Recently, the opening demonstration meeting of “Theoretical Research on Playwriting in Chinese Drama”, a 2022 National Social Science Fund of China Major Project in Artistic Studies, was successfully held in an online and offline-combined mode.
This is another milestone in the development of the subject of playwriting since it was established and launched in 2007 by Professor Lu Jun, a master teacher on the list of the national “10,000 Master Teachers Program”, a fellow of the Shanghai Institute of Culture and History, and chairman of the Academic Committee of the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
This is also a new effort and a new breakthrough of Professor Lu Jun in the field of theoretical research on playwriting for drama after his "Research on the Status Quo, Problems and Countermeasures of Playwriting in Chinese Opera" was approved by the National Social Science Fund of China as one of its major projects in artistic studies in 2016, which was the first-ever project of its kind for Shanghai local universities, and was granted the status of exemption from project-end inspection.
As one of the important results of the preliminary research of the project "Theoretical Research on Playwriting in Chinese Drama", the book launch of "Collected Works of Xiong Foxi" was also held on the same day. The book was presided over by Yang Yang, vice president of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Huang Changyong, president of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and Wen Zeyuan, party secretary and president of the Shanghai People's Publishing House, delivered speeches respectively. Huang Changyong also presented books to Xiong Mengchu, a representative of Mr Xiong Foxi’s family members. The “Collected Works of Xiong Foxi” is published by the Shanghai People's Publishing House, with Lu Jun as the editor-in-chief and Hu Chuanmin as the deputy editor-in-chief. It is a six-volume edition, which systematically contains nearly 500 works (parts) of Mr Xiong Foxi, a famous modern Chinese drama educator and playwright. It is an anthology that collects the most detailed, complete and authoritative research literatures on Xiong Foxi so far. This set of books has also been included in the Shanghai Social Science Masters’ Library, and is a key project funded by the Publicity Department of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee.
After the release of the preliminary results, the opening demonstration meeting began. Xie Wei, party secretary of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Qiu Yihong, director of the National Management Centre for Art Science Planning Projects, and Sun Zhenrong, deputy director-general of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, delivered speeches successively.
Zhu Hengfu, a professor at the Shanghai Normal University, a member of the Steering Committee for Chinese Language Teaching in Institutions of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education, and the leader of the opening demonstration expert group, presided over the opening demonstration of the project. Professor Lu Jun made a presentation to introduce the project.
The members of the research team of the project were born in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s respectively, showing a reasonable academic echelon structure. Among them, Professor Lu Jun has been engaged in playwriting, playwriting teaching, and playwriting research for a long time, and has innovatively separated playwriting from drama to become an independent new discipline, and has continuously paved the way for the construction of this new discipline from the eight dimensions of playwriting history, playwriting ontology, playwriting creation, playwriting comparison, playwriting criticism, playwriting application, playwriting teaching, and playwriting development. Professor Song Baozhen is a leading figure in the study of Chinese drama theory, while Professor Peng Tao and Professor Liu Yanhui are active young and middle-aged backbone academics, and Li Shitao and Chen Haobo are excellent young scholars. Each of the six experts has not only national-level research projects under study, and some of them are still influential playwrights. Both the age structure and the knowledge structure have provided favorable conditions for the smooth progression of this research project.
The expert group highly recognized the theoretical value and practical significance of the project, and believed that the project was fully prepared in the early stage, with solid research foundation, clear objectives, clear thinking, prominent focus and strict logic, and also gave full encouragement to the expected results of the project team. Experts also put forward opinions and suggestions on the research ideas and specific research methods of the project from different perspectives.
Yao Yuhang, project director of the National Management Centre for Art Science Planning Projects, Xu Kaiyu, director of the Scientific Research Division of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, Hu Min, deputy party secretary of the Shanghai Academy of Drama, Liu Qing, vice president of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Sang Biao, director of the Shanghai Institute of Educational Sciences, Zhao Weihua, deputy editor of the Shanghai People's Publishing House, Wang Shengliang, editor of the Shanghai Dictionary Publishing House, and a number of famous experts and scholars, as well as the heads of the relevant functional offices of STA, attended the demonstration meeting.
