In the National Day golden week, as the key platform for traditional folk art, many traditional plays are presented in the tourist attractions. However, lots of folk art, though with profound background, is not that fascinating to attract tourists due to cultural diversity, tourists' lack of deep understanding of folk art, and old-fashioned content and lack of innovation.
In a tourist resort of Foshan City, the traditional music of drum and cymbal rises one after another and performers’ voice undulates deliberately. Ladapian (picture show), glove puppet show, shadow play and other traditional folk art are presented in a line. In a farmhouse of Shunde, although performers have tried every trick, most tourists seem to have little interest. During eight days, there are only less than one thousand people in hundreds of thousands of tourists willing to watch these "old plays", among which over 90% are above 30 years old and children account for only about 10%.
Mr. Zhang, 63 years old, an inheritor of the bag puppet show, was really hurt when seeing the desperate situation. "A stable and complete performance system and more than 700 plays formed after several hundred years. I don’t expect the current situation. There are not only no learners but also fewer and fewer audience." The other traditional art such as Ladapian and shadow play are also in the same "desperate" situation.
People would marvel at the window grilles and paper-cuts pasted all over the place inside and outside cave houses when visiting the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi twenty years ago. But twenty years later, you can only see star stickers covered all the walls in caves even in the most remote village on the Loess Plateau. Someone calls the disappearance of folk paper-cuts as the "one night fall".
No folk songs come from the deep mountains like clouds floating, no window paper-cut is seen like mountain flowers blooming, and Erhu (Chinese violin) has not been heard for a long time. For the folk art influencing the previous generation like us, now it is extremely hard to find them. Just in two decades, the prosperous folk art is like a falling star and seems to vanish forever.
I can’t help being puzzled when facing the situation. What’s wrong with folk art? Is there no survival room for folk art because of the popular culture? Is this the inevitable trend of marketization? Do these unique skills of folk art really have no way out? Who may recover the prosperity of folk art?
It is a sorrow for inheritance when an inheritor dies and a folk art loses.
It is hard to tell how many kinds of folk art are there in China. The red paper-cut revealing happiness and auspiciousness, sophisticated "eggshell carving", ingenious color painting of oracle bones, unique clay sculpture, magnificent copper engraving, fresh and simple printed blue cloth. In addition to these tangible forms of folk art, intangible cultural heritage is even more diverse. Not to mention the well-known Chinese operas of different places such as Cantonese opera, Kunqu opera, and Huangmei opera, the storytelling of north, allegro of Shandong, bass drum of Jingdong, pendant of Henan, and ditty of Jiangnan (south of the Yangtze River) are all fascinating, and even those unknown folk canzonets may lead you to endless aftertastes.
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