Adaptation And Resilience In The Performing Arts PDF Download

This dissertation research concerns the secrets behind the longevity of International Performing Arts Festivals (IPAFs), a popular cultural policy instrument. Highlighting the interaction between festivals and their changing festival environment, festival legitimacy bears conceptual advantages to investigate IPAF management and adaptation over their long-term development. This research thus investigates festival resilience, conceptualized as the dynamics of IPAFs to maintain long-term operation in response to both gradual and sudden changes in the festival environment. Specifically, this study scrutinizes how IPAFs maintained resilience by adjusting festival legitimacy to a mixture of challenges from important stakeholders. The conceptual framework for the investigation of IPAF resilience through legitimacy is developed via a grounded approach, to identify major festival legitimacy sources and criteria, as well as key concepts and perspectives mediating IPAF legitimacy and resilience dynamics. Based on this framework, an embedded case study of China Shanghai International Arts Festival (CSIAF) is given in-depth investigation, particularly the dynamics of CSIAF resilience through legitimacy in the 2010s. Given the pragmatic consideration of data collection approaches, semi-structured interviews with important CSIAF stakeholders and an online CSIAF perception survey were conducted, alongside archival data, policy documents, media reports, and festival programs. By cross-examining three other IPAFs with CSIAF resilience, this research discovers the relationship between festival legitimacy maintenance and IPAFs resilience. The in-depth case study of CSIAF resilience uncovered two trends that the festival applied to sustain its long-term operation. CSIAF strategically programmed the core artistic programs to gain more legitimacy to the city branding and urban regeneration agendas in Shanghai, as well as to international performing arts trends. It continued to proactively respond to national cultural agendas and actively adapted international arts and festival management conventions when facing local and national cultural policy changes and Shanghai’s growing integration in the global cultural market in the 2010s. IPAFs practitioners should apply a proactive and positive mindset towards changes in festival environments and take big events as opportunities for festival legitimacy adjustments. Meanwhile, this research finds that expertise-informed strategic festival programming, including artistic programming and program design, facilitated IPAFs’ quick response to legitimacy challenges from the changing environment. Diversifying the IPAF program portfolio and building legitimacy to urban cultural agendas are strategies festival managers are recommended to apply to sustain IPAF resilience, if local political contexts and inter-governmental relations are well-considered. Furthermore, IPAF organizations engaging in various policy learning activities empowered professional expertise to facilitate the creation of informed and strategic festival legitimation approaches for IPAFs to sustain “festival legitimacy coalitions” inclusive of important IPAF stakeholders, or legitimacy sources. Besides the implications for practitioners and policymakers to make resilient IPAFs by using festival legitimacy as an effective instrument for festival management, this dissertation research also advances resilience studies in the context of arts and festival management. The festival resilience through legitimacy framework addresses the field’s increasing recognition of festivals to survive crises during the Covid-19 pandemic.