20 May 2019
Youth is full of dreams and infinite imagination. On the afternoon of 19 May 2019, the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA) held the press conference on the 4th "Think Youth" Shanghai University Students Cultural Creative Works Display Season Drama and Dance Works Showcase in the conference room on the first floor of the STA Experimental Theatre. Liu Qing, Vice President of STA, Shen Liang, Director of the Academic Affairs Division, and representatives of teachers and students from the prize-winning creative teams attended the press conference. More than ten media organizations, including Guangming Daily, Liberation Daily, Xinmin Evening News, People.cn, Shanghai Youth Daily, Eastday.com, Netease, Sina, Shanghai Education News and Shanghai Education Television Station, participated in the conference. The press conference was presided over by Bao Lifeng, Deputy Director of the Publicity Department of the STA Party Committee and Deputy Director of the STA Party Committee Office and President Office.
The "Think Youth" Shanghai University Students Cultural Creative Works Display Season Drama and Dance Works Showcase is sponsored by the Shanghai Education and Health Work Party Committee and the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and organized by the Shanghai Theatre Academy. It is intended to implement the important plan of deepening the reform of innovation and entrepreneurship education in tertiary institutions, support Shanghai’s efforts to build itself into a cultural and creative industry center and establish its cultural brand, open up the transformation chain of student works-product incubation-cultural commodities, and bring up excellent cultural innovation and entrepreneurship talents. The "Think Youth" event is a stage to showcase the practice and innovation achievements of college and university students with their original works, as well as a platform for innovation and development. Over the past four years since the inception of the event, it has trained a large number of excellent innovative students in the cultural industry, and has driven entrepreneurship through innovation and driven employment through entrepreneurship. It has built a broad entrepreneurship platform and provided broad employment channels for students, and helped a batch of students transform their creative ideas into cultural products. With all these, it has been widely recognized by all sectors of society.
This year is the fourth consecutive year that STA has organized the "Think Youth" Shanghai University Students' Cultural Creative Works (Drama and Dance Works) Collection and Showcase. This event has been actively participated by colleges and universities in Shanghai. A total of 113 works from 19 universities have been received this year. After two months of works collection, 11 first prizes, 21 second prizes and 35 third prizes for drama and dance were selected, and some of them were further selected for participating in the showcase. This year’s prize-winning works included drama, musical play, Chinese traditional opera, puppet play, solo dance, double dance, triple dance, group dance, dance play and other forms of artistic expression. These excellent works combined tradition with fashion and classic with modern, and integrated innovative artistic ideas into artistic practice. The vivid and lively performances demonstrated the unique stage expressiveness, positive spirit, and advanced and courageous consciousness for innovation and entrepreneurship of today’s college and university students, showing the new style of a new generation of young theatre students and young literary and artistic workers.
The "Think Youth" event provides a stage to show the practice and innovation achievements of students with their original works. Comparing with the previous three years, the nominated works received in this year’s event had been significantly improved in terms of creativity and concise connotation.
