Central Academy of Drama
- Chinese name
- 中央戏剧学院
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
1210000040000553XA- Website
The Central Academy of Drama (中央戏剧学院), China’s leading drama conservatory in Beijing’s Dongcheng district, is the artistic co-creator of Digital Mei Lanfang (数字梅兰芳) — the master-reconstruction project launched with Beijing Institute of Technology at the Mei Lanfang Grand Theatre in November 2021, with Tencent technical support, to recreate the Peking-opera master as a high-fidelity real-time digital human approaching the real person in appearance, body, voice and performance. Where BIT supplies the imaging and real-time engineering, the academy supplies the theatrical layer: the performance tradition, likeness scholarship and staging that make the reconstruction a dramatic work rather than a scan.
Digital beings keep recurring in its own productions and discourse: its 2026 original cross-media drama Fissure of Love, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe, stages an AI scientist who builds the 女娲影 digital-twin system to preserve the memories of the dead, performed by real actors alongside embodied robots; and visiting professor Weng Dongdong (翁冬冬, also of BIT’s optoelectronics school) is a recurring public voice on whether digital virtual images can replace human performers.