March 3
Reporter: The first dance you choreographed was March 3, which is the first Li dance in the Chinese dance scene to go global, how did you catch this theme?
Chen Chiao: I think the main thing in dance creation is from life, this dance I just put the Li people that traditional festival on the screen. The Li people in Dongfang County come to the slopes in groups of young men and women dressed in festive costumes on the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar to confess their love and look for a partner through songs. In order to find the details of the performance I went to the slope field on March 3 to experience life, eavesdropping on people's love songs in the bushes, and the young men almost took me for a Li girl. I was preoccupied with the idea of beautifying the scenes, emotions and mentality of Li men and women pursuing love into a dance.
Reporter: Did it go well for you to choreograph this dance?
Chen Chiao: back to the troupe, I told the leadership of the genre, but also roughly a few self-choreographed dance, the troupe leadership think the subject matter is good, but the male actors dance movement is not ideal, it is assigned a male actor Liu Xuanliang to help me choreograph the men's dance. 1956, "March 3" was staged on the occasion of a great response, and then was picked by the Guangdong Province to participate in the first National Professional Groups Music and Dance Concert was selected as the outstanding program, participated in the report performance in Huairen Hall to the head of the Central Committee, and then, also participated in the World Youth Festival of the Chinese Arts Troupe was introduced to the world stage, to participate in the performance of the then National Song and Dance Troupe to learn this dance. With the Soviet experts in the first national dance choreography class symposium, they asked me what choreography this dance, I simply do not understand what they said these esoteric principles of creativity, I said I did not think how, my dance is just inspired by life.
Reporter: This dance is a very bright start for you towards creation, it must have a very special meaning for you, right?
Chen Chiao: This dance allowed the Li people to see their own dance for the first time, and for the first time they produced their own programmed dance vocabulary and the concept of Li dance, and this dance also went up to the international art hall. This is of course very significant for me at the age of 18. After the creation of "March 3", I realized that many ordinary details of life, ordinary life phenomena, as long as you find, color and sublimate them with your heart, you can surely form a unique style and touching dance image. In other words, in order to create a dance with vitality, it must come from life. I have been following this path in my creative work since then.
Reporter: It is said that this dance is also the beginning of your love, right?
Chen Qiao: To say the least, I looked down on Liu Xuanliang at first, because he was introduced to the troupe by me and was less senior than me. However, after the cooperation of "March 3rd", he put forward a lot of insightful comments on the movement design of the male actors, and from then on, he had a good feeling about him, this "March 3rd" not only makes my creation gain, but also the germ of my love, he and I performed on the same stage in the "March 3rd". Later we choreographed and danced together on many dances. He grasped the general framework while I designed the dance movements and the overall structure, and the cooperation was smooth, and both of us danced as a pair. 7 years later, he and I went from being a pair on the stage to being a pair in life. Later, we made March 3 our wedding day, and it was the March 3 stills that we used for our wedding photos.
Reporter: Among the many dances you have created, which one is the most memorable?
Chen Chiao: It's the "Grass Hat Dance". This is the Li girl's most beautiful side that I brought to the stage, and her theme is - look, how beautiful we are! In the Lizhai, straw hats are the daily necessities of the Li people, woven with large sunflower leaves and equipped with colorful ribbons. I often see Li girls frolicking in the river, blocking their faces with straw hats, and then removing them to reveal a lively and provocative look, and the "Straw Hat Dance" was conceived in this way.
Reporter: How did you use the dance movements to express the theme of look, how beautiful we are!
Reporter: How did you use the dance movements to express the theme of
Chen Chiao: It is mainly from life that I captured and refined the external forms of the girls. I have been performing and living in the Li village for a long time, and I found that every time we performed in the village, the Li girls had some very attractive habitual movements, such as covering their faces and peeking, a little bit shy, and always used to walk with a beat because of the straight and narrow short bucket skirts they wore. When standing, one foot is straight and the other is slightly bent, one shoulder is high and the other is low, and the movement is oblique. I have distilled this unique Li habit into a dance vocabulary, which is the three bends in Li dance. The Li girls have a lot of beautiful hand and foot rings on their hands and feet, and they love to sway around in front of people, so I found out from these details that they love beauty by nature. After analyzing, I thought about some actions: two hands outward, a cock and a cock, it can be very good to let their hands of bracelets in front of the people. Next is the movement of the feet, how to make a beautiful anklet for people to see but also self-appreciation? I used a stomping action, a stomp and a stare, the anklet will be able to let people see clearly, so that the girl's love of beauty and habits of life is well expressed. I so from life observation into a programmed standardized action, the whole dance through the chest, crotch, pedal dance rhythm, the straw hat lift, fling, turn, cover, wear and other actions together, very full of the Li girls youthful, energetic style.
Reporter: Your "Grass Hat Dance" has had a far-reaching influence on the creation of the entire Li dance in terms of dance movements?
Chen Chiao: Yes, this is the most typical work of my Li dance repertoire, and most of the subsequent Li dances can't be separated from these three elements: the three bends, the stomping feet, and the crossing hands.
Reporter: The dance "Touching the Snail" gives people a very special feeling, its basic movement is the left hand left foot, the right hand right foot, how did you come up with this unique dance movement?
Chen Chiao: Every time I go to the countryside, I try to do everything I can to mingle with children. Children are naive, unlike adults, who can dance with their hands and feet whenever they drink, and children have to play with them. At that time they loved to play with homemade herringbone wooden mops, and often knocked with them, and when the little feet walked while wearing the adults' wooden mops, mostly left-handed and left-footed, right-handed and right-footed, cute. I not only played with them, but also often went with them to touch snails in the river. The movement of the dance "Touching the Snail" is characterized by the development of the rhythm of the Li dance "Shunquan". After the performance of this dance, a Hong Kong reporter interviewed me and sent me an article entitled - "Chen Chiao says: Left hand and left foot are also dances". It was to discover this left-handed and left-footed movement, which expresses the child's innocence and spontaneity, that I created this dance for an exceptionally long period of time.
Reporter: How many years did you create this dance?
Chen Chiao: I should say that I had the idea when I came into contact with the Li children in the 1950s, but it only took me two days to create this dance in 1981. This is the longest I have created a dance, the total **** took nearly 30 years, really is a long-term accumulation, occasionally.
Reporter: This "touching the snail" dance in the middle of the stage clever use of bamboo bridges up and down the space, forming a three-dimensional intersection of the stage picture, how did you think of using this very creative approach to the performance of the set?
Chen Chiao: There are big and small streams everywhere in Hainan, and in every rural area, you will pass through a wooden bridge, and when I walk on the hills in the village, I often come across some red mountain crabs, whose bites are very painful, and I am very impressed by these personal experiences. With these life materials, I wanted to blend them together, so I came up with the idea of touching the snail as the theme, moving the scene of the red mountain crabs biting into the water, and then performing the dance on the bridge, so that there is more of a real interest in life. This was the first time I used a three-dimensional intersecting dance scene on stage.
Reporter: In 1982, you were invited to take part in the creation of the large-scale music and dance epic "Song of the Chinese Revolution" and were responsible for one of the scenes, "Under the Sea", which was a dance reflecting the workers, which was very different from the folk dances that you usually create, and you must have been very nervous?
Chen Chiao: Of course, "Undersea Welding Flowers" is a dance reflecting the workers welding pipes under the sea, and I usually come into contact with the countryside, and I don't have a concept of the workers' life at all, so I was drumming in my heart. But I said I am a very strong person, I think it is difficult, but also as a breakthrough in my creative dance career, I want to prove that I am not only the success of folk dance choreography, urban dance, I also want to choreograph as well.
Reporter: How did you find the breakthrough?
Chen Chiao: I went to Dagang Oilfield to experience life and understand their work. With this accumulation of life, when I came back, I thought about how to truly show a person swimming in the water. I thought of a stool with wheels, people lying on their stomachs or on their backs on the stool, the wheels rolled, the people moved forward, to be moved to the stage, the use of light ultraviolet effect, a kind of swimming in the sea of the image of the stage came to life.
I put forward this idea, not many supporters, opponents are quite a lot, some people are still skeptical of what I said with a stool sliding around, which can be called dance? I started my own experiment with the feeling of being the first to eat crabs. I asked the props group made a stool, but the stool can only slide, can not turn, and very unstable, I will try to slip in the room to see if I can stand on the stool dance, at first I fell from time to time from the stool down, not the head touched the wall, or fell down to the floor, so that the body of the blue and purple one. Later, the wheels were further improved until I was able to stand on top of the wheels and dance freely, and then the wheels were given to the actors.
Reporter: There are a lot of props used in this dance, so a lot of effort must have gone into the design?
Chen Chiao: Yes, this dance changed how many times I can not remember, the dance is to be beautiful, I want to show the action of the hard-on welders, some of the scenery is very important, so I chose the anthropomorphic underwater flowers, so that the sleeping seabed awakened to welcome the oil workers, so that the theme of the performance will be very lyrical and romantic, in which the use of a number of acrobatic techniques. The whole dance is bright and brilliant, they said I did not expect a choreographed folk dance can play the workers life so live.