What's the school play?

On the evening of July 10, the Beijing People's Art Theatre was filled with the breath of youth, and the "2002 College Students' Drama Exhibition" kicked off here. In the next half-month, 18 plays written, directed and performed by students from 12 universities across the country will be staged one by one.

The slogan on the bright red poster of this exhibition is "enthusiasm, distinctiveness and purity". In the opening performances of capital university of economics and business's Night Spirit, China Renmin University's Miss Moban, I am the poet's daughter and Civilized City that night, the so-called props are desks and chairs that are moved casually; The so-called role costume is the clothes that students wear when they go in and out of campus on weekdays. Simple and pure enthusiasm and endless desire to express, college students show the audience the charm of "poverty drama".

In the past, the campus drama once made us remember the names of Tian Han, Cao Yu and Li Shutong. In recent years, while the drama stage is full of pirated classics and "pseudo-pioneers", independent creation, deep thinking, sincere expression and sharp perspective from campus have become fresh kinetic energy in the drama industry.

Last July, drama lovers from four universities in Beijing walked out of the ivory tower for the first time. I am mentally retarded, I am innocent, Spring Blossoms, Ending, Beginning and Wojcek. In the first round, people outside the university walls were moved to watch the campus drama. The "First College Students' Drama Exhibition" left many people with touching, shocking and unspeakable hopes.

The attempt from this began to go further and further. In March this year, Wocek was admitted to Shanghai Theatre Arts Center by Sun Theatre Society of Beijing Institute of Technology. Some insiders commented that the "Student Edition" of Polytechnic University can be compared with the "Montessori Edition" of Meng Jinghui. In May, another science and engineering college, Beihang University, staged a drama "When the Moon Rises" during the second Beijing University Students Quyi Cultural Exchange Festival. At the beginning of July, some young people with formal backgrounds also started their first attempt to make a career. The graduation drama "The Butcher" of the Performance Department of the Central Academy of Drama was successfully staged a few days ago. The film and television performance major of Beijing Normal University Art Department put Hugo's "Thousand Yuan Bounty" on the China stage first.

Lin Zhaohua, a famous drama director, said that the deepest feeling of student drama is "freedom". He predicted that drama would become more diversified.

Some people once thought that students' plays were vulgar and immature. However, Justin, a member of the organizing committee of the two-term college drama exhibition and a drama producer in Beijing Performance Workshop, said: "Compared with professionals, college drama is not bound by any business, and it is more tolerant of loneliness, showing more pure artistic pursuit, greater creative enthusiasm and broader imagination. "

As one of the sponsors of two drama exhibitions, Zhang Guangtian spent more than two months helping Beihang students to choose scripts, rehearse and stage When the Moon Rises. He believes that the so-called "professional" and "amateur" are not different in performance system, nor in the vulgarity of acting skills, but in whether they are "creative". Even if you are a well-trained person, if you only have a teahouse at the age of 50, then you are a real amateur.

Justin said that the original intention of college students' drama performance is to let more young people pay attention to and get in touch with drama in a participatory way, and at the same time give students who love drama a chance to be recognized and exercised. But now it seems that the significance of college students' drama performance goes far beyond this.

Zhang Guangtian thinks, "Maybe college students' plays are just for fun at first, but there is no doubt that they are showing more and more creative consciousness." Zhang Guangtian believes that in recent years, China's drama stage seems to be prosperous, but in fact, no drama can leave a deep impression on people. The vital things brought by college students will deal a heavy blow to the drama stage in China. So he even said: "Performance is the best educational opportunity in the drama industry. First of all, educate them to enhance their creativity, and then educate them to be younger in creative psychology, and educate them-don't always experiment with the state of drama in the 1980s! "

As we all know, college students' drama is also dubbed "poverty drama", and having no money is an embarrassment that almost every student drama club has encountered. In this regard, Justin believes that money should not be the primary consideration of school drama. Too much money will dilute the purity of art, and always thinking about where to apply for funds will make you deviate more and more from the play itself. Gu Lei, director of Wojcek and a student of Beijing Institute of Technology, one of the first performances last year, agreed that "if we inject too much money, it will hurt our creativity."

How to expand the living space of campus drama? Some people in the drama industry believe that schools should give students more free creative space and standardized management, and the drama industry should also provide students with venues and props to help them apply for funds and provide some platforms for communication.

But apart from funds, college drama does face other problems. For example, poor professionalism: immature pronunciation, rigid body language, word processing is not suitable for stage performances and so on. In addition, most members of the campus drama club come from different departments, so it is difficult to concentrate on rehearsals, let alone "iron soldiers", and the continuity of the drama club is often destroyed.

However, it seems that all the problems faced by campus drama can finally be made up by the enthusiasm of college students. For many young people of campus drama, drama gives them another life experience.

Sun, the screenwriter and director of Civilized City and China Renmin University, was invited to tell the audience something before the performance. He said vaguely, "I can only speak drama, so I can't say it." Drama is where the soul dances. "

An insider in the drama industry quoted the author of the German writer Vojcsek as saying: "Abandoning all kinds of excuses and reasons, at a certain moment, the drama recovered its original appearance, a long-lost spiritual life and collective life. At this time, it is closely related to the belief of survival: groaning and screaming for us, confessing and reveling. "

For more students, campus drama may still be an inevitable passing by in their campus life for several years. Some college students once described his school drama as follows: "There are always some thriving things in Jingjing campus: books, hormones, vigorous and vanished love, and at the same time, there are some things embellished with them, even becoming memorials themselves: football, beer and drama."