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

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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.