FIVE QUESTIONS · NINETY SECONDS

开演之前BEFORE THE CURTAIN RISES

五个问题。九十秒。
先认识几个人、几种声音，以及一幅画留下的时间。然后，灯暗下来。Five questions. Ninety seconds.
Meet a few people, a few sounds, and the time held inside a painting. Then the lights go down.

FIVE QUESTIONS90 SECONDSZH / EN

QUESTION 03

为什么舞台上的青绿如此克制？Why Is Qinglü So Restrained?

《千里江山图》的青绿并不以“寡淡”为特征。

“宋代美学”并不等于低饱和、极简或一味留白。《千里江山图》本身就是最有力的反例——石青、石绿浓丽而层次丰富，间以赭色；山石、屋宇、水纹与细小人物又画得极为工细。北宋宫廷艺术既可以清简，也可以华丽、精密、色彩浓烈。

因此，《只此青绿》的“克制”不是对某种统一的“宋代淡雅”的复原，而是当代剧场的选择。创作中不断做减法，是为了让身体、颜色、暗部与空场保持彼此的距离。服装团队为青绿测试十余种面料：太浅，灯下失去层次；太艳，颜色会抢在身体之前抵达观众。

更准确的词不是“淡”，而是有节制的强度：颜色可以明艳，却不喧宾夺主；情感可以深，却不必全部写在面部；空间可以空，却并不贫乏。看上去越少的地方，往往藏着越密的判断。The blue-green of A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains is not defined by paleness.

Song aesthetics cannot be reduced to muted colour, minimalism or emptiness. A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains is a powerful counterexample — its mineral blues and greens can be saturated and luminous, set against warm earth tones, while rocks, architecture, water and tiny figures are rendered with extraordinary care. Northern Song court art could be spare; it could also be sumptuous, exacting and chromatically intense.

Restraint in The Journey is therefore not a reconstruction of some uniformly subdued Song style. It is a contemporary theatrical decision: to keep colour, body, darkness and open space in proportion. More than ten textiles were tested for Qinglü; too pale and the colour lost depth under stage light, too vivid and it arrived before the body.

The more precise phrase is controlled intensity. Colour may be brilliant without becoming dominant; feeling may be deep without being written entirely on the face; an open stage may be full of tension rather than empty of content. What appears spare may be where judgement is most densely concentrated.

QUESTION 04

为什么高潮反而变慢？Why Does the Climax Slow Down?

舞台的高潮，不必总靠更快、更大、更密来完成。《只此青绿》最重要的编舞选择之一，是在强度上升时反而减少位移、拉长时值。

演员的身体资源来自当代中国古典舞训练，其中“身韵”尤其重要。北京舞蹈学院在20世纪80年代建立《中国古典舞身韵》课程，“形、神、劲、律”的统一成为这一体系的重要教学框架：形指向外在身体形态与运动形态，神关乎意念、神采与内在驱动，劲讨论力量使用的轻重、刚柔、缓急、收放，律则关乎动作的动律、节奏以及顺与逆的变化。它们属于现代中国古典舞的教学语言，并不是宋代舞谱。
在《只此青绿》中，这些训练资源没有被当作既有组合来陈列。音乐最饱满处，编舞有意减少位移、拉长时值；舞者仍通过呼吸、重量转移、躯干倾斜与持续的姿态张力维持运动势能。主创所说“最强的音乐给最慢的动作”，关键正是这种反向配置：听觉强度继续上升，身体却进入悬置。
因此，慢不是风格标签，更不是“东方”的同义词。它是整部作品对时间的编排：让一个身体的此刻，与山水跨越千年的时间尺度同时被感知。A climax need not always become faster, larger and denser. One of The Journey’s most distinctive choreographic decisions is to reduce travel precisely as intensity rises.

The dancers draw on contemporary Chinese classical dance training, especially shenyun (身韵). Beijing Dance Academy developed Chinese Classical Dance Shenyun as an original course in the early 1980s. Its familiar framework of xing, shen, jin and lü brings together bodily form and movement, intention and presence, dynamic quality, and rhythmic organisation. These are concepts of modern Chinese classical dance training, not terms inherited from Song-dynasty dance notation.
The choreography does not put this training on display as a ready-made vocabulary. At moments of maximum musical fullness, travelling movement can diminish and duration expand, while breath, weight transfer, inclination and sustained postural tone keep the body kinetically alive. In the creators’ own formulation, the strongest music may carry the slowest action: sound intensifies as movement enters suspension.
Slowness, then, is neither an exotic sign nor a synonym for “Eastern aesthetics.” It is a compositional decision about time — a way of allowing the present tense of a body to coexist with the much longer duration imagined by the landscape.

04 / 05

QUESTION 05

音乐里的东方乐器Instruments in the Score

《只此青绿》的音乐没有复原一个想象中的“宋代声音”，也没有把传统乐器当作古意的快捷符号。

其中最重要的声音之一是古琴。古琴是中国古老的七弦琴类乐器，历史延续三千余年，长期与中国文人的修养生活相连，也与诗文、书画、雅集和独处聆听形成深厚的文化关系。它的意义从来不只是一种“清幽”音色；在中国文化史里，琴也关乎专注、节制、友朋相和与自我修养。
作曲家吕亮没有把这层传统封存在安静里。在“习笔”等段落，古琴反而承担清楚的节奏与三拍律动，与古筝、木管相互交错，主动打破“古琴只能幽静”的惯常想象。
整部配乐还使用古筝、琵琶、竹笛、箫、埙等中国乐器。古筝由丁雪儿演奏，琵琶由孙莹演奏，竹笛、箫与埙由丁晓逵演奏；古琴演奏包括王悠荻、孙灜。
这些乐器携带的历史并不相同：古筝设有可移动琴码，按弦、滑音与揉弦等技法让音高和余韵在发声之后仍能继续变化；琵琶在中国的发展尤其能看见古代中亚与丝绸之路交流留下的形制与演奏传统。《只此青绿》没有把它们熔成一种泛泛的“古风”，而是让不同的声音保留自己的来处，再在当代作曲中相遇。The score does not attempt to reconstruct an imagined “Song-dynasty sound,” nor does it use traditional instruments as instant signs of antiquity.

One of the score’s central voices is the guqin, an ancient seven-string zither with a history extending more than three millennia. For centuries it has been closely associated with Chinese literati cultivation — with poetry, calligraphy, painting, gatherings among friends and solitary listening. Its significance has never been reducible to a single “quiet” timbre; the instrument also carries histories of attention, restraint, companionship and inward discipline.
Lü Liang does not freeze that inheritance into stillness. In passages such as Making the Brush, the guqin takes on a clear rhythmic life, including triple-metre figures, interlocking with zheng and woodwinds and deliberately unsettling the expectation that it must remain hushed.
The score also draws on zheng, pipa, dizi, xiao and xun. Ding Xue’er performs the zheng; Sun Ying (孙莹), the pipa; Ding Xiaokui, the dizi, xiao and xun. The guqin performers include Wang Youdi and Sun Ying (孙灜).
Each instrument carries a different history. The zheng’s movable bridges shape resonance, pitch bends and glissandi; the pipa’s development in China bears traces of long exchanges with Central Asia and the Silk Roads. The production does not blend them into a generic sound of “antiquity.” It lets distinct musical histories meet inside a score written for the present.

05 / 05进入剧场Enter the Theatre

开演之前，不必把所有答案准备好。
九百多年前的画卷，会在今晚以身体、音乐和光重新展开。剩下的，交给剧场。You need not arrive with every answer.
Tonight, a scroll painted more than nine centuries ago opens again through bodies, music and light. The rest belongs to the theatre.

继续展卷Continue

开演之前BEFORE THE CURTAIN RISES

谁在两个时代之间？Who Stands Between Two Times?

“青绿”究竟是什么？What Is Qinglü?

为什么舞台上的青绿如此克制？Why Is Qinglü So Restrained?

为什么高潮反而变慢？Why Does the Climax Slow Down?

音乐里的东方乐器Instruments in the Score