8 September 2018
After nearly a year of preparation and China-UK bilateral peer review process, the results of the application for the UK-China project "Creative Economy Development in China" of the Newton Fund of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK were officially announced in early September. The joint application of the Shanghai Theater Academy (STA), the University of Leeds and the University of Exeter in the UK won the bid successfully.
The project that has received the AHRC funding support is "Popular Performance for New City Audiences: Reconnecting M50 Creative Industry Cluster Area with Shanghai’s Yue Opera". The project has received a total funding of GBP250,000 from the Newton Fund of the Arts and Humanities (AHRC) in the UK, and will receive the human resources and other forms of support from all partners.
This project focuses on the traditional opera presented by the electronic media performances in the industrial heritage sites for the new urban audience. With Shanghai’s Yue opera as the main axis, it connects the production and consumption of Shanghai’s textile factories and Shanghai’s Yue opera with the M50 Creative Industry Cluster Area in the time and space dimensions, and explores how to strengthen the cooperation between small and medium-sized art enterprises and state institutions or the public sector in the process of the modern presentation of Chinese traditional arts and how to establish the "creative industry chain" in such a process so as to strengthen the diversification and sustainable development of Shanghai's urban creative economy.
The project will be officially launched in November 2018 for a period of three years. In that duration, there will be a series of workshops and documentary production, as well as two international conferences to be held in Shanghai, China and Leeds, UK.
This is the first time that Chinese and British universities have collaborated in the field of creative economy studies, and it is also a project with the largest AHRC funding. The all-round connection between China and the UK in three key areas of humanities research, i.e. design, cultural heritage, and creative and performing arts, aims to promote the deep China-UK collaboration and development in the creative economy.
