Bright young things with stars in their eyes

Bayes, a professor at the Yale School of Drama with about 30 years' experience in the industry, is known for his clown acting, a highly demonstrative comedy that encourages students to wear a red nose and act accordingly.

His class is very demanding physically. During the school's open day students said they were exhausted after only the first one-hour warmup session of a class that would last six hours.

"There's a lot of running and screaming, opening up and being fierce," Bayes says. "And also trying to soften a little so we can really listen to what the body has to say to us. So that's the way we start every day. And then they write and sing songs."

The purpose of these exercises, Bayes says, is to help the actors accomplish tasks they always fear, so that they can feel liberated from shame and embarrassment.

"I really encourage a lot of stupidity and idiocy in the classes, because that's when you really start to have fun. You've got yourself not to be so smart; there's not a lot of fun being smart, but there's a lot of fun to be found in your deepest stupidity."

In August the Dome Studio, aiming to build long-term exchange programs with the world's leading acting institutes, welcomed students from the Yale School of Drama. It will also work with the Tisch School of the Arts in exchanging teachers and with the China Film Directors Guild Young Director Support Program to offer its students more practical opportunities.

When the Dome Studio celebrated its first anniversary recently it opened an application portal for its 2019 beginners' program.

"We've really just been exploring what we can do, but the atmosphere at the studio in the first year was very positive," Chen Kun says. "The relationship between the students and the teachers is one of mutual encouragement. For me, their young, lively spirit is the perfect antidote to fatigue."

As the studio's anniversary approached, the studio asked 20 or so actors involved with it over the past year, along with its three founders, to talk on the studio's website about the happiness that acting brings.

Zhao Lixin, an actor on both stage and screen who attracted a lot of young fans on The Sound with his dexterity in English, German, French and Spanish, said he could not think of anything he would rather do other than acting as a career.

The internationally renowned actor Jackie Chan expressed a similar passion for the craft.

"Each film, each character and each scene, for me, are one experience of a lifetime. These experiences combined represent happiness itself."

One of the aspirations of the Dome Studio's founders is to pass on such passion for acting to a new generation of actors.

"Serious actors have the privilege to create happiness from within," Chen Kuo-fu says.

That the Dome Studio's students are indeed sowing seeds of joy - and perhaps even of future careers - becomes crystal clear when you listen to a delighted Chen Kun enthuse about what it is achieving.

"It's wonderful to see how the students' love for acting becomes a drive in learning, and their internal changes bring to them a kind of vigor that transcends their looks. It's beautiful."

chengyuezhu@chinadaily.com.cn