Every year, forums of the China Shanghai International Arts Festival serves as an important communication window and a platform to establish friendly relationships.  Festival Forums focus on leading edge of art trends and invite directors from both domestic and international arts festivals and arts institutions to share their experience on international cooperation and innovation. The arts and cultural reflections presented at the forums will point out the future trends for the arts development in China.

Under the theme of “Connection and Innovation”, the 2017 Festival Forums will be held from Oct.17th to Nov.19th, including one Theme Forum, eight series of forums and two workshops. They will explore means of arts innovation and push forward arts development from the following three aspects:

▋Upgrade cultural cooperation network, Promote sustained international communication

This year’s Festival Forums will further upgrade cooperation network, pragmatically push forward international cultural exchange and cooperation to a wider range, along with the “Silk Road” countries, promoting the prosperity and innovation of arts and culture.      

In the field of arts industry, the 19th Theme Forum will launch the Network of Silk Road International Arts Festivals, which is the upgrade on the basis of those bilateral international cooperation agreements over the past two years. This will be the first international network about Arts Festivals in China.

In the field of cultural exchange, China Shanghai International Arts Festivals will co-host the 2017 Atelier Workshop with European Festivals Association under the framework of high-level dialogue mechanism for cultural exchange between China and Europe.

In addition, each forum will invite international and domestic leading masters of the industry to share their professional experience.  Such as, the international avant-garde drama master -- Robert Wilson,  and Art Director of China Philharmonic Orchestra -- Yu Long, are going to be the keynote speakers in the Theme Forum; as well as the Creative Producer of South Bank London and International Program Consultant of April Festival in Denmark, will together share examples of how their arts popularization activities produce huge social benefits. Via the dialogues, we may build a global vision that is conducive to our arts operation mechanism.

▋Innovate traditional arts forms, Create stories about people

The Producers Forum, Drama Forum and Opera Forum in this year’s Festival will focus on the creation, production and publicizing of different types of arts forms, and make artworks that suit the contemporary spirit and meet the audience’s aesthetic needs.

The Producers Forum is going to conclude and present the fruits of artworks, especially stage arts performance over the past five years, in order to produce inspiring and positive works, which are people-oriented, representing people and serving people. The Drama Forum, which will be held for the second time this year, is going to seek for the touch point of traditional drama and contemporary society while keeping the beauty of drama, trying to use effective communication means to motivate more people appreciate contemporary opera by approaching the main publicizing process of artworks creation. Opera Forum will focus on national epics, provide inspirations of creating Chinese Opera that suits contemporary audience’s aesthetic needs via multi-perspectives of script creation, music composition and stage direction.

▋Enhance spirit of urban culture, Promote arts to the people

As the important part of public cultural services, arts popularization activities not only are beneficial to people’s growing cultural demands, but also are conducive to optimizing the urban public space and cultural life.

Proceeding with such vision under the background of international cultural metropolis, the Public Culture Forum will take Shanghai and Marseilles as examples, explaining how public arts activities can be fully integrated into city life and benefit citizens. Besides, from the perspectives of arts festival planning, the forum will invite directors of arts festivals in Britain, Denmark, Finland and China to share their experience on how to attract people, design public arts activities and use advanced technology or operation means to maximize social benefits of arts