孔院微课堂 | 大洋彼岸的中国皮影戏

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（本文转载自《孔子学院》中英文对照版 2021年第2期/总第70期）

大洋彼岸的中国皮影戏

TRADITIONAL CHINESE SHADOW PUPPETRY IN THE U.S.

中国传统皮影戏是中国蔚为大观的民间艺术之一。演员借助灯光，在幕布后操纵驴皮木偶在幕布上唱念做打，演绎出令人惊叹的中国故事。

Traditional Chinese shadow puppetry is one of the country’s most spectacular folk arts. Behind a large screen, backlit so that it’s translucently illuminated, handmade donkey-hide puppets dance across the stage, acting out a wide range of stories from China’s formidable canon of classics.

自 20 世纪初以来，影视的兴起以及日后社会历史发展进程中的动荡与坎坷，使皮影戏的流行程度逐渐下降。虽然 2011 年皮影戏入选联合国教科文组织的人类非物质文化遗产名录，可在中国却很少能看到正宗的表演。

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the rise of movies and television, and later the attacks on traditional folk arts during the Cultural Revolution, have sent the popularity of shadow puppet performance into a gradual decline. Although it was added to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2011, it is rare to see an authentic performance in China.

然而，在大洋彼岸的美国，一直有人在坚持表演中国皮影戏。让这“皮影之花”绽放在大洋彼岸的，最初是一位男士，随后是三位女士传承接力，直至今日。

Practitioners in the United States, however, managed to preserve the art form throughout the last century and into the present. The remarkable story of how this happened begins with a man, before becoming inextricably entwined with the lives of three women.

这位男士就是美国东方学家贝特霍尔德·劳费尔(Berthold Laufer)，中国皮影最初就是他带到美国的。1902 年，掌握多门东方语言的劳费尔受雇于美国自然历史博物馆来到中国。在旅行期间，他花了当时堪称巨款的 600 美元，买下了一个即将倒闭的北京皮影戏班，以及它所有的戏台、剧本和皮影偶。他还用蜡筒留声机记录了一些演出音像。

Shadow puppet shows were first brought to the U.S. by Berthold Laufer, an American Orientalist. In 1902, Laufer, who knew many East Asian languages, explored China at the behest of the American Museum of Natural History. During his travels, he spent the then considerable sum of $600 on a near-bankrupt Beijing puppetry troupe, acquiring all its screens, scripts, and mannequins in the process. He also used wax phonograph cylinders to record puppetry performances.

1908 年至 1934 年，劳费尔成为芝加哥菲尔德自然历史博物馆的人类学部主任。在前 15 年里，他走遍了中国各地，收集了各个朝代大约 1.9 万件文物。1923 年，他结合自己和博物馆的收藏，举办了一个名为“东方戏剧”的展览。展览的重头戏就是他收藏的中国皮影，在当时引起了轰动，同时吸引了宝琳·班顿 (Pauline Benton) 的注意。也正是她，让这些躺在博物馆里的中国皮影，在美国开始了新一轮的百年传奇。

Between 1908 and 1934, Laufer served as the lead anthropologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He spent the first 15 years in the role traveling across China, collecting an estimated 19,000 cultural artifacts from various time periods in the country’s history. In 1923, he brought his collection together for an exhibit titled “Oriental Theatricals.” Headlined by his collection of Chinese shadow puppets, the exhibition caused a sensation and drew the attention of Pauline Benton, a woman who would take the alluring images of China’s puppeteers off the museum shelves and resurrect them for a new century and a new country.

班顿的父亲是一位颇有名望的大学学者，当她还是个孩子的时候，就跟随父亲走遍了欧洲和亚洲。1923 年， 她 去 北 京 看 望 姨 妈 艾 玛·孔 纳 兹 (Emma Konantz) 女士，当时是燕京大学的数学教授，是位热爱收集古玩的中国通。在姨妈家的院子里，班顿第一次观看了皮影戏表演——《竹林记》，当那位女将军在逼真的烟雾效果面前飞过屏幕时，班顿一下子就着迷了，连她自己也没有想到皮影戏就这样走进了她的生活并相伴一生。

When Benton was a child, she followed her father, a university scholar of some repute, across Europe and Asia. In 1923, she travelled to Beijing to visit her aunt, Emma Konantz, a professor of mathematics at Yenching University in Beijing and a lover of Chinese culture. In the courtyard of Konantz’s home, Benton first witnessed a shadow puppet performance – a retelling of the play The Burning of the Bamboo Grove. The sight of the protagonist, a female general, flying across the screen in front of lifelike smoke effects enraptured Benton and stayed with her for the rest of her life.

/// 1976 年，乔·韩佛瑞表演《牛魔王》

Jo Humphrey performs the  ‘Bull Demon King’, 1976. 

Courtesy of Li Mingjie

在姨妈的帮助下，班顿结识了会说英文的河北滦州皮影世家传人李氏，他教班顿皮影戏。很快，班顿就成为这个传统中由男性主导的领域里唯一的女性表演者。她承诺将传承这门民间艺术，即使当时皮影戏已有没落之势了。

With her aunt’s help, Benton was introduced to an Englishspeaking Christian convert by the name of Li Tuochen. Li, a native of the nearby coastal town of Luanzhou in Northern China’s Heibei province and a master of shadow puppetry, taught Benton the craft and she soon became the only female performer in what was a traditionally male dominated field. She pledged that she would carry on the tradition, which even then was beginning to show signs of decline.

1932 年，班顿在纽约成立了红门剧社。1936 年，她最后一次离开中国时，带回了上百件定制皮影和一整套道具和乐器。

In 1932, Benton established the Red Gate Shadow Players in New York and in 1936, as she left China for what would prove to be the last time, she took with her hundreds of made-to-order shadow puppets and a complete set of props and instruments.

在大萧条和第二次世界大战期间，红门剧社在美国各地巡回演出。剧社用英语演出了许多中国传统戏剧，部分依靠班顿姨妈或劳费尔的编译剧本，部分依据美国观众的喜好再改编。为了使这些故事栩栩如生，剧社的表演者自创乐曲演奏中国传统乐器月琴、二胡和锣等。他们的表演在当时反响热烈，甚至一度受邀在罗斯福总统执政时期的白宫演出。

Over the course of the Great Depression and World War II, the Red Gate Shadow Players toured all over the United States. The troupe staged English-language productions of a number of traditional Chinese plays, relying in part on translated scripts either funded by Benton’s aunt or carried out by Laufer and partly on story elements written to appeal to American tastes. To bring these tales to life, the troupe’s performers sang the original lyrics and tunes composed using traditional Chinese instruments such as the yueqin or moon zither, the erhu or two-stringed fiddle, and the gong. Their performance was enthusiastically received, even earning them an invitation to perform at the White House, in front of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

班顿一直坚持出演到因脑癌过世前的两年。1974年，依据她的遗嘱，红门剧社的皮影，一半捐赠给博物馆，另一半与戏台、笔记和书籍一起封存在一个木箱子里，希望能等到真正懂得它们价值的人。

Benton continued to perform until the final two years of her life, when brain cancer forced her to retire. Upon her death in 1974, her will stipulated that half of the Red Gate Shadow Players’ puppets were to be donated to a museum, while the other half, along with the group’s stages, notes, and books, were to be sealed inside a wooden box and await the arrival of someone who could put them to good use.

似乎是命中注定，那个人很快出现了：乔·韩佛瑞 (Jo Humphrey), 前南加州大学戏剧专业的学生。20世纪 40 年代，韩佛瑞就读的马萨诸塞州高中举办了一场红门剧社的演出。韩佛瑞对戏剧和中国文化都很着迷，她认为中国皮影把自己的两大爱好完美地融合在了一起。韩佛瑞在 1972 年一次展览中偶然看到了劳费尔的皮影戏收藏，当时参与整理这批文物并协助策划了中国皮影特展，反响特别好，大家都对皮影表现出了强烈的好奇心。然而，在内心深处，韩佛瑞想知道她是否真的能让皮影起死回生。由于当时正值动荡年代，访问中国是不可能的。20 世纪 70 年代中期，韩佛瑞开始组织一个长达半年的皮影工作坊。此后不久，1976 年，她在纽约成立了“悦龙皮影剧团”。

As if by miracle, that someone soon appeared: Jo Humphrey, a former drama student at the University of Southern California. During the 1940s, the Massachusetts high school, where Humphrey studied at, hosted a performance by the Red Gate Shadow Players. Humphrey, who was taken with both drama and Chinese culture, came to see shadow puppetry as the perfect blend of her two greatest passions. Humphrey came across Laufer’s collection of shadow puppets in 1972 and later showcased the collection at a number of well-received exhibitions. At heart, however, Humphrey wondered whether she could truly bring the puppets back to life. In the mid-1970s, Humphrey started to organize a six-month shadow puppetry workshop. Not long afterward, in 1976, she established the Yueh Lung Shadow Theatre in New York City.

韩佛瑞在担任“悦龙”的编剧和导演近 25 年之后，于 1999 年退休。凭着自己对戏剧、中国古典文学及历史的丰富知识，韩佛瑞带领团队将许多中国传统剧目改编成了皮影戏，其中就有著名的《草船借箭》和《火焰山》。起初，她在博物馆里刻制影偶，并让演员用英语、广东话和普通话，录下不同版本的台词对话，再配上中国音乐，让演员们配合录音来操纵影偶。尽管与中式唱腔相比，韩佛瑞的版本乡音已改，但是忠于原著的魅力仍使其风头不减。

Humphrey retired in 1999 after spending nearly a quarter century as Yueh Lung’s playwright and director. She brought a rich knowledge of ancient Chinese literature and drama to the role, and led the group as it adapted a number of classic Chinese shadow puppet plays, including “Borrowing Arrows with Straw Boats” and “Monkey King and the Mountain of Fiery Tongues.” At first, she made replicas of the puppets in the museum and had actors record their lines in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. She then set these lines to music and played them over the puppets as they moved. Although this represented a formal departure from the operatic vocal style traditionally associated with Chinese shadow puppetry, the stories she told and the medium she used to tell them remained faithful to tradition.

20 世纪 90 年代初，韩佛瑞的作品引起了班顿的老朋友麦希娜·卡伦的注意，为了实现班顿的遗愿，她找到了韩佛瑞并转交了蒙尘已久的一箱皮影。获赠后，韩佛瑞不仅拥有了更多丰富的演出皮影，她也把其中的部分精品装裱起来举办巡展。1993 年，“悦龙皮影剧团”更名为“金山传统影戏学会”。

In the early 1990s, Humphrey’s work came to the attention of one of Benton’s old friends, Mercina Karam, who sought Humphrey out in order to carry out Benton’s last wish. Once in possession of Benton’s trove, Humphrey not only had more fresh puppets with which to work, but could also mount some of the finest pieces of Benton’s collection and bring them on tour as a traveling museum exhibition. In 1993, the Yueh Lung Shadow Theatre was renamed the Gold Mountain Institute for Traditional Shadow Theatre.

上世纪 80 年代初，纽约大学戏剧专业的学生冯光宇经常和同学一起在皇后区公寓的走廊里演戏嬉闹，哼唱中国传统戏曲。韩佛瑞立即欣赏到冯的戏剧功底，并很快邀请她加入自己的团队，担任翻译、声乐演员和中国传统戏剧教师。

Back in the early ’80s, Kuang-Yu Fong, a theatre student at New York University, would often get together with her classmates in the hallway of her apartment in Queens to hang out and sing pieces from traditional Chinese operas. Humphrey had an immediate appreciation for Fong’s background in drama and she soon invited her to join her team as a translator, vocal performer, and teacher of traditional Chinese drama.

虽然冯对传统皮影戏了解甚少，但她很快就迷上了这门深深植根于中国戏剧精髓的古老技艺。一个偶然的机会，冯遇到了康涅狄格州大学木偶戏专业的毕业生史蒂芬·凯派林 (Stephen Kaplin)，这是当时全美国唯一的木偶戏专业。当时凯派林正在纽约大学攻读表演艺术硕士学位。

While Fong had little background in traditional shadow puppetry, she soon grew fascinated with the ancient craft, so deeply embedded in the marrow of Chinese drama. By chance, Fong soon met a graduate from the University of Connecticut’s program in puppetry, the only such program in the U.S. The man, Stephen Kaplin, was then a student pursuing a master’s degree in the performing arts at New York University.

 /// 2015 年，冯光宇（左）和凯派林（右）在芝加哥表演《火焰山》

Kuang Yu Fong (left) and Stephen Kaplin (right) perform 

 ‘Flaming Mountain’ at the Field Museum in Chicago, 

2015. Courtesy of Li Mingjie

凭着对皮影的共同喜爱，很快，两人结成了事业伙伴和生活伴侣。1995 年，他们成立了 “中国戏剧工坊”。当韩佛瑞在 1999 年退休时，她坚信冯和凯派林是最适合继承这一传统的人。她将金山传统影戏学会的全部家底都交给了“中国戏剧工作坊”，于 2001年正式合并。

Fong and Kaplin’s shared passion for puppetry brought them together, both professionally and romantically. In 1995, they founded the Chinese Theater Workshop. When Humphrey retired in 1999, she was firm in her belief that Fong and Kaplin were the ones best positioned to carry on the tradition. The entire inventory of the Gold Mountain Institute for Traditional Shadow Theatre was given to the Chinese Theatre Workshop and the two groups formally merged in 2001 under a new name, Chinese Theatre Works.

20 多年来，中国戏剧工作坊自编自导自演了 30余部原创作品。如果说班顿和韩佛瑞对皮影的贡献重在传承的话，冯和凯派林则更多表现在传承基础上的创新。凯派林为百老汇音乐剧《狮子王》制作了全部皮影，工作坊还通过木兰、红线女、佘赛花和秋瑾四位女将的历史故事讲述了中华民族“忠、孝、节、义”的传统价值观。跨越千年，手法却极为酷炫极少的中英台词，配合独特的中国传统乐器古筝、琵琶和二胡等现场演奏。工作坊在表演时将皮影呈现在幕布上，配合道具转换田园、战场、家庭等故事背景。

Over the past 20 years, Chinese Theatre Works has produced, directed, and staged over 30 original productions. While Benton and Humphrey were primarily concerned with preserving the art, Fong and Kaplin have used this earlier conservation work as a basis for innovative new performances. Kaplin personally made all the shadow puppets for theBroadway adaptationof “The Lion King,”and in “Mulan: Holding Half the Sky,” the troupe used the historical tales of four women warriors — Mulan, Hongxian, She Saihua, and Qiu Jin — to depict traditional values valorized by the Chinese, including benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and belief. With a narrative arc stretching across millennia, largely wordless scripts, and the unique sounds of traditional Chinese zithers, lutes, and pipes, the company’s spectacular performances see the colored silhouettes of puppets dash across the screen, while further props evoke the countryside, battlegrounds, and homes in which the stories take place.

中国皮影曾一度呈现没落之势，直到最近开始复兴。而在大洋彼岸的美国，这些戏剧家，与中国并没有血缘关系，却把他们的一生奉献给了远离他们本土文化的中国民间艺术。让他们聚到一起的是对皮影的欣赏与热爱，这是一种跨越国家和文化的艺术。在班顿未发表的笔记中，她曾写道：“中国服装、艺术、建筑、信仰、历史和传说的秘密，都安静地留存在皮影人物的形象中。”

While Chinese shadow puppetry was fading in popularity until its recent cultural resurgence, across the ocean in the U.S., many dramatists, some of whom had no blood ties to China, have devoted their lives to a folk art far removed from their native cultures. What united them was a quiet appreciation for the aesthetics and art of puppetry, one that stretched across countries and cultures. In her unpublished notes, Benton wrote: “The secrets of Chinese costumes, arts, architecture, religion, history, and mythology were all held in the quiet forms of the shadow figures.”

当韩佛瑞被问到为什么她这样一个美国人会如此精通《水浒传》、《西游记》和《三国演义》等中国经典小说时，她说，皮影戏的创作者就是中国的莎士比亚，这些故事结构纯熟、戏剧张力饱满，早已成为经典，所包含的智慧与道德是属于全世界的。

Similarly, when Humphrey was asked why she, an American, was so well versed in Chinese classics like“Water Margin,” “Journey to the West,” and “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” she said that while the artistry behind shadow puppets was quite simple, the form of performance had the potential to be even more magical than movies or shows featuring live actors. Their stories and characters may be quintessentially Chinese, but their heroes and villains, princes and princesses, all speak to our shared humanity.

我们的许多文化遗产都陈列在博物馆里，它们被保存了下来却也失去了活力。劳费尔、班顿、韩佛瑞、冯、凯派林对皮影戏的热爱和坚持，不仅使中国文化焕发了新的生机，融入美国元素后也使其更加丰满。他们的经历表明，即使是皮影这种极富中国特色的文化遗产也能证明人类对真善美的追求是心同理通的，文明互鉴，艺术永恒。

Much of our cultural heritage is conserved for display in museums, where it loses its vitality. With their passion and enthusiasm for shadow puppetry, Laufer, Benton, Humphrey, Fong, and Kaplin not only revived a swath of Chinese cultural history, but also enriched it with local American elements. Their lives speak to how even the most seemingly exotic cultural heritage testifies to the interconnectedness between civilizations.

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作者：李明洁 Li Mingjie

翻译：Kilian O’Donnell

图文排版：李雪（实习）

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