The biography of consorts in Han Dynasty said: "The alchemist and Qi people only spoke a few words, which can lead them to their gods. At night, I lit lanterns and candles, set up curtains, aged wine and meat, put him in a tent, and saw the face of a good girl Li Furen from a distance, but still sat and walked. " From the description, Li Furen's image may be in the form of silhouette, with lights, candles and curtains, which seems to have the embryonic form of shadow play. However, the emergence and prosperity of real shadow play was in the Northern Song Dynasty.
According to Meng Yuanshen's Dream of Tokyo, there are "shadow play" among more than 100 kinds of plays performed in entertainment places in Bianliang City in the Northern Song Dynasty, and famous shadow play artists Dong Shiwu, Cao appeared. In the Southern Song Dynasty, it was recorded in Zhou Mi's Biography of the Old Wulin that the party, government and army had a special "Painted Skin Society" film organization. In the Yuan Dynasty, shadow play was also performed in the army as an entertainment activity.
Shadow play developed greatly in Ming and Qing Dynasties, and different artistic styles and schools appeared all over the country. China is the hometown of shadow play. As early as the beginning of13rd century, during the reign of Ningzong Jiading in the Southern Song Dynasty, shadow play spread to Myanmar, Siam, Java and other places, and in the middle of14th century, it spread to Persia, Arabia and Turkey. /kloc-It was introduced to Egypt in the Ming Dynasty in the 0/5th century. /kloc-At the beginning of the 0/7th century, it was introduced to Turkey in the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty.
/kloc-in the 0 th and 8 th centuries, western Catholic missionaries introduced Chinese shadow play into France and spread it to Britain and Germany. Its performance caused a sensation in Europe. In the thirty-ninth year of the Sino-Japanese War (1774), Goethe, a great German poet, introduced China's shadow play at the Wei Lan World Expo in 178 1, and he also hosted a shadow play performance with German stories as its content.
Shadow play is mainly performed by the shadow play actors through the manipulation of the master, through the transmission of light, on the screen, with the help of musical instruments and vocals. Commonly known as "eternal legend, dancing millions of soldiers with both hands."
A preliminary study of shadow play
Shadow play art is a kind of pure folk art with a long history and rich connotation, rooted in China and affecting overseas. For thousands of years, shadow play has flourished and become the main collection of the people.
Shadow play was originally carved with thick paper, and later it was generally made of donkey skin, cowhide or sheepskin. After cutting and scraping, it is designed according to the needs of characters and scenery, and it is completed through carving, coloring, ironing, binding, oiling and other processes. The style is similar to public opinion paper-cutting.
In the Southern Song Dynasty, Nai Deyong's "Red Wins the Capital": "Every play is carved with plain paper at first, and then covered with colored skins." It's a card. Shadow play actors are generally about two feet tall, but their hands, arms, waist, legs and other joints are carved separately, and then connected together with threads, so that they can move freely when performing; The shadow head is carved separately and can be replaced by the shadow body. Shadow play is a special skill, which requires exquisite carving and bright colors, portraying people with various personality characteristics, mainly focusing on exaggerating people's eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth and beard. Colors are red, green, blue, ink and so on. Each color is divided into different shades. Wu Wen Xiao Sheng, Dan Jiao, Bai Jing and other people who perform white faces use hollowing out. Blackheads, red nets, painted faces, etc. , are all half an hour. Because the projection performance is performed on a flat screen and can only move left and right, most of the shadow characters are silhouette.
China's early shadow play is now treasured by many national museums around the world. The Shadow Play Museum in offenbach, West Germany has a special collection of more than 3,250 Chinese shadow play treasures. There are three sizes of shadow play: 6 inches, 9 inches and 1.3 feet, from which we can see the development history of Chinese shadow play. Some early small works, with the artistic modeling of shadow puppeteers in Ming Dynasty or earlier, are hard to see in China, but they are well preserved here. These collections were bought from Beijing by the owner of a small antique shop in Berlin 1930.