Ten years ago, if you asked someone what is arts education in China, the answer tended to be taking piano or painting courses at such art academy like places where art is taught in a relatively systematic and academic way, meanwhile accessible to just a small group of people. For ordinary public, the only chance to get in touch with arts is to go to theatre or museum to see performances or exhibitions. However, the situation is changing in recent years when people’s perception about arts is evolving in an interesting way. Below is a successful example of introducing arts to the public and make it accessible to as many people as possible in Shanghai.

Inaugurated in 1998, Shanghai Grand Theatre (SGT) is one of the most important performing venues in town. As statistics show, it has staged over 6,000 performances for an accumulative audience of 10 million by the end of 2009. Apart from becoming the stage for world-class art works mainly presented in the Lyric Theatre which has 1,800 seats at three levels, supported by Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation, SGT has developed a brand-new arts education program named Arts Class since 2009. By using its 600-seat Drama Theatre as the home battlefield, the Arts Class programs are organized and presented on regular basis throughout the whole year. In order to better serve the objective of education and outreach, almost half of the events are free of charge, including Arts Open Days, Conversations with Masters, Arts Salon and some themed events such as a series of lectures and performances commemorating the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death. As for those events which are not free, there is only a very low price charged at RMB 20, 40 and 60. These events have a wider range of arts forms, covering ballet, opera, folk music, chamber music, classical music, musical theatre and etc. Taking advantage of its extensive networks with arts groups and communities in Shanghai and also the strong programming at SGT, the Arts Class has quite good resources in terms of projects content design and inviting important artists as guest speakers, to name a few, Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, Japanese pianist Midori and etc.

In order to reach as many audience as possible, Arts Class is promoted in different channels, including not only traditional paper media/official organization website but also social media in Kaixin (Facebook’s equivalent in China), weibo (Twitter’s equivalent in China), douban (popular website among young Chinese who love arts and culture).

According to Richard Fei, the former Program Director of Arts Class project (Richard has been recently transferred to Shanghai Culture Plaza, a newly set-up performing venue devoted in promoting musical theatres in Shanghai. He is the behind-stage hero who designed the whole 2011 Arts Class season totaling up to 100 events), different from audience 10 or 20 years ago when internet was not that popular, it’s much easier for audience today to get information from different channels, which make them more demanding and difficult to please. We are at the moment to think about what we should do to attract audience back to theatre and appreciate art in a more direct way. Arts Class is exactly the thing we should do and do well – to bring arts from the stage to the audience, tell them arts is nothing up there impossible to get access to but for everyone to enjoy, and create opportunity for interaction between artists and the public. That’s why we have created a new model of educational concerts, which is a combination of lecture and performance. For example, we used to do a musical theatre featured event. The moderator is a musical theatre specialist. The 1.5 hours event is divided into lecture and demonstration (live performance + audio-video aid), which proves to be a very effective way to engage audience and reach the objective of education and outreach.

The mission of Arts Class, Shanghai Grand Theatre is to become a bridge linking arts and life, which objective is actually what arts education to reach.

Written by Lynn Fu (Correspondent in China) Photo by Shanghai Grand Theatre