Wuzhen and drama, in a new form of symbiosis.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Drug” (ID: youhaoxifilm), Wen | Zhang Ying, Zhang Na, editor | Jiang Yuqi.
On November 1st, at 1:30 in the morning, the whole Wuzhen was immersed in the deep night. Only the No. 3 Hall of the Convention and Exhibition Center in the Xizha Scenic Area was lit with warm yellow light. Hours of drama experiments.
This experimental drama called “From Early Morning to Midnight” is one of the biggest repertoires of the 7th Wuzhen Drama Festival this year. All the tickets for the three performances are sold out quickly, even at night, there are hundreds of theaters. Still packed. However, at the end of the prologue performance, the actors began to applaud the audience with no expression, and continued for ten minutes. The audience yelled and several viewers left early.
“No one is forcing you to come here!”
The face of the director Chen Mingxi suddenly appeared on the display. He wore an exaggerated wig and continued to say to the audience: “Many people in Wuzhen during the day, black and white, only this from 1:30 am to 6:00 am Half is the best time of Wuzhen in a day.” In a previous public interview, Chen Mingxi also expressed his intention to conduct a drama experiment from midnight to dawn: “My play connects Wuzhen’s most comfortable Two moments.”
Queue to watch the audience from “morning to midnight”
Wuzhen in the day is indeed “very busy”, especially during the Wuzhen Drama Festival: “Youth Competition” “Guzhen Carnival” and “Small Town Dialogue” “Specially Repertoire” four sections, enough for the audience to run before After the run, the directors, screenwriters and actors must also go to sleep early to prepare for the performance; while the tourists are scattered in the lanes and bridges of Wuzhen, taking pictures of the performers who are strange and exquisite in makeup; The drug lord (Weixin ID: youhaoxifilm) found that every time the Wuzhen Drama Festival, the bustling Wuzhen on weekdays is even more crowded, and the audience watching the play and the play are brought together, which is especially noisy.
The beginning of the Wuzhen Drama Festival was an attempt to explore the transformation of tourist towns to cultural towns, in order to form their own unique cultural characteristics and build in the ancient towns of different sizes across the country. Belong to your own cultural brand. However, the choice of “drama”, which was originally small in scale and relatively weak in foundation, was not optimistic at the beginning. Even in the first year of the festival, there were media reports that the Wuzhen Theatre Festival was just a “short new trick.” “, will not last long.
But six years later, the festival has become one of the most important cultural symbols of Wuzhen. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists can be attracted to the drama culture in this small town of Jiangnan. However, in the case that the tourism industry in the ancient town is generally fluctuating, Wuzhen also uses the cultural symbols such as the drama festival and the Internet conference to “energy” and get rid of the label of a single tourist attraction. In the fluctuation period of the ancient town tourism industry, it is still Maintain a steady development.
In this old and modern town of Jiangnan, Wuzhen and Drama are carrying each other and accomplishing each other.
Twelve o’clock in Wuzhen
“It’s too much like a utopia here. I have seen a lot of dramas here and I have done a lot of dreams about dramas.” A college student who has been studying in Hangzhou and has been to Wuzhen for three consecutive years said to the drug lord.
From 2013 to the present, for seven consecutive years, every September and October, drama practitioners, fans and tourists from all over the country, watching movies, dialogues, competitions, poetry and other activities constitute the lively, busy and drama of Wuzhen. The atmosphere is 12 o’clock.
When Wuzhen Scenic Area became a Utopia of Dramatic Art, the day was stretched long and long.
After eight in the morning, in order to be able to enter the new round of “Youth Competition” at 10 o’clock (known as “Qingsai”), a long queue was set up at the entrance of the Liwan Theatre. Those who started earlier than the audience were the actors who participated in the Youth Championship.
“Rehearsed last night and went to the middle of the night. I got up at five o’clock this morning.” A young drama actor, Bei Zi (a pseudonym), told the drug lord, from the decision to participate in the May registration, and then come to Wuzhen began the competition, and the whole team had been preparing for the past six months. After arriving in Wuzhen, the preparations and inspections of the service roads affected their nerves for a series of trivial things such as lines and positions. For them, this is More than just a game, “the people standing outside the door are our first in the audience.”
Youth Competition
As one of the four major links of the Wuzhen Drama Festival, “Qingsai” was identified as an important part from the beginning of the Wuzhen Drama Festival. The original intention was to create for young people who love drama, have potential and have dreams. They provide a self-display platform, and at the same time give them the opportunity to learn from the drama masters, thus promoting the development of young original drama and supporting the young stage drama talents.
In China, although art schools all over the world often have professional courses in drama creation and performance, the industry is not open to young practitioners. There are many practitioners from the director department and performance department. In the last seven or eight years, I had the opportunity to bring my first work to the stage. “This is still good. Many of my classmates can’t go on, give up their dreams of drama, go back to their hometown to test civil servants, become teachers, or switch to another.” A graduate of a college of drama and literature in a university in Nanjing The drug lord said with emotion.
“The Organizing Committee will receive an application for five or six hundred teams each year, and then select 18 of them from the large group to enter the Youth Championship.” Huang Lei, one of the founders of the Wuzhen Drama Festival, includes the drug lord. The media inside said, “These young people have a strong passion for creation, and they are one of the most vivid and vivid parts of the drama.”
There are 18 teams in this year’s Youth Championship. 83 contestants will enter 20 performances during the festival and face the screening of the judges to jointly attack the “Small Town Awards” – although the quota is limited, The Wuzhen Drama Festival provides an attractive stage for young, enthusiastic creators. “Specially nervous, the first time the show ended, there was a group of people looking for me to take a group photo.” Beizi was a bit flattered. “Before I was watching a movie and looking for someone to take a photo, now I have been photographed.”
There are also some small teams that can’t participate in the Youth Show in the theater, and they will transfer their “battlefield” to the “Guzhen Carnival” link. The Carnival is a comprehensive cultural performance in the public space of all non-traditional theaters in the Wuzha Scenic Area of Wuzhen. The wooden houses, stone bridges, alleys and even the rocking boats of Wuzhen Xizha can be the stage.
Team in the “Old Town Carnival”
In the ten days of the Wuzhen Drama Festival, there are more than 800 large and small towns in the ancient town carnival show walking around the scenic spot, hereEven ordinary visitors who pass by can stop to watch the show. “We came from Suqian in Jiangsu. I haven’t heard of a drama festival before. I can’t think of meeting it here.” A nearly 50-year-old female tourist said to the drug lord, and was asked what is going on in front of her performance. When she felt it, she hesitated, tried to search for the appropriate adjectives, and then replied: “It’s quite powerful!”
The performer’s face was painted with paint, dressed in a robes, followed by the rhythm of the sound in the sound, and the physical function of her body was constantly enlarged, and the performer was completely immersed in it. Opposite them, there are many tourists who come for travel. Many of them don’t have much chance to get into the drama before.
“China Performance Industry Association: 2018 China Performance Market Annual Report” shows that in 2018, the annual box office receipts (including sub-accounts) were 18.221 billion yuan, of which the professional theater show box office revenue was only 7.961 billion yuan, compared to the drama. With a large variety of variety and movies, as well as the scale of foreign offline performances, the domestic performance market is relatively limited. Not only that, the current fare performance of the drama is also high, which also affects the purchase of consumers. The person in charge of the head ticketing website told the drug smuggler that the vacancy rate of the performance venues is very high, but because of the fear that the attendance rate is not high, Therefore, there are very few dramas that are willing to perform in the third- and fourth-tier cities. “How to solve the high fare is the core of the drama and the sinking.” But even in the big cities such as Beishangguang, it is good IP, good. Repertoire and venue restrictions, drama performances are still a relatively niche entertainment.
For this reason, when Wuzhen presents an open stage to every audience in an equal manner, many viewers who are interested in the drama culture but have few opportunities to contact on weekdays can find simple freedom here. In order to appreciate the drama, in addition to practitioners and senior fans, many ordinary tourists will also come to “see what the drama is all about.”
“Small town conversation”
“The most obvious result is that the ticket is getting harder and harder to grab. The opening drama “Three Sisters” seconds, I and two other friends have not grabbed.” A year-round theater in all parts of the country to seeSenior fans of the show told the drug lord that at the 5th Wuzhen Drama Festival two years ago, “Ye Gurney Onegin”, also the opening play, could also manually grab a good ticket, but this year it was slightly popular. A little bit of drama basically has to fight for luck and grab tickets. “It shows that more and more people come to Wuzhen to watch the show, and it is quite good.”
In addition to ushered in more fresh audiences, the seventh year of the Wuzhen Drama Festival also attracted many world-renowned troupes including the Vakhtangov Theatre in Russia, the Moscow Art Theatre and the Japanese drama master Suzuki Tadashi. Masters brought their works to the show, and even in theaters, restaurants and alleys, there may be occasional encounters with stars such as Lin Qingxia, He Wei and Sun Honglei. The influence of the Wuzhen Drama Festival is getting bigger and bigger, attracting audiences across the country. The world’s famous groups and busy celebrities came to Wuzhen to pay attention to drama and experience drama.
Why is Wuzhen to host the festival? In his group interview, Huang Lei said that he would be asked this question every year. “The drama festival sounds like it should appear in Beijing or Shanghai, but in contrast, Wuzhen is just a small town, where the atmosphere of the drama will be more dense. Moreover, to be an international drama festival, it is necessary to represent the cultural style of China. Wuzhen is both simple and modern, and it is obviously more appropriate.”
In the geographical environment, Wuzhen is confined, and fans don’t need to travel in different parts of the city like in Beijing and Shanghai. In Wuzhen, they only need to wear several lanes to cross several bridges. From one theater to another; at the same time, Wuzhen is open, young people who are passionate about drama, practitioners who pay attention to the development of drama art, and fans who like to soak in the theater to feel the drama, even do not understand Drama is just a passing tourist, they can all carnival and dream in the Wuzhen Drama Festival.
The change of Wuzhen in the past 20 years
In fact, not only Wuzhen provided a stage for the drama to expand, but the development of the festival also brought new vitality to Wuzhen.
Located in Wuzhen, Tongxiang, Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province, it is located in the “Golden Triangle” of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, and the hinterland of Hangjiahu Plain. It is 60 kilometers away from Hangzhou and Suzhou and 106 kilometers away from Shanghai. Here, there have been famous celebrities, with more than 7,000 years of civilization history and 1300 years of town history, known as “the last pillow in China”.
However, just on the New Year’s Day 20 years ago, an old local woman accidentally let the candles ignite the wooden walls, causing a fire that caused the 13 houses along the river in Wuzhen Xizha to be burned. The fire was finally blocked by the high fire wall, but the traditional buildings in the corner of the ancient town were also taken away by the fire for the vicissitudes and aftertastes.
After the fire, Chen Xianghong, then the director of the Tongxiang Municipal Government Office, was ordered to be sent to Wuzhen to resettle the victims. Later, the Tongxiang Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government proposed the idea of developing Wuzhen Scenic Area, prepared a starting capital of 200,000 yuan, and raised 13 million yuan with 13 units, and appointed Chen Xianghong to take over the development and protection of Wuzhen.
When the town of Wuzhen, there was no such thing as the past, the houses were chaotic, the east and west gates were ruined, and the tourism ecology was almost blank. The painter Chen Danqing described “the kind of dying…. like a hell of smog and chilling water.” The writer, born in Wuzhen Dongzha, also left a sentence: “Farewell, I will not come again.” p>
The same as Wuzhen people, Chen Xianghong understands the sigh of the fellow villagers. He once bluntly said: “This Wuzhen is completely strange to him.” So after taking over the responsibility of protecting and developing Wuzhen, facing the surrounding waters In ancient town, his original idea was to use the tourism industry to bring the town back to its former prosperity. After all, Zhouzhuang and Xitang, both of which were ancient towns in the south of the Yangtze River, began their tourism development work many years ago. In contrast, at the beginning of the development of Wuzhen, Zhouzhuang has already won the reputation of “China’s first water town”, and Xitang was listed as one of the “first batch of China’s top ten historical and cultural towns” by the Ministry of Construction, and Wuzhen has no reputation. At that time.
The first step in the development of Chen Xianghong’s leadership is to take the lead in the development of the East Gate area of Wuzhen with the reputation of the former residence of Mao Dun. He not only demolished the department store in Dongzha, the dormitory in the 70s and 80s, but also all the buildings that are not in harmony with the old district. He also buried all the pipelines underground and installed toilets on the houses to prevent residents from dumping dirt into the river. And use the old materials collected from neighboring townships to transform the old houses of Dongzha, and even restore the cement to bluestone roads.
Under the insistence of Chen Xianghong, Dongzhe gradually began to present the “original” ancient town appearance, and in the whole process of “repairing”, the planning of Wuzhen’s sightseeing town became more and more clear. In 2001, Dongzha began to officially receive tourists. After just one year, Wuzhen’s annual number of visitors increased from less than 30,000 in the early years to one million. To 2In 003, the investment of 100 million yuan in the previous period has been fully recovered, and Dongzha has brought a new possibility of economic development to Wuzhen.
In 2002, the TV series “Watery” starring Huang Lei was filmed in Wuzhen. Chen Xianghong and Huang Lei met each other. The outside world also visually saw the quietness and serenity of Wuzhen through this TV series. The ancient town has added another fire.
Sports of the Years
But just having a reputation, it is still not enough to support the rapid development of Wuzhen. Because Zhouzhuang and Xitang, which are close to Shanghai, occupy geographical advantages, there are too many ancient towns with similar styles around them. Wuzhen wants to grab more tourists. It is not enough to rely solely on the “quaint ancient style”. After the restoration was completed, Chen Xianghong spent another half a year examining several famous ancient towns in China. He found that many cases have many things in common: First, all the ancient towns are not developed in one time, and there is no complete product form; Second, most of the towns are mainly based on point management.
Chen Xianghong believes that when there are only one street or a place like the ancient town in other ancient towns, Wuzhen wants to stand out from the crowd and must start with the overall style. “Do not be the first, but be the only one.” Therefore, in 2003, Wuzhen Scenic Spot began to consider the construction of the second phase of the project, and drafted the development idea of “Dongzha Sightseeing and Xizha Holiday”. The property of Dongzha is to allow tourists to visit during the day, so Xizha should build the properties of the night tour. The cooperation between the two is best to make visitors want to live more than one day.
In Chen Xianghong’s plan, for tourists, although the ancient town is chosen to avoid the busyness of the city, the convenience of life still has to be aligned with the big city. In the second phase of the Xizha project, Wuzhen moved all the 1,800 former residents, and the development focused on the service industries such as hotels, hotels, restaurants, etc., which enabled Xizha to achieve 100% commercialization. On the basis of public basic services, Wuzhen has also realized the use of each pipeline gas, the establishment of a direct drinking water plant, the construction of a wireless network and free use for tourists, etc. At this time, Wuzhen has already entered the ranks of holiday and leisure towns.
In the development process, money is always the trickiest. From the second phase of the project in 2004After the beginning of the rotation, Chen Xianghong mortgaged Dongzha to the bank and exchanged for a loan of 300 million yuan. At that time, Chen Xianghong said to the outside world, “The development funds of Xizha all rely on the company’s own loans, and the pressure is great.” In order to alleviate the pressure on debt, Chen Xianghong chose to introduce Wuzhong, a listed company of state-owned enterprises, into Wuzhen in 2006, injecting 355 million yuan to transform Wuzhen Tourism into a joint stock limited company, CYTS holding 60%, and local government accounting for 40%.
After the completion of the total investment of 1 billion yuan in 2007, Xizha boosted Wuzhen’s annual operating income of 158 million yuan and realized a net profit of 36.06 million yuan. The East-West scenic spot received tourists for the first time to break through 2 million. By 2008, Wuzhen achieved sales revenue of 241 million yuan and net profit of 61.73 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 52.6% and 71.2%, and received a total of 2.52 million tourists. At this time, Chen Xianghong decided to quit all public positions and began to devote himself to the commercial exploration of Wuzhen.
But the initial success is not enough to make Wuzhen sit back and relax. Because of the success of the Wuzhen model, many ancient towns have begun to follow suit. When the major tourist attractions simultaneously hit the signboard of “Small Bridges and Waters”, Wuzhen once again faced homogenization. The question of how to break through again has become a new problem for Chen Xianghong.
Based on this dilemma, IDG, who became a joint venture partner of Wuzhen Tourism Co., Ltd. in 2007, has proposed that it can try to rebuild the water theater in Wuzhen, bringing an “Impression·Wuzhen”. However, this proposal was directly rejected by Chen Xianghong because there are too many “impression” series across the country. This is not a good way for Wuzhen to move toward “uniqueness”.
Wuzhen Water Theater
However, the proposal to rebuild the water theater in Wuzhen gave him the idea of using “culture” to enlarge the IP of the scenic spot, and he was thinking about how to upgrade Wuzhen from a resort town to a cultural town. And Huang Lei’s fate helped him.
In 2008, during the tour of Shanghai, “Hidden Love Peach Blossoms”, Huang Lei invited him to watch. In the process of the performance, what surprised Chen Xianghong most was not the drama itself, but the young people sitting in the theater. Chen Xianghong guessed whether drama can also become a new entrance for Wuzhen development. Moreover, Wuzhen is not too far away from major cities such as Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, so it can target its target customers to modern young people. Coincidentally, soon after Huang Lei was drunk in Wuzhen, he also gave birth to the idea of wanting to run a drama festival in Wuzhen. The two men hit it off and the idea of using the drama festival to “reform Wuzhen” was born.
Later laterHuang Lei has drawn into the drama master Lai Shengchuan and the pioneering drama director Meng Jinghui, and has drawn 500 million investment. After four years of preparations, finally in 2013, the curtain of the Wuzhen Theater Festival was opened. In the original Wuzhen Drama Festival, there were only 6 invited plays, 19 performances, and more than 500 ancient town carnivals. However, by 2019, 28 special plays and 141 performances have been realized, and the ancient town carnival has been nearly 2000. field. Today, the Wuzhen Drama Festival has become the largest and most influential drama event in China. It has even been regarded by many fans as “the third largest drama festival in the world” except for the French Avignon and the Edinburgh Festival in England.
The success of the festival has provided Wuzhen with a new transformation idea. In 2014, Wuzhen also hosted the first World Internet Conference, which became the permanent venue for this internationalized national conference. CYTS mentioned in its 2014 financial report that the “Cultural Wuzhen” brand should achieve leapfrog upgrade. Transformation. And this international Internet event helps Wuzhen attract the attention of many Internet practitioners around the world and more tourists. According to the data provided by the Tongxiang Tourism Committee, the number of tourists in Wuzhen increased from 6,923,500 in 2014 to 9,500,300 in 2018.
In 2017, Wuzhen’s convention and exhibition industry was booming. It has successively accepted the world-famous artificial intelligence AlphaGo and Go’s world number one Ke Jie’s Go showdown, with the theme of “gathering waves”. Inspur Partner Conference, Audi and other well-known car companies, new car conferences and other activities. In the 2017 China Youth Travel Association semi-annual report, with the continuous enhancement of the reception capacity of the business meeting in Wuzhen Scenic Area, Wuzhen should actively transform into the “Meeting Town”.
It seems that Wuzhen’s “third expansion” to the exhibition town is a priori. Due to the over-exploitation and homogenization of various cultural attractions in recent years, the revenue of many scenic spots has begun to decline, and it has fallen into a business crisis: According to the annual report of listed companies, the net profit of Zhangjiajie and Lijiang both fell by 60.80 in 2018. %, 6.16%; and the investment of 2 billion in Chengdu Longtan Ancient Town, it is also reported that it has reached the point of no one cares.
In the face of unfavorable factors such as the decline in passenger flow and the reduction of ticket prices in scenic spots, Wuzhen still maintains a good income: in 2001, it achieved revenue of 1.905 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15.74%, and revenue of 855 million in the first half of 2019. , an increase of 2.60% year-on-year. In Chen Xianghong’s view, the stability of Wuzhen is precisely to constantly create differences: “This isA long system engineering, but at different stages to stand out, you must create a unique user experience.
The current part of the proceeds is based on the fact that the festival is not fully commercialized. Qiu Jianwei, the organizer of the festival festival and the deputy general manager of the cultural Wuzhen, said in an interview with the First Financial News in 2018: “The Wuzhen tourism business develops soundly, and each year has the ability and budget to support the drama festival, and the festival itself is facing a balance of payments. In the direction of the matter, they are not eager to harvest in this matter.”
When Wuzhen is a holiday resort, commercialization has been completed more maturely, and as a cultural event, the festival is still exploring a path that can preserve the decentness of drama art and achieve good returns. “Some things can’t be measured by money, especially cultural things. The value of its creation is not something that can be seen on the surface.” Lai Shengchuan once said in an interview with the media, “I still give Wuzhen a little time, let us try our best. Do this well.”
At the end of each autumn, tourists who travel and sightseeing will still arrive as scheduled. In Wuzhen, they can buy souvenirs and small items in any scenic spot in the country, and maintain accommodation and eating habits that are no different from those in the city. You can walk along the banks of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal through a section of the channel, and feel the quaint natural landscape of water waves, trees and villages. Wuzhen is still a suitable and perfect tourist attraction.
On the other side, the audience who came for a long time from the festival festival can perform a ten-day drama revelry in Wuzhen. When the gates of various theaters in the Wuzhen Xizha Scenic Area are opened, the actors from home and abroad are located here. The sounds of the sounds and electronic equipment disappeared from the audience, and the lights of the theater were also darkened by everyone. They are holding their breath and waiting for the opening ceremony – entering the drama and entering the dream, the day of Wuzhen has just begun.
The cover image is from pexels