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Wang Dahua

Stage actor and woodcut artist who played the brother Wang Xiao'er in the 1943 yangge play Brother and Sister Open the Wasteland, a landmark of yangge song-and-dance theatre.

Also known as Also known as Duanmu Yan

Wang Dahua, also known as Duanmu Yan, was born in Weifang, Shandong, in 1919. In 1936 he entered the National Drama School in Nanjing to study stage design, and he was also a woodcut artist. As a drama teacher at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts he premiered the yangge play Brother and Sister Open the Wasteland with his student Li Bo in Yan'an at the 1943 Spring Festival, playing the brother Wang Xiao'er; staged as yangge song and dance, it drew huge crowds and made him the best-known performer of the new yangge theatre. He later also directed and designed for touring troupes. On 21 December 1946 he died in a fall from a vehicle while travelling to Nehe to collect folk material, aged twenty-seven.

Life and times

  1. 1919BornRepublican Era
  2. 1946 CEDied

Works

  1. Stage · Plays1
    1. Brother and Sister Clear the WastelandFirst performed at the 1943 Spring FestivalFirst staged in Yan'an at the 1943 Spring Festival, and called the first of the new yangge plays