Nanjing University Signed Strategic Partnership Framework
with Guangzhou Opera House
On July 21, 2017, the party committee secretary of the Chinese Literature School of Nanjing University, Liu Chongxi, and the deputy director of innovation and entrepreneurship office, Dong Ting, signed a strategic partnership contract with the deputy general manager of Guangzhou Opera House, He Ying. They jointly unveiled the nameplate of “Nanjing University- Guangzhou Opera House Innovation and Entrepreneurship Base”, witnessing the opening of “D arts space”, an incubator that is based on a theater and designated to theater performing art, the first of its kind in the country.
Nanjing University, as one in the first batch of the model entrepreneurship and innovation bases in the country, focuses on building a campus mass entrepreneurship practice platform that combines production and development, a scientific achievement commercialization platform with joint efforts from university and local governments, a cultural creative industrial platform with coordination between university and corporate, and a innovation entrepreneurship supporting platform featured in international cooperation. In particular, the cultural creative industrial platform includes key projects of drama production and media industrialization.
Guangzhou Opera House is supervised by the state-owned enterprise China Arts and Entertainment Group (CAEG), an affiliate to Ministry of Culture. Guangzhou Opera House is hailed as one of the Top Ten Opera Houses in the world by USA Today, the largest daily newspaper in the U.S. by circulation. Guangzhou Opera House is an important cultural icon in the city. It keeps introducing high-quality performances both domestic and abroad. In addition, it embarks on arts education activities and therefore enjoys a high reputation in the country.
The cooperation between Nanjing University and Guangzhou Opera House is significant, as it will fully employs the rich academic resources from the drama and media subject at Nanjing University, and the artist resource from Guangzhou Opera House. It will also take advantage of the performing platform to better explore artistic innovative resource, and cultivate talent both in theory and practice to incubate cultural creation projects and teams in drama industry.
The signing ceremony coincidentally fell into the time of Guangzhou Arts Festival. “The face of Chiang Kai-shek”, a play dubbed as the “miracle of campus theater”, was invited to kick-off the festival’s “Youth Drama Talent Cultivation Program”. The tickets of the play were available on sale for only two weeks; yet the first day was marked with a ticket crunch—almost all of the 1,600 tickets were sold.
The script of “The face of Chiang Kai-shek” was originally written by then junior undergraduate of Nanjing University Wen Fangyi in 2012. The deputy head of the School of Chinese Literature, and dean of the department of theater and media arts, Lv Xiaoping was the play’s director. An academic paper tuning into one of the most well-received and influential original plays, the phenomenon is a great force in campus theater that cannot be overlooked. This play was selected “the best performing arts project” by Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture, and won the Jiangsu Provincial 9th Spiritual Civilization Construction Award of Five-one Project (2012-2014) in 2015. Since its debut in 2012, The Face of Chiang Kai-shek has been played publicly for over 285 times. Following its success, the team has registered in 2014 a Nanjing University master of arts theater company, with a market-oriented management approach to run the plays, which yields in millions of revenue in box office and outstanding social and economic benefits.
This time’s cooperation has gathered support from Guangzhou alumni association of Nanjing University. In addition to alumni from Guangzhou, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Shenzhen, there are alumni across the country from Nanjing, Changsha, Shanghai and Changchun coming to watch the play. Investors from cultural, media and innovative creative industries in Guangzhou also rushed to buy the tickets to come.