Bridging the Gaps: mixed reality performance of Chinese Opera in rural and urban Shanghai

Bridging the Gaps brings together a cluster of pre-selected UK-China experts with complementary skills to explore the potential of mixed reality performance in bridging Shanghai's rural and urban communities and developing respective creative economies. By "mixed reality performance" we mean performance that uses common and novel technologies to merge "real" and "virtual" worlds in the audience's experience and through which material, digital objects and actors interact in real time. Such performances may be fixed or locative and take place across one or multiple sites. This proposed project will focus on new and innovative performances of Chinese Opera, a form of popular culture traditionally relating to rural communities, as a case study to establish new China-UK research-industry partnerships and projects for long term development.

Xi Jinpings' Presidency of China has, from 2014, placed increasing emphasis on balancing rural-urban social economic development and positioned traditional Chinese art forms, including Chinese opera, as the anchor of China's creative and cultural industries (CCI). Since 1992, Shanghai has been identified by the Chinese Central Government as the 'Head of the Dragon' to lead economic development, yet disconnections between rural and urban communities and their respective creative practices and economies persist and have held CCI developments back.

Shanghai's rural-urban divisions exemplify these challenges. Shanghai is separated into Pudong and Puxi: the former originally comprising of underdeveloped rural countryside; the latter occupying affluent economic and cultural quarters built by former British, French and other foreign concessions. Whilst Western imported modern drama has been established since the early 20th century in Shanghai Puxi, as the symbol of Shanghai's young middle class - represented by Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre - Chinese opera, a form of popular culture, predominantly relating to rural communities and rural migrant workers in urban cities, carries low social and cultural capital and struggles to engage with the young urban audience.

By 2016, China emerged as the second largest economy in the world. Chinese opera has been fused with tourism for regional economic development and global soft power insertion, exemplified in 2017 by the £100 million investment in building an opera village, which includes a digital technology opera museum, at Shanghai Pudong Chuansha village, the very same village where the world's latest Disneyland Resort was opened a year earlier. Meanwhile, all five Shanghai Opera Houses (Kun Opera, Beijing Opera, All-female Yue Opera, Hu Opera, Huai Opera), whose offices are situated in Puxi's former French concession area but have no public performance space, receive increasing government subsidies for productions and new theatre complexes. However, both the Opera Village in Pudong and Opera Houses in Puxi continue to struggle to engage the young urban audience and attract visitors. Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, which locates amongst the cluster of five Shanghai opera houses in Puxi and is China's largest modern drama theatre outside Beijing, has never collaborated with any of the opera houses. The gaps in Shanghai between urban-rural, modern-tradition may be subtle, but thorough.

The UK-China research-industry partners have worked together under the 2019 (February - July) AHRC award UK-China Creative Industries Partnership Development "Bridging the Gaps", in which collaborative themes, methods and outcomes have been explored and a number of outputs, including a documentary film and special edition of Shanghai Arts Review, have been generated. Building on the achievements of the first stage partnership development, this proposal brings together a team of pre-selected UK-China research-industry partners with shared vision and commitment, through financial investment/in-kind contribution, to advance the collaboration.

The project will, from the outset, engage with six UK-China industry partners working in Shanghai to develop mixed reality performance and will generate pathways to impact on a range of non-academic audiences, professional groups and organisations:

1. Our first route to impact will be via the three productions (Product 1-Sound of the migrants; Product 2-Salome; Product 3-site specific performance - incorporating Product1&2 - linking Pudong and Puxi, Shanghai) and their engagement of rural and new urban audiences for Chinese opera. In the first year, the project will collate information on how diverse Shanghai opera acts as a way of life in rural and urban settings and how it has been absorbed into everyday practices; in years two and three, research data will be collated focused on Shanghai opera production style and consumption patterns; data will be recorded and will be edited and streamed periodically on the bilingual project website and interlinked with all partners existing webpages for maximised online readership: Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre engages an audience of more than 300,000 every year, mostly under 40 years of age; Shanghai Yue Opera House has the largest female audience across rural and urban Shanghai; Chuansha Opera Village is one of the latest national profile creative industries investments and has prominent government and social media coverage. There will be high interest and followers from all partners on this project.

2. The second pathway to impact comes from the research links, activities and outputs generated by the project's presence at the three International Festivals. Chuansha International Opera Festival was created in October 2018 to promote the diversity of Chinese opera, which currently has over 300 different regional forms; thousands of SME as well as government opera institutions registered for the 2019 Festival, with the highlight being the linking of international sites using digital media technology to celebrate events simultaneously. Since 2005, SDAC has been hosting the annual Shanghai International Festival with more than 150 productions from over twenty different countries registered and performed in the festival. The two Shanghai symposiums are scheduled to coincide with the two festival events. The development of joint products and partnerships will be consolidated through the 3rd and final Leeds symposium in month 36, coinciding with the 2023 Leeds International City of Culture Festival; again, a series of activities will be wrapped around, including sections of Product 1, 2&3 exhibitions and performances, staged at UK partner institutions and organizations along with the release of the project documentary film. This will provide an end-point and report back on emergent collaboration and new activities in relation to the project and beyond.

3. The third pathway to impact will be delivered through the project's catalysing of collaborations between the external partners, and potentially other participants, to develop and establish a creative industry chain, in which public and private sectors work reciprocally to identify new consumers and markets. Such a creative industry chain applies within UK partners, Chinese partners as well as across UK-China partners. The process assists UK SMEs (Invisible Flock, Human VR) to develop partnership with Shanghai Pudong Municipal Government (Chuansha Opera Village) and traditional and modern Chinese performing companies (Shanghai Yue Opera House, Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre) to engage directly with a leading UK theatre (Leeds Playhouse) for artistic creation and collaboration. This project provides a rare and excellent opportunity for them to enter the Chinese market as a cluster, with complementary areas of expertise, to provide each other linguistic and cultural support with shared resource whilst developing partnerships in Shanghai as a UK cluster, nurturing partnerships in China and establishing a long-term 'creative chain'.