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.

This book offers insights into some of the digital innovations, structural adaptations and analogue solutions that enabled live performance in the UK to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides evidence of values-led policies and practices that have improved the wellbeing of the creative workforce and have increased access to live performance. Through sections that address digital innovations, workforce resilience and programming live performances outdoors and in community settings, this book provides practical insights into the challenges live performance faced during the pandemic. It shows how, in order to survive, individuals and companies within the sector drew on the creativity and resourcefulness of its workforce, and on new and existing networks. In these accounts, the pandemic functioned as catalyst for technological innovations, stock-taking regarding exploitative industry structures, and a re-valuing of the role of live performance for community-building.

This groundbreaking handbook is a resource for artists, community activists and anyone wishing to reach beyond the facts and figures of science and technology to harness their creativity to make change in the world. This timely book explores the pivotal role artists play in re-thinking the future; re-inventing and re-imagining our world at a time of systemic change and uncertainty. Playing for Time identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges, reclaiming a traditional role for artists in the community as truth-tellers and agents of change. Sixty experienced artists and activists give voice to a new narrative – shifting society’s rules and values away from consumerism and commodity towards community and collaboration with imagination, humour, ingenuity, empathy and skill. Inspired by the grass-roots Transition movement, modelling change in communities worldwide, Playing for Time joins the dots between key drivers of change – in energy, finance, climate change, food and community resilience – and ‘recipes for action’ for readers to take and try. Praise for Playing for Time... ‘This book is full of wings – wings that are ancient practices, that are community, arts, modernity, wings of global learning for local concerns. Lucy Neal’s anthology of possibility offers a salmagundi of thought,knowledge, options and hope. It’s all here. An almanac to dip into and then create – in the kitchen and the window box and the garden, locally, in community, regionally, nationally, globally. The seeds of change are in us. This is a book to help us grow.’ Stella Duffy, author and founder of Fun Palaces ‘It’s so important that the role of artists in making change is being systematically and beautifully addressed. Playing for Time, holds the keys to the possibility of transformative action.’ Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of 350.org ‘A remarkable book that pulls no punches. It’s most enduring image is the poignant flock of passenger pigeons, drawn in sand on Llangrannog beach in 2014, the 100th anniversary of their extinction. It’s an image that will not leave my mind: a message of loss, but also of hope, from which we must, and can, learn.’ Dame Fiona Reynolds, Chair of the Green Alliance ‘“Barren art”, Kandinsky wrote, “is the child of its age”. But prophetic, powerful art is the “mother ofthe future”. A better world will be born of such art, and Lucy Neal’s wonderful cornucopia should beat the elbow of everyone helping in its midwifery.’ Tom Crompton, Common Cause Foundation WWF ‘A total delight’ Rob Hopkins, Co-founder Transition Movement ‘A hand-book for life’ Rose Fenton, Director Free Word. ‘A remarkable achievement’ Neil Darlison, Arts Council England ‘Beautiful from the first sentence’ Laura Williams ‘Deeply nourishing’ Mike Grenville ‘A beauty of a book’ James Marriott, Platform

Covering the full spectrum of treatment guidance for dance artists, circus artists, musicians, and more, this practical title by Dr. Lauren E. Elson expertly explores the intersection of sports medicine and performing arts medicine. Ideal for practicing and trainee physiatrists, physical and occupational therapists, and sports medicine physicians, it addresses a wide range of relevant topics including auditory symptoms in musicians; management of the dancer’s foot and ankle, hip, and spine; return-to-dance or return-to-performance guidelines; and much more.

International Perspectives of Festivals and Events addresses contemporary issues concerning the potential of festivals and events to produce economic, social, cultural and community benefits. Incorporating a range of international perspectives, the book provides the reader with a global look at current trends and topics, which have until now, been underrepresented by current literature. International Perspectives of Festivals and Events includes a broad range of research, case studies and examples from well-known scholars in the field to form a unified volume that informs the reader of the current status of festivals and events around the world. In a fast-moving industry where new theory and practice is implemented rapidly, this is essential reading for any advanced student or researcher in festivals and events.

A far-reaching examination of how international theatre festivals shape 21st-century intercultural negotiation and exchange.

A contemporary overview of festival activity based on over 30 international case studies. It demonstrates how the nature of festivals crosses borders, how they are a recognisable and growing part of societal and cultural delivery around the globe and that their impacts, economic, social and cultural are a major driver in their development.