Miss Li, a young migrant worker in Hangzhou, walked into a theater in Hangzhou city for the first time in her life this week to watch a play called "Rural Workers' Shed" at the on-going China Arts Festival. She left with tears swelling in her eyes.

The play, staged by an art troupe in Li's hometown in southwest China's Yunnan Province, tells the story of how a Party secretary in a rural village leads his village folks to work in a big city to get riches and happiness.

In the course of China's economic reforms, rural people in their hundreds of millions left their native land to look for vacancies in large cities.

"It seems to me that we are at the bottom of the social ladder. Nobody understands and cares about us, let alone really knowing what we need," Li complained.

But Li changed her mind when the troupe visited her home and invited workers living in the construction site sheds to watch their play for free of. The playwright, Li Shiqin, lived together with workers, listened to their personal bitter stories and witnessed the disputes between workers and their employer and an accident at the building site.

"I liked the play very much as it was based on our everyday life. Moreover, it told us that we can become accustomed to urban life just like the people in the play," said a farmer-turned construction worker from east China's Zhejiang Province.

Many plays and performances staged during the current China Arts Festival portray the true life of ordinary people in China. For instance, one modern drama depicts the life of laid-off workers. A song-and-dance duet popular in northeast China tells a love story between a garbage collector and his fiancee. The "Xiaobaihua" Shaoxing Opera Troupe has created a fascinating play about finding love through the Internet.

For years, audiences for Chinese theater were usually government officials, intellectuals and art workers. Common urbanites and farmers, however, who number about 800 million in China, have had few opportunities to appreciate modern dramas.

The structure of audiences has changed over recent years, as a growing number of rural people have flowed into large cities, and traditional plots involving emperors or ancient talented scholars and beautiful ladies lost their market. And more and more playwrights came to realize that only by reflecting the daily life of common people could they succeed.

Chen Zhenlian, director of the Art Research Institute at prestigious Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, holds that all art forms stem from people's real life, and that stage art must conform to the interests of common people.

The "perspective of common people" has been highly appreciated by the current session of the China Arts Festival.

Yang Jianxin, head of the CAF organizing commission, noted thata crucial criterion to judge candidate plays for the national awards of performing arts, or Wenhua Awards, is a theme close to the life of commoners.
 
(Xinhua News Agency September 23, 2004)