On the evening of June 6, 2021, the course final performance of Drama Performance was successfully performed in the atrium on the second floor of the North Building of School of Creativity and Art. Thanks to the efforts of the instructor Tao Zhou and nine students for sixteen weeks, the course of this semester came to a successful conclusion, and the performance was warmly welcomed by the students of various colleges. As the number of spectators who came that night exceeded expectations, so the scene had to temporarily remove seats, so everyone stood around the stage and watched, allowing you to experience a small immersive performance.
The repertoire of this performance is a fragment of The Dawn Here Are Quiet. The play is adapted from the novel of the same name written by Boris Lvovich Vasiliev. It tells the story of Warrant Officer Vaskov leading five women during the Great Patriotic War. The story of a soldier fought fiercely and brutally in a vast forest.
It is worth mentioning that for the first time this semester, everyone tried a venue with a height difference as a stage, which enhanced the sense of spatial hierarchy, and at the same time, it was not a small challenge to the lighting arrangement and the design of the stage moving route of the actors. Under the guidance of Teacher Zhou Tao, everyone cleverly used the stairs and platforms on site to create different scenes such as rivers, mountains and forests. With the sound effects and lighting changes on site, it can be described as immersive. With the performance of the actors, everyone slowly walked into this poignant story, saw the pain caused by the war, and saw the most sincere and pure emotions in the disaster.
Rehearsal at three o'clock late at night......
In order to allow everyone to have a deeper understanding of the script, Box exercises will be conducted every semester. That is, after reading the script in one breath, everyone needs to find the object that best represents their understanding of the script within five minutes, put it in the box, and share it with classmates in the next class; in class, everyone also needs to experience And interpret the items brought by other students. Box practice allows everyone to fully communicate after reading the script, making the rehearsal afterwards more fluent.
In class, each group of students will show the results of last week's rehearsal. Teacher Tao Zhou will give suggestions and opinions on the performance, and the students will also share their views based on the problems encountered during the rehearsal. The students gradually reached consensus in their communication with the teacher. From the initial single-player practice, multi-player practice, and then to the final script rehearsal, the nine students have made considerable progress. At the beginning, most people will be at a loss or use too much effort, but in the end, almost all the students can do it freely. This is the result of the accumulation of small progress every week.
More performance moments↓
The Drama Performance course adopts small class teaching. Since the start of the course in the fall of 2018, about 100 students in the school have taken this course. This course is based on the Steinney table director system, combined with the current performance workshop training mode of European and American drama teaching, and is an artistic practice course for students who are interested in performing arts to improve their performance and expression skills. As a general education course, through the influence of drama art, it provides new enlightenment for students' personal cultivation, emotional development, and language expression.
Student testimonials:：
No, it's not over yet, far from it. Maybe I didn't learn to spit out the lines smoothly and clearly until the end so that the audience could hear clearly, and some small details of the final performance were still so unsatisfactory in retrospect. I acted as a German temporarily, and 'died' before being hit by a knife. These imperfections will alert me and warn me: There are so many places to be tempered in your life! (Dadi Xu)
Rehearsal has been my main theme for almost a month. Every time the teacher's guidance always surprises me; our own thinking and discussion over and over again will always give me infinite satisfaction after the final implementation of the real plan. I also be exhausted in the middle of the night, but it is so precious to start communicating with my friends about my true feelings; I also get tired of repeating the lines over and over again, but we have integrated the lines into our lives, and then become more and more adept. From the stage to the props to the music, countless efforts. The ending was perfect, it was our most satisfying one, and it was a highlight of our lives. (Ruiyan Xia)
By chance, I chose this course on the recommendation of my classmates. Surprisingly surprised, this is my favorite course at the graduate level. The professional guidance of Mr. Tao Zhou and the enthusiasm and dedication of the students have deeply infected me. For the first time, I found that it is so happy and satisfying to accomplish something with all my heart and energy, and the value of these things to me is far beyond a course. Before I came into contact with drama performance, I thought drama was artistic and perceptual, but in the course, teacher Tao Zhou's script analysis and character emotion analysis were full of logic and reasoning, and each step was strictly in accordance with the development of the story and the state of the characters. Looking for the reasons behind the emotions and actions of the characters, these analyses and inferences shocked me, and also made me feel the powerful and meticulous logic of the drama. At the same time, it was the rehearsal process that made me discover that drama has high requirements for actors'comprehensive ability, not only in advance preparation, emotional training, and even language skills and physical fitness. For teachers and classmates, Mr. Tao Zhou's professionalism amazed me, especially his grasp of delicate emotions and control of language explosiveness. It is worthy of me to study hard, and even accompany us to rehearse till late at night. This is a rare seriousness and persistence in things; The classmates are also very conscientious, often rehearsing until four in the morning, and their youthful vitality makes me feel the simplicity of the students and the long-lost heart of a child, which has a great impact on me. I would like to thank the teachers, teaching assistants, and classmates for bringing me a lot of drama performance in the graduate stage. It seems that I have re-experienced a period of life and chose a different career direction, which makes me grow and unforgettable. (Xin Chen)
After the performance, I took a shower. I hid in the shower curtain and cried bitterly under the cover of the sound of water because my characters were dead tonight. My friend told me that this might be a performance personality. I don't know if I really am a performance personality, but I do love acting, there is no doubt about it. (Rusong Ding)
We live in limited time and space, and our cognition and thinking are more or less restricted to a mode. Art, as a way to enlighten thinking and nourish the soul, plays an unprecedentedly important role. As a kind of art, drama 'creates' a new time and space and gives us the opportunity to experience different lives. The absurdity, twists and turns and even the plot of science fiction in the drama may never happen in our real life, but the laughter and cry in the drama have important enlightening significance to our current life. (Jianping Li)
In the course of this semester, every student of the teacher and the crew has invested a lot. There is a classroom with lights on at four in the morning, and there is a polishing of the performance details over and over again. The most important thing is in this highly competitive era, a group of similar but different people were found to be able to constantly strive for the same pure goal, so suddenly they had the courage and strength to continue working hard. (Ziling Chen)
Throughout the course of drama performance, I learned a lot about acting, and also realized that it is not easy to be an actor. The understanding of the role requires a lot of time to polish. Several falls and fighting scenes can also cause certain damage to the body. . All in all, this course has taught me a lot. Thank you very much for your help and encouragement, as well as the very professional guidance of the teacher. (Zhe Wang)
