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Students perform an excerpt from a classical drama as part of the San khau hoc duong (School Theater) project |
Keeping Vietnam’s traditional culture alive and relevant can take a bit of prodding.
A national project to bring traditional theater and junior high school students together is proving successful in Da Nang City on the central coast.
San khau hoc duong (School Theater) gets students between 12 and 15 years old involved both as spectators and performers in different genres, including the satirical musical theater known as cheo and the classical drama called tuong.
The focus in Da Nang is on tuong, which originated in the central region more than 500 years ago.
So far, some 200 students from six of the city’s secondary schools have taken part.
The organizations responsible for taking Vietnam’s traditional theater to a younger generation are the Bureau of Performing Arts and the Center for National Cultural Research, Preservation and Development.
Ending its second stage last year and heading for the third stage in the near future, the project’s approach is first to have students watch professional artists perform onstage.
After each show, the actors explain the significance of the stage sets and the characters’ facial expressions, body gestures, costumes, and even the beards on some of the male characters.
Next comes the acting part, for which the six participating schools and Da Nang’s Nguyen Hien Dinh Theater have chosen talented students for three months of acting lessons and performance.
Explaining their approach, Principal Nguyen Dinh Hung of Nguyen Phu Huong Secondary School notes that it is perfectly reasonable for people to be uninterested in something they know nothing about.
“These kids showed very little interest or none at all when they were watching the professionals perform, but their attitude changed completely when they got involved as performers,” he explains.
“Once a desire for new things is sparked, they will join in voluntarily and practice with enthusiasm.”
What’s more, their newfound interest rubs off on their peers and encourages more young people to go to the theater.
Professor Hoang Chuong from the project’s steering committee says it’s a good sign that the students are performing standard pieces of tuong along with excerpts from old tales and the history books.
“How lovely it is to see students of 12 and 13 years old beating drums and playing wind instruments,” he exclaims.
“Classical drama will not disappear as long as young people are keen on it and spread their enthusiasm around. We’ll know when we can hand the job over to them,” the professor says.
Still, the project’s facilitators do not expect to find any actors or actresses of the future through the School Theater, says Nguyen Hien Dinh Theater’s Director, Tran Dinh Sanh.
“The idea is simply to make young people more aware of tuong and what it has to offer,” says Sanh, and adds that the Discovering Tuong program will be expanded across the whole of Da Nang soon.
Nguyen Van Thanh is one of many Da Nang students who has benefited from School Theater.
“By actually playing a historical hero, the background information about him that I looked up before will stay with me for a long time. This could well be the easiest way for me to study history,” the keen youngster says.
Since it began in November 2001, School Theater has drawn more than 1,000 students from 55 schools in 18 provinces, among them Thua Thien Hue and Binh Dinh in the central region, and Bac Giang and Hung Yen in the north, according to the Bureau of Performing Arts.
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