Popular performance for new urban audiences: reconnecting M50 creative cluster with Shanghai All-Female Yue Opera

This project will engage new urban audiences with traditional Chinese opera through the digital mediation of performance into a heritage site in Shanghai, focusing on Shanghai All-Female Yue Opera and reviving its historical connection to the Shanghai M50 contemporary arts creative cluster. The project will explore how this kind of engagement with traditional forms may provide opportunities to enhance small and medium enterprise business development in partnership with the public sector, establishing a 'creative chain' that will enhance the diversity and sustainability of Shanghai's urban creative economy.

Yue Opera first entered Shanghai from the rural countryside of Zhejiang province following the influx of Zhejiang female workers to the expanding Shanghai textile industry in the early 20th century, where it evolved into an urban popular cultural form identified with female performers and audience in Shanghai. In the 1990s, nationwide state enterprise reform, textile factory closures and worker redundancies cut off the traditional audience as well as state patronage. The M50 creative cluster was established at the site of one such textile factory and has since developed into a world-renowned creative cluster. It currently houses more than 140 artists' studios, galleries and other creative companies, from over 20 countries and regions, presenting international contemporary art. It is today the symbol of China's transitional economy - from 'made in China' to 'created in China'. However, despite its historical association with Yue Opera, at M50 there is no presence associated with traditional Chinese opera and no tourism or other literature providing this link or history for visitors. This project will reconnect M50 to its historical association with Yue Opera, and re-present Yue Opera for a contemporary urban audience as an art form of constant evolution; and do so at a site now renowned for contemporary art, including media and digital work.

The project will result in a series of public site-specific installations at M50 developed through archival, historical and contemporary audience research and collaboration with local businesses and stakeholders. The installations will use digital media to re-present aspects of Yue Opera, and its historical links to M50, to a broad public. This will include the use of iPads by visitors acting as hand-held guides, large-scale projected installations of performance, the site-specific screening on monitors of contextual and other material, as well as the facilitation of visitor participation and the embedding of media into interactive objects of historical or contemporary relevance. The project will also result in a documentary video, a co-edited book, and a report to the Shanghai Municipal Government, to ensure the widest possible dissemination. The project will include two public symposia that will bring interested parties from the UK and China to contribute to and debate the implications of the project as it develops and in its culmination.

Our case study aims to demonstrate how by engaging new urban audiences for Yue Opera a creative industry chain may be built in collaborations between public and private sectors. In this creative industry chain, the private and public sectors work together to identify specific consumer groups and develop local markets: in this case in relationships between music business, design merchandise, and the reinterpretation of traditional performing arts. This creative industry chain is intended to outlive the duration of the research project and contribute to the diversity and sustainability of the creative economy development in Shanghai. In these ways, the project will contribute to Shanghai's ambitions to build a global cultural city of diversity, creativity and sustainability. The project will also offer a model relevant to the sustainable development of other traditional opera forms across China, of which there are up to 300 nationwide.

The project will generate pathways to impact on a range of non-academic audiences, professional groups and organisations:

1. Our first route to impact will be the M50 performance/installations and their engagement of new urban audiences for SYO. The process of developing the installations also provide significant routes to impact. Archival work conducted in the first year of the project will provide information on how SYO acted a way of life for M50 workers and was absorbed into their everyday practices until the1999 closure of the textile mills. In year two and year three, the research information collected will focus on post-1990s SYO audience development in relation to M50. Some of the data currently exists on SYO House's own website, however, there is little reference to SYO new urban audience engagement through reconnecting with its own historical heritage site, the M50 creative cluster. The project will provide more comprehensive research relating to SYO and its audiences, as well as the reconnection of M50 with its own heritage. The project website will address policy-makers, artists, art organizations and creative industry SMEs across China and the UK. As SYO is the only all-female Chinese opera and representative art form of the urban female, this information will also be of interest to artists, designers and cultural policy makers who are interested in promoting female art forms and female audience expression and communication. The research findings will be disseminated in a more synthesized form (e.g. briefing papers) via the project website, key strands of the project will also be addressed in the co-authored monograph and a documentary film.

2. The second pathway to impact comes from the research links, activities and outputs generated by the project's presence at M50 in Shanghai and the two symposiums held in Shanghai and Cardiff. A major part of this project involves interviews with M50 business occupants and visitors, external partners and symposium attendees from China as well as the UK. To integrate M50 further with this project, the Shanghai project symposium in month 18 will be jointly held by Shanghai Theatre Academy and M50 Bandu. A team of UK creative economy representatives are invited to attend, with the intention of forging arts and business links between China and UK. This connection will then be consolidated at the Cardiff symposium in month 36, which will provide an end-point and report back on emergent collaborations and new activities in relation to the project and beyond. This forum between industry, the academics and public audience offers a clear pathway to impact for the research emerging from this project. The international dissemination advances the research project's stated aims to explore Shanghai's development as a 'Creative City' more widely in China and beyond.

3. The third pathway to impact will be delivered through the project's catalyzing of collaborations between the four 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 will outlive the duration of this research period. This process will be of potential interest to government policy makers concerned to revive market vibrancy and support SMEs sustainability. As there are currently around 300 forms of traditional Chinese opera actively trying to identify ways of engaging new audiences, this project will also draw attention from policy makers, other creative industry SMEs, and potentially influence policy making and funding strategies. The process of establishing such a creative chain will form the basis of commissioned reports to both Chinese government and UK Arts Council and will be documented and disseminated through a project video which will provide an animated tool kit for other collaborators.