Learning games

Li Li brought her 6-year-old son to the open day because she wanted an unconventional extracurricular activity to emphasize his overall development.

"The workshop is based on theater education but it also incorporates education in picture books, traditional culture and even natural sciences, which I think is very comprehensive," she says.

Her son is a slightly reserved child and slow to warm up to others. Though there is nothing wrong in being an introvert, she says she hopes by attending the acting sessions, her son will be able to open up and communicate well with others when needed.

"I feel theater can help children to develop their minds and express themselves better," she adds.

The open day invited parents to exercise their imagination and perform the activities together with their children.

The workshop runs another project that targets amateur performers, and so far it has covered more than 8,000 participants after having started in 2019.

"When I started with children's theater education, my main aim was to influence generations of teachers. I feel in Chinese society, two groups of people have a major impact on children's future-mothers and teachers, and these two groups sometimes overlap," Liu says.

She says teachers and parents should acquire theatrical knowledge for education and parenting. She gives the example of a woman, who attended an acting course at the workshop with her son.

When the woman and her son got into an argument about doing homework later, she thought of the role-playing exercise they had learned, where parents and children took turns to play the "big tiger and small tiger".

The exercise became an effective way for them to release their negative emotions and communicate with each other as equals, Liu says.

"Everyone is first and foremost a human, and secondly has a social identity. We have gradually let our social identities become predominant while diminishing the part of us that is simply human. Hence, we bear more burden enforced by our social identities, and gradually lose ourselves."

She adds: "Both adults and children should make connections with their inner worlds via drama, rather than enshrining drama in the theaters or on screens.

"Nowadays, the popular ways of entertainment, such as escape rooms, are actually derived from drama, and they are able to bring people closer."

The workshop is also seeking to popularize advanced theater education in middle schools.

"Some schools have been working to create different kinds of environment for their students, whereby textbook knowledge can be truly applied to everyday scenarios," Liu says.