Short Play Festival - A Reading of Plays Written in English is held successfully as part of 2019 Hundred, Thousand and Ten Thousand-Character Plays Playwriting Workshop

Publisher:主页英文版Time:2019-12-30Views:101

23 December 2019

The Short Play Festival - A Reading of Plays Written in English, being part of the Hundred, Thousand and Ten Thousand-Character Plays Playwriting Workshop under the Cooperative Training Program for Postgraduate Students of Playwriting between the Shanghai Theatre Academy and the Columbia University of the USA, was held in the Jing’an District Cultural Centre.

The Short Play Festival – A Reading of Plays Written in English was set up and presided over by Professor Lu Jun, the founder of the Hundred, Thousand and Ten Thousand-Character Plays Playwriting Workshop, and it was an important part of the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA)’s cooperative training program with the Columbia University, an internationally first-class university in the USA.

Up to now, the cooperative training program for postgraduate students of playwriting between STA and Columbia University has been successfully carried out for five rounds by way of Professor Lu Jun, chairman of STA’s Academic Committee and director of STA Playwriting Research Centre exchanging postgraduate students with Professor David Henry Hwang, chairman of the Dramatists Guild of America, head of playwriting at Columbia University School of the Arts and author of “M. Butterfly” for cooperative training, i.e. every year the two universities students to study at each other’s university.

This year, thanks to this exchange program presided over by Professor Lu Jun, three students of the Columbia University, namely, Daniel Rattner, Marty Murray and Paola Alexandra Soto, came to the Shanghai Theatre Academy. In addition to experiencing the course and life full of Chinese characteristics and culture, the three students also brought the Columbia University’s teaching mode and writing concept for playwriting to the students of STA through the course of Short Plays Written in English, which opened a channel for the students of STA to further understand their way and concept of creation. Through this course, students from the Columbia University and STA interacted with each other, learnt from each other's strengths and made up for each other's weaknesses. Under the guidance of the Professor Lu Jun, they studied and grew up, and constantly improved their skills and abilities for playwriting.

Towards the end of the “Short Plays Written in English” course, the three students from the Columbia University, under the guidance of Professor Lu Jun, selected a total of eight short plays written in English by the students of STA, and held a reading session of those plays in the Jing'an District Cultural Centre on the morning of 20 December. This was a display of scripts and, more importantly, a test of teaching results.