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

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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.