A Dual-Perspective Review

"Inspire Your Drama Dream” became a headliner in 2021 as China’s most influential filmmaker Xu Zheng and his wife Tao Hong launched this initiative to promote drama art among the younger generation. Co-sponsored by Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and the couple’s Zheng Love Charity Foundation, "Inspire Your Drama Dream” regularly organizes winter/summer camps for kids, art workshops, and train-the-trainer sessions. The program also facilitates drama curriculum development in China.

 

"The essence of the project is education,” said 49-year-old Xu in an interview. "We will try our best to help teenagers discover their true talents and hope that one day theatre will become an integral part to their lives.” Also, during the gala night of the 2nd Shanghai Teenagers Theatre Festival in 2020, Xu Zheng called for "all his peer-directors, screenwriters and actors to devote more to teenager’s theatre as it will delight the young generation’s lives via improved creativity, artistic expression and interpersonal skills.”

 

Liu Zelin, one co-author of this article, is one such actor-director, yet with a degree in public relations. During a tour of over 40 performances, Liu got in close contact with many campus students. It was not long after that that she decided to take drama education as her new career - in addition to professional acting. "When working with these teenagers, I’ve found imaginations are allowed to run free and wild - which creates an amazing contrast with their routine life,” noted Liu, "…this simply energizes me.”

 

 

Due to historical reasons, educational drama had been absent in China for a long time. Yet theatre does enjoy a centuries long history, being an important part of Chinese culture.  "It suffices to say that Chinese theatre is no younger than, nor inferior to, the western theatre,” Liu Zelin affirmed. "Fortunately, we have a lot to get inspired from - by drawing on traditional forms of theatre-making both domestic and imported - in our today’s endeavor of drama education.” Liu’s engagement in theatre teaching varies in formats. A co-curricular program delivered at middle school campuses (and beyond) is one of the best-received.

 

That’s also where she met Scott Yanshun Cai, currently a 9th-grader at a bilingual school in Shanghai and the other co-author of this article. Young dramatists like Scott are connected by a common enthusiasm. Their goals may not have been to mount an artistic endeavor per se; rather, embracing drama is a way of genuine escapism and yet creating meaning and exploring ‘human’ experience in depth.

 

Scott worked diligently with Liu Zelin. Liu mentored her theatre troupe throughout the process of producing a play, and always gave them the support they needed. To her contentment, she saw the kids build into a tight, cohesive team and uplift one another as people and actors alike. Liu Zelin underlines that educational drama is a very effective method to cultivate students’ comprehensive quality and all-around development: "the more challenging things become, the more motivated are my students - true friendships are formed, often lasting beyond graduation. The value of play is revered by all of them - it’s really a dramatic change spanning a wide domain in their school-life”.  

 

Scott is also aware that the resources he and his classmates have enjoyed should not be taken for granted: Even in a metropolis like Shanghai, there’s a big disparity in arts programming among all K-12 schools. Not every campus has a co-curricular theatre program as his school offers. For the many ‘under-resourced’ schools, Scott has his own two-pennies-worth advice: "First of all, invest heavily in boys,” he said, "At least in our country’s teen’s theatre field they are the minority; therefore, motivate, train and retain them! Secondly, 1-or-2 grades can already be a ‘generation’ gap among youngster players. Hence it’s incredibly vital to transform the focus on skills training into organizational learning. For instance, every single time when we rehearse, when we do the stage set, music and lighting, Ms. Liu will invite our junior troupe members to sit in and witness. Also, the digital archiving of plays helps pass on the critical know-how to future ‘generations’, both from an artistic and operational point of view…”

 

 

Scott’s engagement in theatre has brought him a whole new horizon of what is possible by synergizing performing arts with other disciplines, also as career endeavors. Drama therapy, for instance, is an interdisciplinary domain that he’s tremendously interested in. It is an active form of expressive therapy that can help teens better identify their own (as well as others’) feelings, explore new problem-solving skills and personal growth.

 

As a result, Scott got in touch with Ms. Gao Fan, the faculty leader of his school’s psychology club, and joined her work of creative therapy. If SaaS (‘Software as a Service’) is a term in the IT sector, then Scott would like to view his endeavor as DaaS (‘Drama as a Service’). Under the guidance of Ms. Gao, a psychotherapist, he and his club peers organized and delivered therapeutic-drama activities on the campus. One showcase was what they called ‘one-emotion-one-drama’. By adopting drama and theater techniques - including improvisation and role playing - they were working to ‘act out’ the participants’ day-to-day ‘moments-of-emotion’ and thereby enable catharsis. Other psychodrama activities included formats aiming to provide the content for participants to work through personal issues and themes, and to achieve self-compassion and strength. 

 

Liu Zelin believes that ‘Drama as a Service’ can go even further. In her network at Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, some theatre educators have been working to bring more psychodrama to correctional institutions. The rationale is quite straight-forward: drama can help prisoners tell their stories, find healing from the trauma, develop interactive skills with others and, above all, rediscover their own humanity.

 

 

As has been shown, next to empowerment and the development of genuine life skills, teaching students arts education in school can foster artistic and organizational competences as well as skills and approaches for career paths in fields such as cultural management or art and health. This is why Liu Zelin is delighted to see an increasing number of her top students applying for theatre academies. "A drama background will expose you to a great variety of future career set-ups, including but surely not limited to actor, drama therapist, stage manager, broadcast presenter, arts administrator, public relations, educator, talent agent, researcher, director, choreographer, theatre owner… and full of imaginations,” she emphasizes.

 

Both Liu and Scott remember well that during the Shanghai Teenagers Theatre Festival in 2020 among the 45 participating schools one heavily-represented segment was the international schools (including bilingual schools). But for the rest, one could hardly find any ‘chicken blood schools’ engagement. (‘Chicken blood school’, in Chinese, refers to those whose students work extremely hard to be high-graders in Gaokao, the national college entrance exam.) 

 

 

In fact, the first ever academic five-year degree program in arts management, which connects arts education at high schools straight through college education, was launched just this year in China. The prospect of an arts management career is also starting to soar. In Guangdong, for instance, the training ‘Arts Management Program for Theatre Operators’ has been able to convene renowned academics and industry practitioners from Hong Kong and Taiwan to deliver. The Program is always being over-subscribed. The Shanghai Theatre Academy has regularly invited world-leading academics in arts management to lead its flagship executive education programs. 

 

Such an access to globalized education opportunities enhances the pipeline and competencies of Chinese talents coming to the sector. Liu Zelin often shares one anecdote that impressed her very much: a Zhihu (Chinese equivalent of Quora, a popular social question-and-answer platform) posting on the simple question "What is arts management really about?” generated a huge amount of enthusiastic input, with many of the users sharing their own study experience atvarious arts management institutions across the globe: from SAIC (Chicago) to CSM (London), Carnegie Mellon, Gold Smith, Melbourne University, Università di Bologna (Italy) and so on… "Such oversea-educated arts managers surely are bringing fresh views and skill sets to the Chinese creative world,” Liu said, "both generically and, serving as a unique inspiration ahead the journey, for arts education back at middle school.”