Crowdsourced Student and Other Amateur Productions
We aspire to give traditional Chinese plays a broader footprint in the imagination of Anglophone audiences; conversely, we also hope to delight audiences familiar with Chinese plays a taste of what younger generations can do when they engage with these materials.
Over the course of several years, at The Ohio State University students from all kinds of backgrounds--international students from the PRC, Asian Americans, Chinese majors, students fulfilling literature requirements--would sign up for a medium-enrollment course called "Chinese Drama." In this course, it became quickly apparent that some of the deepest engagement with the assigned plays from the corpus of traditional Chinese drama took the form of live performance.
Originally, we did not record any of these live productions. However, when the course was offered through ZOOM in spring 2021, all the students negotiated the need to substitute live performance with a ZOOM-mediated adaptation in wonderfully creative ways. It it those adaptations that will be featured here with the permission of the students involved.
Now that the Chinese Theater Collaborative has gone live, we hope that other student and amateur performers will want to share their creations with us.