The success of Small Town, Rainy Alley reflects the creator's in-depth understanding of the spirit of traditional Chinese culture and the poetic expression of the beautiful Jiangnan. The slowly unfolding beautiful scroll of "Rainy Alley in a Small Town" makes us read a kind of long-lost poetic feelings. After watching the dance "Rainy Alley in a Small Town", it reminded me of the famous poem "Rainy Alley" by Dai Wangshu. However, the dance "Rainy Lane in a Small Town" is not a reproduction or depiction of the poem "Rainy Lane". Here, we do not see Dai Wangshu's egoistic mood of indecision and hesitation, but we retain and deepen those humanized and poetic elements of emotion, gentle, light, gentle, soothing, airy, moist, clear and pure. Together with the music and performance of a singing and sighing style of laying out, unfolding, amplifying and intensifying a flavor and atmosphere in the imagery of the poem. From a certain point of view, the dance "Rainy Lane in a Small Town" draws on the emotional channel of the poem "Rainy Lane" to show a more infectious and expressive poetic world.
It was as if everything was a demonstration of the creators' fascination and attachment to traditional Chinese culture and poetry. They followed the channels provided by traditional culture and found the best way to communicate freely between their hearts and the objective things, so that every object and prop on the stage showed more profound meanings and exuded the light of spirituality. For example, white walls and black tiles, oil-paper umbrellas, silk cheongsams and so on, which are abstracted by time, are all characterized by typicality and cultural symbols. They are both Jiangnan and Chinese; they are both concrete and ethereal; they embrace the inherent qualities of life, but are also highly symbolic and full of the tension of life. In people's empathy for the history and reality of Jiangnan, the white walls and black tiles may represent a kind of nostalgia and cultural identity. When the white wall in the rain inlaid with a flowery umbrellas and girls handsome face, when simple and light music floats over the ridge from the eaves sliding down the white wall bounce more and more seemingly melodious, we will find that the white wall is like a piece of white paper, with unlimited possibilities, it is from the culture of the growth of the bright scenery. The oil paper umbrella reminds us of the characteristics of the water in Jiangnan, the wet feeling seems to have a thing in the change of what, life from the haze appeared, the eyes also began to focus. People are surprised to find that a beautiful paper umbrella can make the world suddenly bright and vivid. The cheongsam can be said to be the expression of an era, and it is somewhat exaggerated and romantic in its promotion of female beauty, reminding us of the old-fashioned month-boards, gramophones, and Zhou Xuan's sweet singing, etc. However, the use of these cultural symbols is not the same as that of the cheongsam, which is a symbol of the Chinese culture. However, the use of these cultural symbols is not to accomplish a complete nostalgia, when a lilac girl with sorrows becomes a group of lovely and pure-hearted girls, and when the dancing of the girls melts into the light green and red of that season, everything is changed. At this point you will find that the white walls and black tiles, the oil-paper umbrellas, the cheongsams and the stone bridge in the distance are so apt on this rainy day that they create a prescribed situation and constantly reinforce the theme. In this context, the choreographer has designed many details. In the ever-changing time and space, the girls accurately and delicately express their feelings of enjoying the rain, avoiding the rain, and having fun and playing in the rain through such seemingly common and trivial actions as going out and holding an umbrella, carrying their skirts across the bridge, shaking off the water to collect the umbrellas, and holding the umbrellas under their arms as the sky clears up, and so on. Together, we see a dreamlike picture. This is the creator's poetic telling of the story of the rainy alleys in the small town, not defined by time, full of experience and discovery, allowing us to feel a rhythm and rhyme of life in immersive appreciation, and to read a personified, even feminine and soft Jiangnan.
In recent years, our stage art, especially the art of dance is really wonderful. Impressions of Yunnan" and "Thousand Hands of Goddess of Mercy" have brought this art to a new height. However, on the whole, we still seldom see works with profound connotation and beautiful poetry. Due to the intervention of television media and new sound and light effects, and because instantly catching the eye and winning applause are considered important criteria for measuring a work of art, people seem to pay more attention to the display of skills and the external form of expression. It is a very strange phenomenon that in the TV competition, those works with rich connotation and far-reaching meaning are often not pleasing to the eye. People seem to take the stage as a purely competitive arena, and whoever spins more circles and turns the heel higher is the winner. The role of this orientation is not to be underestimated. In this way, some works are big and empty, obtaining high scores and much applause but not being able to enter the ranks of the classics or give people more spiritual enjoyment. In the final analysis, this is also the result of commercialization. Nowadays, like many other arts, the art of dance is becoming more and more typecast, more and more formalized, more and more purely entertaining, and more and more like a disposable consumer product in the face of commercial power. Undoubtedly, the emergence of "Rainy Lane in a Small Town" is exactly a kind of adherence to the spirit of traditional art, as well as a call for the poetic return of contemporary dance.
Modern society's high degree of materialization and all kinds of convenient ways, after changing our former inherent basic judgments about space and distance, reality and psychology, have also made us far away from Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Su Dongpo, as well as Shakespeare, Pushkin, and Montaigne, and so on, whose poetic lives they have experienced. However, the world has changed, but we can not lose the poetic life, can not be without the aesthetics that can be dialogued with the soul, and even more can not be without the beauty of the soul to appease. If real life is missing, we can still look for it in literary works, and we can cultivate our temperament, enlighten our minds, and realize our lives in the vivid review and description of history. In this way, literary workers cannot give up their mission.
"Rainy Lane in a Small Town" fully utilizes the characteristics of dance and modern expression to display a beautiful situation. It does not seem to show the fashionable life of the moment, there is not much of a big opening and closing, ups and downs, there is not much of a display of difficult skills, and there is no grand scene, but it moves us, makes us look back again and again, inadvertently, like the spring breeze and the rain, silently. This gives us this revelation: we must find a way into the depths of human emotions, touch and play the strings of people's hearts with poetic hands; we must pay attention to the in-depth excavation of traditional Chinese culture, so that contemporary art is rooted in the deep soil of traditional culture. We must learn to tell, not the pretentious kind of telling. When we give up the utilitarian and secularized way of expression, and speak from the standpoint of the sky and the earth based on the essence of life, it will be a stirring heavenly voice.