of her, she was posing, while the photographer said, "You should be a little lower, too high out of the facial structure is not right." She even asked the person who was helping her with the flash to be in the right position.
"Do you want to use a reflector?" "No reflector, fill in the light with that poster instead?" Instead of just letting the photo be taken how it is, as many of her interviewees do, she is constantly volunteering suggestions as the photo shoot progresses.
It can be seen that Yang Liping is very sensitive to modeling, she has her own ideas, and must be strictly according to the requirements to achieve, try to achieve the ideal state. Perhaps all people who have made achievements in art will be like her, either not to do, to do it to the extreme.
For example, this time, in the large-scale dance collection "The Sound of Yunnan", in order to display a variety of sounds from Yunnan's folklore, she did everything she could and searched for them in many ways. Even such farming items as rice and gourds were brought to the stage by her on a large scale.
The situation seen at the rehearsal hall that day surprised the reporter. Thousands of gourds were piled up everywhere, and rice was held in more than 20 huge bamboo baskets. Tree trunk drums taller than a man, but also hundreds of them, each with a year. There are even a thousand strange musical instruments piled everywhere, water jar, bamboo hourglass, one-stringed plucked piano, water pipe, wine cups, cigarette cases, each piece has a national flavor. The rehearsal space is like a farmer's market on the border.
These are all things that Yang Liping spent more than eight months collecting. She would figure out things like how she could put so many gourds on her body and how to keep those bamboos from cracking, which took a lot of energy. But she says those are minor problems because she enjoys the process so much, "I'm very comfortable with all my farmer brothers and sisters immersed inside a desire and passion to create."
When Yang Liping did "Reflections of Yunnan" six years ago, she was far less lavish on props. At that time, she didn't even have the money for the production, and had to sell her house in Dali, Yunnan province, take electrical appliance advertisements, go to performances, and make money in those ways before coming back to buy costumes and rent a theater.
Well, that's all in the past. Rehearsals only started last August, and big domestic powerful performance companies like Xiken and Poly came over to talk about it. At that time, 50 shows were signed, and the performance fees were already allocated before they stepped out of the house. Yang Liping used the first batch of performance fees to re-invest to make the work better, which became a virtuous cycle. "Everything has gone exceptionally smoothly, which is not easy in the performance industry." Yang Liping said.
Youth Weekend: This time you put forward the "derivative ecological dance", can you give us an example of what is original ecology and what is derivative ecology?
Yang Liping: The Peacock Dance danced by Mao to Grandpa in the village in the past, that was the original ecology. It was a dance for men, and I felt that it could no longer express my own emotions, so I created "The Spirit of the Sparrow," which is a derivative ecology.
Similarly, this time, "The Sound of Yunnan" is a group of us, Xiaogang, Peng, these children learned from their fathers and grandfathers, but they were not satisfied, they created a lot more, full of whimsy, and it became a derivative ecology. Breeding and multiplying, new things with their own personalities grew on that land.
Young Weekend: The second dance, "Cow Bells," is also a kind of derivative ecology?
Yang Liping: Yes! When I was a child herding cows in the village, everyone tied a cow bell around the neck of the cows, so that they would not lose it even if they went far away, and the sound was distinguishable enough to know that it was the sound of my family's cow bell. To my ears and eyes, it was a wonderful percussive music. This scene had been in my mind for too long and I wanted to show it this time. The cow bells were brought to the stage and became percussion music, which has never been done on a traditional stage before.
Young Weekend: Why is it called "The Ringing of Yunnan"?
Yang Liping: I want to collect the sounds from Yunnan together. When I was a child, I went inside the forest to listen to nature, the rhythms that nature emits. Our fathers had a tune called "Wind Blowing Trees and Beating Leaves", meaning that the wind blew the leaves and the leaves beat each other, giving rise to a folk dance of clapping hands. There is also a tune called "seaweed accent", people saw the water plants inside the lake rolling with the waves, so they created the seaweed accent, the flavor is particularly graphic.
These are all part of Yunnan, whose percussion music is full of spirituality and the unity of heaven and mankind, and I felt that I should present some of these classics and highlights on stage, and thus the "Rattle of Yunnan" was created.
Youth Weekend: I saw so many ancient wooden drums as soon as I entered the Poly Theater, how did you get them?
YANG Liping: Those drums were found by us from the tribes in the deep forests. Each one is more than two meters high, two or three people embrace, is our ancestors with the trunk of the whole tree made of musical instruments, at a glance, there are hundreds of years, decades of history.
I observed that in the Hangzhou hall, after these drums were placed there, the audience came in and stood in awe, and immediately thought, "Oh, this is the soul, the soul of the dead, the things that should be collected in the museum.
These ancient drums are going to be flown all over the country with our performance team on this tour.
Young Weekend: transportation costs are high, right?
YANG Liping: It's not very expensive, it cost 70,000 to 80,000 yuan, all of which I personally paid for. Everywhere I go, I have to display them in the performance hall, I think it can awaken an ancient memory, awaken the mind's original beginning and end.
Talking about the "secret of youth"
To keep the "spirit"
Face to face with Yang Liping, the most impressive thing is her thin and unusual waist, and her long nails.
Her figure, lean and tall, with hardly any fat, makes it hard for you to believe that it actually belongs to a 51-year-old woman. As for the white nails on the ten fingers, they are two to three centimeters long, and have obviously been trimmed with extreme care, as if they were thin white jade, vaguely translucent. Yang Liping said that these long nails give her a feeling of going back to ancient times and are useful for dancing, and there is a Dai dance in Yunnan called the Long Nail Dance.
Yang Liping, born in 1958, wears a pair of fashionable and colorful clip-on sandals and walks with elasticity as if there are springs on the ground. Swinging her arms easily while walking makes her look like a little girl.
The clothes she wore had both an ethnic flavor and a sense of design in them. At the beginning of the meeting, she proudly introduced to the reporter that the earrings were from the Miao ethnic group, the embroidered pieces on her chest were from the Yi ethnic group, and the hat was her own design.
She wore a pair of gyro-like silver earrings that were a little too big. Later, talking about the topic of original and derivative ecology, the reporter asked if the earrings were something original to the Miao? Did not go through their own processing?
"It is the Miao, not processed, how you do not believe ah? You see you see!" She yanked the earring from her right ear and handed it to the reporter to "verify" it.
"The earrings are original, can also be regarded as a kind of original ecology? But the hat after your own design processing, is not a derivative of the ecology?" The reporter asked.
"Derivative ecology is just a choreographic idea. You people who work with words can write whatever you want." Yang Liping laughed and shook her head, and after a moment collected her smile and said, "As for dancing, you have to hear the sound of birds chirping! You have to hear the sound of butterfly wings flapping!"
In the show, "The Rattle of Yunnan," there is a dance that shows a pregnant woman, from pregnancy to labor to finally death. Yang Liping said that in the village where she lived as a child, a woman gave birth and the whole village came to beat the drum for her labor. The experience left such a deep impression on her that she brought it to the stage this time.
Yang Liping herself has never given birth. Pregnancy is unimaginable for someone like her, who has been dieting for so long that she barely has any fat on her body. A few years ago there were media reports that if she wanted to give birth, Yang Liping would have to put on weight, and putting on weight would mean stopping dancing for a long time, and in the end, between the two sides of the dilemma, Yang Liping chose to dance.
"How can you play a pregnant woman when you haven't given birth to a child yourself?" At the end of the interview, the reporter temporarily asked this question again. At that time, Yang Liping was about to leave, when she heard this question, she stopped and slammed the back of the chair beside her and said to the reporter, "Do you know that this chair is my child!"
She waved her slender arms and said, "The sun is my child, the moon is my child, everything in the world can be my child!"
Her tone became fast and excited, "Why can't I play a pregnant woman? Just wait until you see the show, what I'm carrying in my belly can be anything, I'm carrying a flower in my belly!"
The Yang Liping of this time is no longer the same Yang Liping who laughed and joked at the beginning of the interview and answered with her mouth as if she were playing. These last few words of hers were agile, jumpy, and a little angry, as if an aura had flashed through.
Youth Weekend: Your figure hasn't changed over the years, how do you keep it up?
Yang Liping: mainly rely on exercise, dancing every day, once you sweat a lot of acidic toxins inside your body is eliminated. If you don't exercise for a long time, your cells are dead.
Young Weekend: what to pay attention to in terms of diet?
Young Weekend: You have to eat chili peppers, such as Chongqing hot pot. Eating chili peppers will stimulate cell renewal. You can drink some red wine, and make sure to drink soybean milk, preferably yellow soybean milk today and black soybean milk tomorrow, so blend it. Now there are very good machines on the market, 10 minutes or so, out of the hot soybean milk.
Nuts, such as peeled pine nuts, bags and bags of supermarkets, to clear the lungs is particularly good. But don't eat one kind every day, you can do this today and that tomorrow, you have to plan to eat. My home is, a row of transparent cans on the wall, which is full of licorice, chrysanthemum, mung beans, soybeans, walnuts, black sesame seeds, white sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds, grains and cereals, very beautiful, have to line up to eat.
Another one is to drink tea, Pu'er tea must be drunk. I sometimes squeeze a lemon, the oldest way to squeeze the lemon juice out, put some honey in it, the same as beating soybean milk, there is a kind of fun in it, that kind of feeling is especially good. Anyway, I think one has to be interested in life, full of curiosity, and you will be especially happy. Essence should be maintained.
Youth Weekend: You have very good stamina, this time in Beijing, a jump is six days in a row, but also to go on a national tour, such a long performance cycle, you really do not get tired?
Yang Liping: How can dancing be tiring? Just like your interview, are you tired of interviewing now? If you are tired of dancing, just take a break and you will regain your strength after 10 to 20 minutes.
Young Weekend: You have been dancing for 38 years, will you keep on dancing like this? Even if it's very, very old?
Yang Liping: so what? I don't necessarily dance on the stage, look outside on the street, those old ladies are also dancing when they are so old. People like me from 1971 to the present dance seems to have not, I think I because of love, I did not take it as a career.
For me, dancing itself is a very good way to express and relieve myself, it's my other language, my second mother tongue. Of course I am so attached to it, so obsessed with it, so enjoyable. I think that people who can dance are very lucky.