19 November 2014
The Shanghai Theatre Academy began hosting the International Expert Symposium on Innovation in Performance and Entertainment in 2012. This year, the event was held from 27 October to 1 November in the form of a workshop and with a high profile theme of Mediating Cultural Heritage. Mr Han Sheng, President of STA, attended the opening ceremony which was held at the STA Virtual Studio on 30 October, as well as a number of activities during the workshop.
Mediating cultural heritage seeks to address the protection, inheritance and innovative application of cultural heritage in the context of new technologies. With the introduction and recommendation of Mr Hans Georg Knopp who is STA’s senior strategic advisor, Motion Bank was chosen as a key project of this year’s international expert workshop. Motion Bank is an innovative research project developed by the Forsyth Company in Germany. Its initial function was to record, analyze, decode and transmit modern dance and have the result results published online in an attempt to compile a “dance score” similar to a music score that is easy to identify, keep and transmit, using digital methods. After 20 years of accumulated efforts, Motion Bank has gradually expanded its scope of research to the inheritance and protection of the diversified ethnic arts of different countries, including the Chinese traditional opera arts. This year’s workshop took Peking Opera, i.e. the most representative branch of the Chinese traditional opera, as the subject of research, in particular, the male role with painted face in Peking Opera. The research used Motion Bank’s technical standards to capture and process the information and presented it to the experts for discussion during the workshop with the objective of making the Motion Bank research more suitable to the Chinese traditional opera.
During the workshop, the international experts also gave several inspiring lecturers, highlighting the cutting-edge trends of development in the field of performance and entertainment internationally.
