Academic and Research Partners
stage@leeds is involved with a number of ongoing projects and internal University of Leeds partners.
Centre for Cultural Value
The Centre for Cultural Value will enhance understanding of the difference arts and culture make to people’s lives and society, by making research more accessible and by supporting the cultural sector to capture and evaluate the value it produces. Building on existing research, and working in collaboration with a range of partners across the UK, the Centre will ask: Why do arts and culture matter? What difference do they make to people’s lives? And how can we evidence this?
Based at the University of Leeds, the Centre’s core partners are The Audience Agency and the Universities of Hull, Sheffield, York and Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. The Centre is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Cultural Institute
The University of Leeds Cultural Institute has three main aims: to increase pioneering research collaborations with creative sector partners, to widen cultural engagement and participation and to build the skills of our students.
Bridging the Gaps
Bridging the Gaps is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through its UK-China research-industry creative partnership grant with matched funding and in-kind contribution from UK and Chinese industry partners totalling over £1.5m.
Taking Chinese opera as a case study, the project brings together arts institutions, digital media small and medium enterprises (SMEs), government policy makers from both countries, to assist in-depth understanding of transnational production and consumption patterns. It provides a rare and exciting opportunity for UK arts institutions, government bodies and SME companies to enter the Chinese market as a cluster, with complementary areas of expertise, to provide each other with linguistic and cultural support and shared resource, whilst developing partnerships in Shanghai and establishing a long-term ‘creative chain’.
Song of The Female Textile Workers
UK-China digital connectivity, is a newly awarded project by UK
Research and Innovation in response to the Arts and Humanities Research Council call on UK-China Creative Partnerships: Responding to the longer-term impacts of COVID-19.
The one year project sees the creation of a one-actor performance, led by WANG Rousang, a Chinese national star performer of xiaosheng role (male cross dressing) at Shanghai Yue Opera House, in collaboration with Shanghai Textile Museum, Leeds Industrial Museum, Yorkshire based script writer Mary Cooper and digital SME Human VR. The project will be hosted online, with rehearsals and performances live streamed between Shanghai Yue Opera House, China and Stage@LeedsDigital, UK.
Coinciding with Chinese New Year celebrations (12–27 February 2021), this online exhibition presents historical information and six specially created documentary films to highlight commonalities between the UK-China textile industries, whilst telling the stories of industrial and cultural development in Shanghai. There are distinct links to the city of Leeds and Armley Mills, once the world’s largest woollen mill and now Leeds Industrial Museum.
The first two videos are available to view and subsequent videos will be released each week as the Chinese New Year celebrations progress:
https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/leeds-industrial-museum/song-of-the-female-textile-workers/