Performing arts, economics, and cultural policies. New interpretative paradigms between aesthetics and social sciences

The project aims at renewing the methodologies and perspectives for investigating the performing arts through dialogue and interdisciplinary cooperation between Humanities (Theatre Studies, Musicology, and Aesthetics) and Social Sciences (Economics and Law) with the help of Informatics. Despite the vast amount of literature about the creative industries, and especially about the cinema, the relationship between the performing arts, economics, public financing, and cultural policies still requires more investigation, both in a historical and contemporary perspective. A major study, dealing expressly with the analysis of primary sources and quantitative data, is necessary. The project aims at filling in this gap of knowledge through the analysis of large and hitherto unexplored archival sources that have been produced by major theatrical entities, public institutions, and single individuals on State, regional, and local level over the last 150 years. This wide documentation is of theatrical, economical, juridical, and political nature, and it represents an uncharted reservoir of quantitative and qualitative data: if correctly processed and analysed, also with the aid of machine-learning technology, it is likely to achieve ground-breaking results in terms of the capacity of reading the historical evolution of the Italian theatrical system from the unification to nowadays. The research activities investigate the evolution of the market on artistic production and consumption from a highly interdisciplinary perspective. The objective is to introduce also in Italy a methodology that has proven to be ground-breaking abroad, as the PI and the LRs have experienced in their previous international research.