文化交流｜汉剧飞越太平洋

编者按

湖北是楚文化的发祥地，是古楚国的核心区域。楚国作为春秋战国时期的大国和强国之一，在其800多年的历史长河中，创造了灿烂辉煌的文明。时至今日，湖北省在对楚文化的继承和发扬中逐步走向现代化和国际化。

图为：汉剧演员王荔

2015年春节，有着400年历史的武汉汉剧院第一次飞越太平洋，走进美国，进行文化交流，在新泽西州公演两场。

图为：汉剧团在美国交流演出时合影

担纲此次文化交流活动的是国家一级演员王荔。这位80后女孩是陈派（陈伯华）汉剧的第五代传人。

据她回忆，上一次汉剧走出国门，是在上世纪九十年代，汉剧大师陈伯华率团把汉剧唱到了日本、新加坡。这一次，武汉汉剧院20多人带着两台根据莎士比亚名剧改编的新汉剧《驯悍记》和《李尔王》，来美国交流。

当时，美国西东大学访问学者熊杰平教授，要求美方把演出地点从校园搬到市内剧场，而且对外售票，票价24美元。希望借此检验美国观众是不是真正喜欢汉剧。

虽然事先并没有做什么宣传，演出仍吸引了众多观众。在现场，华人观众看得热泪盈眶，说充满了自豪感和归属感；外国观众看得如痴如醉，他们被中国地方戏演绎西方戏剧经典的新奇方式一下子吸引住了。

汉剧赴美首秀即获得美国观众认可，普通观众对汉剧觉得既新鲜，又熟悉。因为演绎的故事是他们熟悉的莎剧，几乎不看英文字幕也可以流畅地看下去。而形式是新鲜的，中国戏曲的唱、念、做、打颇有艺术表现力。这也达到了事先提出的赴美交流的目的：借用西方人耳熟能详的故事框架，传播东方人独有的审美情趣，书写中国人的道德价值观。

将莎翁名剧“中国化”。汉剧这次颇有想象力的创新，让外界看到了中国传统戏曲的生命力。

图为：汉剧团在法国交流演出

Preface

Hubei, the birthplace of Chu Culture, lies in the heartland of ancient Chu State (1042-223 BC). Being a great and powerful kingdom in the Warring States Period, the Chu State created a splendid civilization during its reign of over 800 years. Today, Hubei has proudly walked into the fast lane of modernization and internationalization based on its inheritance and development of Chu culture.

Han Opera Flew over the Pacific

In the Spring Festival of 2015, Han Opera, with a history of 400 years, flew over the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Wuhan Han Opera Theater went to America for cultural exchange, and presented two public performances in New Jersey.

Wang Li, the organizer of this cultural activity, is a national first-class artist born in the 1980s, and a fifth-generation inheritor of the Chen School (Chen Bohua) of Han Opera.

In her memory, last time Han Opera went abroad was in the 1990s when Chen Bohua, the master of Han Opera, led the troupe to perform in Japan and Singapore. This time, over 20 artists from the Wuhan Han Opera Theater went to America to perform two plays, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear, which were loosely adapted from William Shakespeare’s well-known plays.

At that time, Prof. Xiong Jieping, a Chinese visiting scholar in Seton Hall University, suggested that the venue for the performance should be shifted from the campus to the city theater, and the tickets should also be sold to the public at 24 US dollars each. In this way, it would show whether American audiences truly loved Chinese Han Opera or not.

Although they didn’t promote the performance in advance, they received a large audience that day. In the theater, overseas Chinese audience watched the performances with tears in their eyes, proud of their ethnic identity, and American audience were fascinated by the superb performance in which the western theatrical classics were presented in the form of Chinese local opera.

The debut of Han Opera in the US was a hit. The local audience felt that Han Opera was both new and familiar to them, as the story itself was the familiar Shakespeare’s play, and they could watch it even without English translation, yet the form was brand new, and they were impressed by the four means of Han Opera’s artistic expression, which are singing, chanting, acting, and acrobatic fighting. Therefore, the purpose of the cultural exchange was successfully achieved- that is, to spread Easterners’ unique aesthetic taste and Chinese people’s moral values by borrowing storylines familiar to Westerners.

It was a creative innovation to adapt Shakespeare’s well-known plays into two new Han operas, which has shown the vitality of traditional Chinese opera to the outside world.

（来源：特别关注）

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