The city of Shanghai is becoming an open theater. Embedded in all corners of the city, the new space for performing arts is sought after in Shanghai as a "new thing", and the interaction of immersive experience, scene-based consumption, music and various emotional extreme experiences has become the "most loved" of young and middle-aged people. During the epidemic period, the performance market "rose against the market", and so far 100 new performing arts spaces that meet the standards of the Shanghai Performance Industry Association have been awarded.
Pictured: Students at the Halloween Game Drama Workshop perform a clip from the Halloween Game. Photo by Wang Kai
Why do young and middle-aged people love the new space for performing arts? Living in Shanghai, which leads the trend, proud of innovation and entrepreneurship, why do you have to choose to enter the theater after a day of work, dress up with tiredness, wear straight, and enter the theater regularly? Why can't you have more options, consume more easily, inspire your passion and vitality, and make life more colorful?
The new space for performing arts allows the experiencer to feel an unprecedented "wonderful ease", such as walking into the "crazy barbershop", getting a haircut, washing hair and even manicure like usually entering the barbershop, there is no stage only the performance area, about 200 spectators and 6 actors who are mainly responsible for washing and cutting blowing, the long and non-stop piano sound suddenly stops sounding, and every barber looks like a "scissor hand"? The audience begins to participate in the investigation, who killed the pianist? A sinking experience begins. Countless new performing arts spaces, countless scene experiences, accompanied by countless new stories in Shanghai.
The new performing arts space "adds weight" to Shanghai's urban life. Shanghai's sun-soaked boulevards, the exposed old and new buildings on both sides of the street, the urban gardens that can be seen around the corner, the coffee reading shops that can be encountered on a walk, plus these new performing arts spaces integrated into commercial complexes, office buildings, hotels, physical bookstores and even the corner of the standard theater, ranging from 100 square meters to thousands of square meters, together with the surrounding art and design scenes, show the literary, polyphonic, warm and unpredictable urban life scenes.
Shanghai is a culturally empowering way to light up the fragmented space in the process of urban renewal. As early as 2018, the Shanghai Performance Industry Association set up the "Performing Arts New Space Professional Committee", and the cultural tourism system identified 60 new performing arts spaces in central urban areas including Huangpu, Jing'an, Xuhui, Hongkou, etc., and signed a pilot commitment letter with 10 of them (including Big World, Bund No. 22, Dayin Jingshe, Sinan Mansion, etc.). The 100 spaces are the result of a successful pilot rollout.
The epidemic is changing everyone's life and consumer psychology, and Shanghai is carefully responding to the epidemic, but the economic wave based on cultural creativity is also surging. The various new experiences of the new performing arts space, because of the active adaptation of the public's needs to integrate leisure, tourism, shopping and cultural experiences, coupled with a bit of "meta-universe space scene experience" the feeling of the first version, a "point" is on the spot, the performance area venue mushrooms like mushrooms, entrepreneurs, operators are full of infinite vitality. At present, these 100 new performing arts spaces are already 100 cultural soft powers in Shanghai, which will create and lead Shanghai's cultural life.
Zhao Hongling/Wen