Author(s)

Xinyu Zhu ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Shanghai Pinghe School, Shanghai, 200000, China

Corresponding Author

ABSTRACT

My most successful learning experience often happened on stage. Ever since I took theatre and musicals as my hobby, I experienced the flow of focus and the strength of quick learning. To be a good actress took more than good memory of the scripts, beautiful voice for the songs, and elegant postures for the performances. To understand the characters, the settings, and the context brought me into a new realm of how drama education and theatre itself could enhance other areas of learning. It prompts me to question the cognitive relationship between acting and understanding. Therefore, I chose to study how drama could enhance empathy for my Yuanpei Academic Project. My own experiences in acting taught me to feel what the characters feel, so as to perform and act out with more reality. Good performers and artists have more empathy towards humanities because they are usually more perceptive to the world and more expressive to convey their understanding of events and emotions to the audience, moving the spectators from passive observers to active empathetic participants.

KEYWORDS

CITE THIS PAPER

Xinyu Zhu. A Brief Literature Review of How Drama Enhances Empathy for Both Its Performers and Audiences. Art and Performance Letters (2021) 2: 69-73. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/artpl.2021.22012.

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