performing arts research

National Endowment for the Arts

Grants for Arts Projects
Challenge America
Research Awards
Partnership Agreement Grants
Creative Writing
Translation Projects
Volunteer to be an NEA Panelist
Manage Your Award
Recent Grants
Arts & Human Development Task Force
Arts Education Partnership
Blue Star Museums
Citizens' Institute on Rural Design
Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network
GSA's Art in Architecture
Independent Film & Media Arts Field-Building Initiative
International
Mayors' Institute on City Design
Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge
National Folklife Network
NEA Big Read
NEA Research Labs
Poetry Out Loud
Save America's Treasures
Shakespeare in American Communities
Sound Health Network
United We Stand
American Artscape Magazine
NEA Art Works Podcast
National Endowment for the Arts Blog
States and Regions
Accessibility
Arts & Artifacts Indemnity Program
Arts and Health
Arts Education
Creative Placemaking
Equity Action Plan
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
Literary Arts
Native Arts and Culture
NEA Jazz Masters Fellowships
National Heritage Fellowships
National Medal of Arts
Press Releases
Upcoming Events
NEA Chair's Page
Leadership and Staff
What Is the NEA
Publications
National Endowment for the Arts on COVID-19
Open Government
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
Office of the Inspector General
Civil Rights Office
Appropriations History
Make a Donation

abstract collection of different colored arrows pointing up

Research into the value and impact of the arts is a core function of the National Endowment for the Arts. Through accurate, relevant, and timely analyses and reports, the Arts Endowment elucidates the factors, conditions, and characteristics of the U.S. arts ecosystem and the impact of the arts on other domains of American life.

The NEA has four priority areas of research:

Health and wellness for individuals
Cognition and learning
Economic growth and innovation
In what ways do the arts contribute to the healing and revitalization of communities ?
What is the state of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts ?
How is the U.S. arts ecosystem adapting and responding to social, economic, and technological changes and challenges to the sector?

NEA Research Agenda: FY 2022-2026

Infographic of high-level research priorities

Research Agenda Planning Study

Research Stories

Quick Study Podcast : This monthly audio feature uses research to explore the arts sector and to demonstrate the arts’ value in everyday life.

Measure for Measure : Monthly arts research blog post.

Arts Research & Data

Research Publications NEA-produced in-depth reports and analyses of research topics in the arts, such as:

Arts Participation Patterns in 2022: Highlights from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts
Online Audiences for Arts Programming: A Survey of Virtual Participation Amid COVID-19
Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium
Arts Strategies for Addressing the Opioid Crisis: Examining the Evidence

Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account The NEA partners with the Bureau of Economic Analysis (U.S. Department of Commerce) to provide annual reports of the economic impact of arts and culture in the United States.

Arts Data Profile Series Collections of statistics, graphics, and summary results from data-mining about the arts. Examples include datasets from the Survey for Public Participation on the Arts (SPPA), the Arts Basic Survey (ABS), the American Community Survey (ACS), and more.

Research Grants in the Arts Study Findings Working papers, publications, and presentations that so far have resulted from NEA Research Grants in the Arts funding. Topics include economy/workforce, arts participation, health, and education.

Research Labs Information on the NEA's current Research Labs, transdisciplinary research teams, grounded in the social and behavioral sciences, engaging with the NEA five-year research agenda.

National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture Hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. A webinar tour around the latest data on arts and culture at the National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture is now available .

The NEA’ Research Awards cover two funding opportunities for research projects that engage with the NEA’s five-year research agenda :

Research Grants in the Arts: Support for research studies that investigate the value and/or impact of the arts, either as individual components of the U.S. arts ecology or as they interact with each other and/or with other domains of American life.

Research Labs: Transdisciplinary research teams investigating the value and impact of the arts.

Initiatives

Sound Health Network A partnership of the NEA with the University of California, San Francisco in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Renée Fleming, the center’s artistic advisor. The Sound Health Network (SHN) was established to promote research and public awareness about the impact of music on health and wellness. Visit SHN’s website for a database of key scientific publications on music and health research, webinars, funding opportunities, and more.

Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network An initiative of the NEA in partnership with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs that seeks to improve the health, well-being, and quality of life for military and veteran populations exposed to trauma, as well as their families and caregivers. Creative Forces is investing in research on the impacts and benefits—physical, social, and emotional—of these innovative treatment methods. Visit Creative Forces’ National Resource Center to learn more and to read all research associated with Creative Forces.

Arts & Human Development Task Force From 2011-2023, this federal interagency task force encouraged research on the arts and human potential.

Additional Resources

Program Evaluation and Performance Measurement Links to online resources about program evaluation and performance measurement for arts organizations.

UMass Amherst NEA Archives Collection A digitization of more than 40 years of publications on the arts and arts management.

Research Convenings (archived) National gatherings with researchers and arts and community experts.

OLD TEXT Research Agenda: FY 2022‐2026

This document sets forth a five‐year research agenda for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In preparing this agenda, the NEA’s Office of Research & Analysis supervised a planning study that included a review of NEA research activities in the past decade, and arts-related research supported by other federal agencies. The study also used focus group meetings and interviews with field experts to gather views on priority research areas. These activities preceded a public comment period. The resulting agenda aligns with the NEA’s FY 2022-2026 strategic plan, to be published in early 2022. The agenda is based on results from a planning study conducted in 2019-2020.

See an infographic of high-level research priorities, as discussed in the agenda.

Research Publications The Arts Endowment produces in-depth reports and analyses of research topics in the arts that demonstrate the value and impact of the arts in communities throughout the country.

Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account The National Endowment for the Arts partners with the Bureau of Economic Analysis (U.S. Department of Commerce) to provide annual reports of the economic impact of arts and culture in the United States.

Arts Data Profile Series Collections of statistics, graphics, and summary results from data-mining about the arts.

Research Grants in the Arts Study Findings Working papers, publications, and presentations that so far have resulted from NEA Research Grants in the Arts funding.

National Endowment for the Arts Research Labs Transdisciplinary research teams investigating the value and impact of the arts.

Sound Health Network A partnership of the Arts Endowment with the University of California, San Francisco in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Renée Fleming, the center’s artistic advisor. The Sound Health Network was established to promote research and public awareness about the impact of music on health and wellness.

Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network Creative arts therapies at the core of patient-centered care for military members, veterans, and their families.

Arts & Human Development Task Force The federal interagency task force established in 2011 to encourage research on the arts and human potential.

Quick Study Podcast

A new monthly audio feature using research to explore the arts sector and to demonstrate the arts’ value in everyday life. Listen

Research Convenings National gatherings with researchers and arts and community experts.

Creative Forces National Resource Center/Clinical Research Findings Creative Forces invests in research on the impacts and benefits – physical, emotional, social, and economic – of creative arts therapies as innovative treatment methods.

National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture Hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. A webinar tour around the latest data on arts and culture at the National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture is now available .

Recent Research News

Arts & Cultural Sector Hit All-Time High in 2022 Value Added to U.S. Economy

New Resource from the NEA Will Monitor the Health and Vitality of the Arts in the U.S.

A group of children celebrate the arts in Boston Public Schools. They are outside with their hands raised high, some holding signs that say "iCreate" and "Creative Mind at Work." Many are wearing tie-dyed t-shirts and some hold musical instruments.

National Endowment for the Arts Announces More Than $32 Million in Arts Funding to Organizations Nationwide

Research blog posts.

graphic that says Measure for Measure. On the left side of the graphic, there are hatchmarks that suggest bar graphs

Can the Arts Fortify State Economies in Times of Financial Crisis? Yes, Apparently

The expressive life of institutions—and other observations from the #healbridgethrive summit, indelible ink: the lasting benefits of print media for reading comprehension, stay connected to the national endowment for the arts.

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Performing arts as a health resource? An umbrella review of the health impacts of music and dance participation

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine, Hannover University for Music, Drama and Media, Hannover, Germany, Prince of Wales Clinical School, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Division of Dance Science, Faculty of Dance, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, United Kingdom

Roles Data curation, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine, Hannover University for Music, Drama and Media, Hannover, Germany

J. Matt McCrary,
Emma Redding,
Eckart Altenmüller

Published: June 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956
Peer Review
Reader Comments

An increasing body of evidence notes the health benefits of arts engagement and participation. However, specific health effects and optimal modes and ‘doses’ of arts participation remain unclear, limiting evidence-based recommendations and prescriptions. The performing arts are the most popular form of arts participation, presenting substantial scope for established interest to be leveraged into positive health outcomes. Results of a three-component umbrella review (PROSPERO ID #: CRD42020191991) of relevant systematic reviews (33), epidemiologic studies (9) and descriptive studies (87) demonstrate that performing arts participation is broadly health promoting activity. Beneficial effects of performing arts participation were reported in healthy (non-clinical) children, adolescents, adults, and older adults across 17 health domains (9 supported by moderate-high quality evidence ( GRADE criteria )). Positive health effects were associated with as little as 30 ( acute effects) to 60 minutes ( sustained weekly participation ) of performing arts participation, with drumming and both expressive ( ballroom , social ) and exercise-based ( aerobic dance , Zumba ) modes of dance linked to the broadest health benefits. Links between specific health effects and performing arts modes/doses remain unclear and specific conclusions are limited by a still young and disparate evidence base. Further research is necessary, with this umbrella review providing a critical knowledge foundation.

Citation: McCrary JM, Redding E, Altenmüller E (2021) Performing arts as a health resource? An umbrella review of the health impacts of music and dance participation. PLoS ONE 16(6): e0252956. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956

Editor: Emily S. Cross, University of Glasgow, UNITED KINGDOM

Received: December 15, 2020; Accepted: May 25, 2021; Published: June 10, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 McCrary et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: JMM was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

Participation and receptive engagement in the arts are increasingly recognized as being health promoting, most notably in policy briefs [ 1 ], a recent World Health Organization-commissioned scoping review [ 2 ], and social prescribing initiatives [ 3 ]. However, the widespread integration of the arts into healthcare and public health practices is limited by a disparate evidence base; the specifics of the most effective arts interventions–namely the mode (specific ‘type’ of art–e.g. ballroom dance, singing) and ‘dose’ (frequency and timing/duration)–for various clinical and public health scenarios are still unclear [ 4 ]. Consequently, formulation of evidence-based arts prescriptions and recommendations is presently difficult [ 4 ].

Participation in the performing arts is the most popular form of arts participation, with up to 40% of EU and US adults participating annually in performing arts activities [ 5 , 6 ]. Within the performing arts, music and dance participation are the two most popular modes of engagement, both involving engagement with music, and proposed to have common evolutionary origins [ 7 – 9 ]. The health effects of music and dance participation were thus considered likely to be both related and broadly studied and are the focus of this review. ‘Performing arts participation’ will be used to refer, jointly, to music and dance participation from this point forward.

Performing arts participation is particularly intriguing in a health context in that it combines creative expression with intrinsic levels of physical exertion associated with many health benefits (e.g. moderate–vigorous intensity cardiovascular demands) [ 10 ]. Both creative arts and physical activity have been independently linked to broad health benefits [ 2 , 11 – 13 ], albeit with a more robust body of evidence supporting the substantial and widespread health impact of physical activity–primary and/or secondary prevention for at least 25 chronic medical conditions and a 9–39% reduction in overall mortality risk [ 12 , 14 , 15 ]. Performing arts and exercise/ physical activity participation are distinguished by a distinctly expressive, rather than exertive, focus of the performing arts; exertion is an intrinsic byproduct, not an objective. Accordingly, the health impact of performing arts participation must be evaluated using frameworks that allow performing arts to remain a primarily expressive activity, but also consider the likely impact of intrinsic physical exertion.

Evidence regarding the full breadth of health impacts of performing arts participation, as well as the modes and doses underpinning these effects, has yet to be compiled, critically appraised and analyzed using a common framework. This umbrella review aims to address this knowledge gap by systematically reviewing and appraising evidence regarding the health effects of performing arts participation, including its impacts on both broad mortality and disease risk and more discrete health-related outcomes, in healthy (non-clinical) adults, adolescents and children. Performing arts participation is hypothesized to have similar health effects as physical activity due to its intrinsic physical exertion, as well as additional effects related to creative expression and engagement with music. Accordingly, a secondary aim of this review is to compile data regarding the intrinsic physical intensity of varying modes of performing arts participation to inform further hypotheses related to relationships between physical intensity and observed effects.

2.1 Review registration

This review was prospectively registered in the PROSPERO registry (ID: CRD42020191991).

2.2 Overview

Following informal literature searches, the authors made an a priori decision that an integrated, three component umbrella review would most effectively address study aims:

A systematic review of systematic reviews of the health effects of performing arts participation;
A systematic review of observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk. NB : initial searches revealed no prior systematic reviews addressing the effects of performing arts participation on mortality and/or non-communicable disease risk .
A systematic review of studies of heart rate responses to performing arts participation.

Search terms and inclusion/exclusion criteria for each component are described below. All components involved searches of MEDLINE ( all fields , English & human subjects limiter ), EMBASE ( all fields , English & human subjects limiter ), SPORTDiscus ( all fields , English limiter ), and Web of Science ( Arts & Humanities citation index; all fields; English limiter) from inception– 15 June 2020. Abstracts of all database search results were screened, followed by full text review of potentially relevant articles. Hand searches of the reference lists of included articles were also conducted to locate additional relevant articles. The review procedure was conducted by the first author in consultation with the authorship team.

Across all components, ‘music participation’ was defined as singing or playing a musical instrument. ‘Dance participation’ was broadly defined as an activity involving “moving one’s body rhythmically…to music” [ 16 ], with an additional criterion that included articles must identify the investigated activity as ‘dance.’ Articles investigating music and dance participation conducted with an exertive aim (i.e. music or dance session(s) designed to elicit a target heart rate/rating of perceived exertion) were excluded to maintain review focus on performing arts vs. exercise participation. As noted in the introduction, performing arts participation is distinguished from exercise participation by its distinctly expressive, rather than exertive, focus; exertion is an intrinsic byproduct, not an objective.

2.3 Systematic review of systematic reviews of the health benefits of performing arts participation

2.3.1 database search terms..

Database searches were performed using the following search terms and a ‘Reviews’ limiter where available: ((music* OR danc* OR performing art* OR choir OR choral) AND (psycholog* OR biochem* OR immun* OR cognit* OR physical OR health)).

2.3.2 Inclusion/Exclusion criteria.

Inclusion criteria were systematic reviews examining the health effects of active performing arts participation in healthy adults, adolescents or children. A ‘systematic review’ was defined based on Cochrane definitions [ 17 ] as a review conducted using explicit, reproducible methodology and aiming to comprehensively synthesize all available relevant evidence. Exclusion criteria were assessed at the primary study level within relevant reviews: 1) studies with qualitative data only; 2) studies in which performing arts participation was conducted with a target exercise intensity or heart rate–these studies were judged to evaluate exercise, rather than performing arts participation; 3) studies of long-term dance or music interventions in experienced dancers or musicians; 4) single-group observational studies characterizing experienced dancers or musicians.

Systematic reviews including a mixture of primary studies meeting and not meeting inclusion/exclusion criteria were included if:

Reviews in which study results were quantitatively synthesized (i . e . meta-analysis) –The majority (>50%) of included studies examined active performing arts participation in healthy populations and met no exclusion criteria
Reviews in which results were narratively synthesized (i . e . descriptive synthesis of quantitative primary study results )–The results of primary studies of active participation in healthy populations meeting no exclusion criteria could be extracted and re-synthesized for the purposes of this review.

2.3.3 Data extraction.

Demographic and outcome data were extracted for all included reviews and their underlying primary studies meeting inclusion criteria and no exclusion criteria. For each outcome, the effect of performing arts participation was determined to be ‘positive’, ‘negative’, ‘no effect’, or ‘unclear’. Designations of ‘positive’, ‘negative’ and ‘no effect’ were given in cases where clear links between changes in a parameter and a corresponding positive/negative health effect exist in healthy populations (e.g. shift from pro- to anti-inflammatory tone–positive effect; delayed pubertal onset–negative effect). An ‘unclear’ designation was given in cases where such links between changes in a parameter and health effects do not exist (e.g. acute increase in IL-6).

2.3.4 GRADE quality of evidence appraisal.

The GRADE system was favored for this review because of its alignment with review aims and applicability to systematic reviews of systematic reviews [ 17 ]; GRADE is specifically “designed for reviews…that examine alternative management strategies” [ 18 ]. The GRADE system results in an appraisal of the quality of evidence supporting conclusions related to each outcome of interest—very low; low; moderate; high. Specific criteria and appraisal methodology are detailed in the S1 Appendix .

2.3.5 Evidence synthesis.

To minimize the biasing effects of overlapping reviews, all outcomes from primary studies included in multiple reviews were only considered once. The lone exception to this was one outcome (flexibility–sit & reach) from one primary study of dance [ 19 ] which was included in multiple meta-analyses [ 20 , 21 ] and thus considered twice. Re-calculation of meta-analyses to remove this duplication was not considered necessary due to consistent effects of dance on flexibility across 4 reviews considering 15 individual studies [ 20 – 23 ]. Common outcomes were first combined and assigned a grouped health effect and GRADE appraisal at the review level. Outcomes and GRADE appraisals were then combined across reviews and assigned a health effect and GRADE appraisal at the umbrella review level. Where appropriate, outcome results were stratified by music/dance participation, sex, age, GRADE appraisal, or instrument/style. Outcomes were categorized by domain–domains used to organize evidence of the health benefits of physical activity were used as an initial framework, with additional domains added as required [ 12 ]. Specific outcomes contained within each category are detailed in S1 Table in S1 Appendix .

2.4. Systematic review of observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk

Given an absence of known reviews of epidemiologic data regarding performing arts participation and the importance of these data in evaluating health effects, the authors made an a priori decision to conduct a separate systematic review.

2.4.1 Search terms.

Databases were searched using the following terms: ((music* OR danc* OR performing art* OR choir OR choral) AND (mortality OR public health OR disease OR risk) AND epidemiology).

2.4.2 Inclusion/exclusion criteria.

Inclusion criteria were observational studies investigating the relationship between performing arts participation and all-cause mortality or non-communicable disease risk and/or non-communicable disease risk factors (i.e. metabolic syndrome) in adults, adolescents or children. No exclusion criteria were defined.

2.4.3 Evidence synthesis, GRADE appraisal and synthesis.

Conducted using an adaptation of the procedure detailed in sections 2.3.3–2.3.5, with included primary studies appraised individually and then synthesized at the level of this systematic review.

2.5 Systematic review of studies of heart rate responses to performing arts participation

2.5.1 search terms..

Database searches were performed using the following search terms: ((music* OR danc* OR performing art* OR choir OR choral) AND (load OR intensity OR heart rate)).

2.5.2 Inclusion/Exclusion criteria.

Inclusion criteria were studies reporting average/mean heart rate data collected from at least 1 minute of a representative period of active music or dance participation in any setting. Studies reporting heart rate such that raw heart rate data (beats per minute) could not be extracted were excluded.

2.5.3 Data extraction and appraisal.

Demographic and raw heart rate data were extracted from all included studies. Raw heart rate data were calculated where necessary (i.e. from data expressed as % maximum heart rate). Rigorous application of inclusion/exclusion criteria was used in lieu of a formal assessment of evidence quality.

2.5.4 Evidence synthesis.

%HR max values were then categorized by intensity according to American College of Sports Medicine definitions [ 26 ].

3.1 Systematic review statistics ( Fig 1 )

PPT PowerPoint slide
PNG larger image
TIFF original image

Specific details regarding excluded reviews/studies are contained in the S1 Appendix .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956.g001

This umbrella review includes 33 systematic reviews of the health effects of performing arts participation (15 dance; 18 music), encompassing 286 unique primary studies (128 dance; 158 music) and 149 outcomes across 18 health domains. Additionally, 9 observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk (3 dance, 5 music, 1 dance & music) were included, as well as 87 studies reporting heart rate responses during performing arts participation (71 dance, 16 music). Review articles and observational studies of mortality and non-communicable disease risk are directly referenced in this manuscript (Tables 1 and 2 ); the complete list of references, including studies investigating heart rate responses, is contained in the S1 Appendix .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956.t001

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956.t002

3.2 General health effects of active performing arts participation

Positive effects of performing arts participation were reported in 17 of 18 investigated domains–only glucose/insulin outcomes were consistently reported to be unaffected by dance participation (no data related to music participation)( Table 1 ). Positive effects in 9 domains ( auditory; body composition; cognitive; immune function; mental health; physical fitness; physical function; self-reported health/wellbeing; social wellbeing ) were supported by moderate to high quality evidence; results in 4 of these 9 domains ( cognitive; mental health; physical fitness; self-reported health/wellbeing ) included a mixture of positive and neutral/no effects varying by specific outcome ( Table 2 ). Positive effects of performing arts participation were found in 9 of 13 domains (7 of 13 supported by moderate-high quality evidence) associated with the mechanisms of physical activity benefits (Tables 1 and 2 ) [ 12 , 28 ]. Raw data underpinning summary results and GRADE appraisals are detailed in the S1 Appendix .

Effects of performing arts participation were investigated in adult populations ( age 20–59 ) across all domains backed by moderate-high quality evidence. Benefits of performing arts participation ( moderate-high quality evidence ) in children ( age 0–9 ) and adolescents ( age 10–19 ) were reported in auditory (music), body composition (dance), cognitive (music), and physical fitness (dance) domains; positive effects of dance on adolescent mental health were also reported. Benefits of performing arts participation were reported in older adults ( age ≥60; moderate-high quality evidence ) across cognitive (dance); immune function (music), mental health (dance), physical fitness (dance), physical function (dance), self-reported health/wellbeing (music & dance), and social functioning (music & dance) domains.

3.3 Modes and ‘doses’ of performing arts participation associated with reported health effects ( Table 2 ; moderate–high quality evidence only)

The effects of dance participation were more broadly supported by higher quality evidence– 34 individual outcomes, with positive effects reported across 7 domains ( body composition; cognitive; mental health; physical fitness; physical function; self-reported health/wellbeing; social functioning ). The effects of music participation were supported by moderate to high quality evidence for 11 individual outcomes, with reported positive effects in 5 domains ( auditory; cognitive; immune function/inflammation; self-reported health/wellbeing; social functioning ). Modes of performing arts participation associated with the broadest positive health effects were: aerobic dance (4 domains ); ballroom dance ( 4 domains ); social dance ( 4 domains ); drumming ( 3 domains ); and Zumba dance ( 3 domains ).

Acute doses ( single session lasting 30–60 minutes ) were sparsely associated with positive effects—hip-hop dance benefited mental health (mood) and music participation (drumming; singing) was associated with positive changes in immune function/inflammation, self-reported health/wellbeing (fatigue), and social functioning (anger). All other results were based on studies of sustained performing arts participation. Significant heterogeneity in frequency and timing of sustained participation was found. Positive health effects were associated with sustained performing arts participation lasting at least 4 weeks, with a minimum of 60 minutes of weekly participation and at least one weekly session. Each individual session in intervention studies lasted 21–120 minutes; the length of individual sessions in cross-sectional studies of performing arts participants vs. non-participants was generally not reported.

3.4 Physical demands of performing arts participation

Heart rate responses to performing arts participation widely varied by style and/or performance setting, with studies of both music and dance participation reporting heart rates classified as very light, light, moderate, and vigorous intensity physical activity (Tables 3 and 4 ). Heart rate also varied substantially within the same mode of music/dance participation, with 16 modes (12 music; 4 dance) associated with heart rate responses at two intensity levels, 3 modes (1 music–trumpet; 2 dance–ballet, modern) associated with heart rate responses at three intensity levels, and active video game dancing associated with heart rate responses at all four intensity levels. Raw heart rate data underpinning summary results are detailed in the S1 Appendix .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956.t003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956.t004

4. Discussion

This umbrella review presents an expansive and detailed synthesis and appraisal of evidence demonstrating that performing arts participation is, broadly, health promoting activity, with positive effects across 17 health domains. Moderate-high quality evidence supported positive effects across 9 of these domains, including 7 of 13 domains associated with the health benefits of physical activity. Positive effects were reported in adult populations across all 9 domains, with beneficial effects in children, adolescents, and older adults reported across 4, 5, and 7 domains, respectively. This review also provides preliminary insights into the modes and doses of performing arts participation underpinning observed benefits. Further, heart rate data from 87 additional studies indicate that both music and dance participation intrinsically elicit mean heart rate values corresponding to a range of intensities, including moderate and vigorous.

This review also reveals that the evidence regarding the health impacts of performing arts participation is still in its infancy. Accordingly, reported health benefits and preliminary insights regarding effective performing arts modes and doses must be considered within this context. Moderate-high quality results provide valuable guidance but should not be interpreted as supporting the totality of health benefits or superiority of modes or doses of performing arts participation. Key results of this review are due to greater amounts of high-quality studies of specific modes and doses in particular domains; the overall quality of included evidence is generally low ( 26% (45/173) of outcomes backed by moderate-high quality evidence ) due to a predominance of non-randomized and observational vs. randomized controlled trial study designs. Control and comparison groups varied widely across all study types, including no-intervention/waitlist control groups and exercise (various types), cognitive and/or language training and other art participation (e.g. visual art, drama) comparison groups.

All included studies were conducted without explicit intensity aims, yet 2 of 4 modes of dance participation associated with the broadest health benefits come from exercise, not artistic, traditions: aerobic dance [ 67 ] and Zumba [ 68 ]. Heart rate data ( Table 4 ) unsurprisingly confirm that both modes are associated with moderate to vigorous intensity physical demands as per global physical activity recommendations [ 69 ]. However, two traditionally expressive modes of dance–ballroom and social–were found to have similarly broad benefits, including in physical fitness and function domains. Heart rate data for ballroom and social dancing were sparsely available, precluding discussion of the potential impact of intrinsic physical intensity. Nonetheless, these results suggest that expressive dance participation is similarly health promoting to modes created from an exercise viewpoint. Further obscuring the relationships between physical intensity and observed benefits, drumming was the most broadly health promoting mode of music participation and associated, across various settings, with very light, light, moderate, and vigorous intensity heart rate responses. Additional research is needed to establish the relationships between intrinsic physical intensity and health impacts during performing arts participation.

Both acute and sustained performing arts participation were associated with health benefits, although the bulk of evidence relates to sustained participation. Acute benefits of singing and drumming on inflammation and immune parameters are particularly intriguing; similar short-term effects have been associated with physical activity and linked, with sustained participation, to long-term preventive benefits [ 70 ]. Epidemiologic studies suggest similar links between sustained performing arts participation and a reduced risk of non-communicable diseases and early mortality. However, the quality of these epidemiologic studies is presently low and specifically limited by the use of a range of bespoke survey instruments with unclear psychometric value to quantify the frequency, timing/duration and type of performing arts participation. Future studies using validated instruments for quantifying performing arts participation are needed.

The majority of health benefits backed by moderate-high quality evidence were associated with sustained performing arts participation lasting at least four weeks. Although substantial heterogeneity in results limits conclusions regarding the impact of specific doses of the performing arts, all reported benefits were associated with at least weekly participation. Some benefits were seen with as little as 60 minutes of weekly participation, demonstrating that, like physical activity, significant health benefits can be achieved with modest effort and time commitment [ 14 ]. Physical activity evidence indicates that greater levels of weekly participation are associated with greater health benefits–‘ some is better than none, more is better than less’ [ 14 ]. Substantial further research is required to determine the impact of the frequency and duration of performing arts participation on health benefits, as well as the potential additional impact of the setting (e.g. laboratory, classroom, live performance) of performing arts participation on observed benefits.

In sum, this review presents promising evidence regarding the health benefits of performing arts participation, but is limited by a young and disparate evidence base, as well as additional factors discussed below. Excepting studies of non-communicable disease risk, this umbrella review was limited to English language studies included in systematic reviews of the health effects of performing arts participation. It is thus probable that some primary studies were not considered; their exclusion could impact individual outcome results given the aforementioned infancy of the evidence base. However, it is less likely that individual primary studies would significantly impact the general conclusions of this review, which are based on aggregated moderate-high quality evidence grouped by domain of health impact.

This review is also potentially limited by the conduct of literature searches, data extraction, and evidence appraisal by the first author alone, in consultation with the authorship team, due to resource constraints. Single author search, extraction and appraisal has been demonstrated to increase the incidence of errors [ 71 ], yet these errors have been found to have a minimal impact on review results and conclusions [ 72 ]. To best meet study aims, the authors thus favored a broad, single author search, extraction and appraisal over a more constrained review conducted by multiple authors in duplicate. Additionally, the inclusion of a comprehensive and transparent S1 Appendix detailing all review data and subjective decision-making (i.e. article inclusions, GRADE appraisals) clarifies the basis for specific conclusions and serves as a foundation for discussion and future research.

Finally, while studies of participation-related performing arts injuries were beyond the scope of this review, it should be noted that, similar to exercise participation [ 73 ], the health impact of performing arts activities is not exclusively positive. Participation in performing arts does carry an injury risk, for example caused by overpractice [ 10 ]. These risks are considerably counterbalanced by the broad benefits of performing arts participation demonstrated in this review. However, on an individual level, participation risks must always be managed and weighed against potential benefits.

4.1 Conclusions

Performing arts participation is, broadly, a health promoting activity, with beneficial effects reported across healthy (non-clinical) children, adolescents, adults, and older adults in 17 domains (9 supported by moderate-high quality evidence). Positive health effects were associated with as little as 30 ( acute participation ) or 60 ( sustained weekly participation ) minutes of performing arts participation, with drumming and both expressive ( ballroom , social ) and exercise-based ( aerobic dance , Zumba ) modes of dance linked to the broadest health benefits. However, the evidence base is still very much in its infancy. Further research is necessary to optimize modes and doses of performing arts participation towards specific health effects, as well as clarify relationships between intrinsic physical intensity and observed benefits. The broad yet rigorous approach of this umbrella review provides a valuable knowledge foundation for such future research.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. the s1 appendix contains raw data underpinning grade appraisals and summary results of reviews, epidemiologic studies, and heart rate data..

Additionally, details of excluded articles are included.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252956.s001

1. Fancourt D, Warran K, Aughterson H. Evidence Summary for Policy—The role of arts in improving health & wellbeing. United Kingdom: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, 2020.
View Article
Google Scholar
PubMed/NCBI
16. Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary: Merriam-Webster; 2004.
17. Higgins JP, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, et al. Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions: John Wiley & Sons; 2019.
26. Medicine ACoS. ACSM’s guidelines for exercise testing and prescription: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2013.
56. Ekholm O, Bonde LO. Music and Health in Everyday Life in Denmark: Associations Between the Use of Music and Health-Related Outcomes in Adult Danes. Music and Public Health: Springer; 2018. p. 15–31.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List

Performing arts as a health resource? An umbrella review of the health impacts of music and dance participation

J. Matt McCrary

1 Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine, Hannover University for Music, Drama and Media, Hannover, Germany

2 Prince of Wales Clinical School, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Emma Redding

3 Division of Dance Science, Faculty of Dance, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, United Kingdom

Eckart Altenmüller

Associated data.

All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.

1. Introduction

2.1 Review registration

This review was prospectively registered in the PROSPERO registry (ID: CRD42020191991).

2.2 Overview

Following informal literature searches, the authors made an a priori decision that an integrated, three component umbrella review would most effectively address study aims:

A systematic review of systematic reviews of the health effects of performing arts participation;
A systematic review of observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk. NB : initial searches revealed no prior systematic reviews addressing the effects of performing arts participation on mortality and/or non-communicable disease risk .
A systematic review of studies of heart rate responses to performing arts participation.

2.3 Systematic review of systematic reviews of the health benefits of performing arts participation

2.3.1 database search terms.

2.3.2 Inclusion/Exclusion criteria

Systematic reviews including a mixture of primary studies meeting and not meeting inclusion/exclusion criteria were included if:

Reviews in which study results were quantitatively synthesized (i . e . meta-analysis) –The majority (>50%) of included studies examined active performing arts participation in healthy populations and met no exclusion criteria
Reviews in which results were narratively synthesized (i . e . descriptive synthesis of quantitative primary study results )–The results of primary studies of active participation in healthy populations meeting no exclusion criteria could be extracted and re-synthesized for the purposes of this review.

2.3.3 Data extraction

2.3.4 GRADE quality of evidence appraisal

2.3.5 Evidence synthesis

2.4. Systematic review of observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk

2.4.1 Search terms

Databases were searched using the following terms: ((music* OR danc* OR performing art* OR choir OR choral) AND (mortality OR public health OR disease OR risk) AND epidemiology).

2.4.2 Inclusion/exclusion criteria

2.4.3 Evidence synthesis, GRADE appraisal and synthesis

Conducted using an adaptation of the procedure detailed in sections 2.3.3–2.3.5, with included primary studies appraised individually and then synthesized at the level of this systematic review.

2.5 Systematic review of studies of heart rate responses to performing arts participation

2.5.1 search terms.

Database searches were performed using the following search terms: ((music* OR danc* OR performing art* OR choir OR choral) AND (load OR intensity OR heart rate)).

2.5.2 Inclusion/Exclusion criteria

2.5.3 Data extraction and appraisal

2.5.4 Evidence synthesis

Raw heart rate data were converted to % heart rate maximum (%HR max ) using common estimation methods [ 24 , 25 ]:

%HR max values were then categorized by intensity according to American College of Sports Medicine definitions [ 26 ].

3.1 Systematic review statistics ( Fig 1 )

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is pone.0252956.g001.jpg

Specific details regarding excluded reviews/studies are contained in the S1 Appendix .

This umbrella review includes 33 systematic reviews of the health effects of performing arts participation (15 dance; 18 music), encompassing 286 unique primary studies (128 dance; 158 music) and 149 outcomes across 18 health domains. Additionally, 9 observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk (3 dance, 5 music, 1 dance & music) were included, as well as 87 studies reporting heart rate responses during performing arts participation (71 dance, 16 music). Review articles and observational studies of mortality and non-communicable disease risk are directly referenced in this manuscript (Tables (Tables1 1 and and2); 2 ); the complete list of references, including studies investigating heart rate responses, is contained in the S1 Appendix .

#—domain linked to mechanisms of the health benefits of physical activity (no performing arts data associated with 3 proposed domains/mechanisms–cardiac function; blood coagulation; coronary blood flow) [ 12 , 28 ]. ‘Positive’ and ‘no effect’ results highlighted in green and black, respectively, are supported by moderate and/or high quality evidence.

Age group classifications based on United Nations/World Health Organization definitions: 0–9 years–children; 10–19 years–adolescents; 20–59 –adults; 60+–older adults. ‘Acute’ participation refers to a single session (up to 2.5 hours) of performing arts participation; ‘sustained’ participation refers to 4+ weeks of at least weekly performing arts participation.

3.2 General health effects of active performing arts participation

Positive effects of performing arts participation were reported in 17 of 18 investigated domains–only glucose/insulin outcomes were consistently reported to be unaffected by dance participation (no data related to music participation)( Table 1 ). Positive effects in 9 domains ( auditory; body composition; cognitive; immune function; mental health; physical fitness; physical function; self-reported health/wellbeing; social wellbeing ) were supported by moderate to high quality evidence; results in 4 of these 9 domains ( cognitive; mental health; physical fitness; self-reported health/wellbeing ) included a mixture of positive and neutral/no effects varying by specific outcome ( Table 2 ). Positive effects of performing arts participation were found in 9 of 13 domains (7 of 13 supported by moderate-high quality evidence) associated with the mechanisms of physical activity benefits (Tables (Tables1 1 and and2) 2 ) [ 12 , 28 ]. Raw data underpinning summary results and GRADE appraisals are detailed in the S1 Appendix .

3.3 Modes and ‘doses’ of performing arts participation associated with reported health effects ( Table 2 ; moderate–high quality evidence only)

3.4 Physical demands of performing arts participation

Heart rate responses to performing arts participation widely varied by style and/or performance setting, with studies of both music and dance participation reporting heart rates classified as very light, light, moderate, and vigorous intensity physical activity (Tables (Tables3 3 and and4). 4 ). Heart rate also varied substantially within the same mode of music/dance participation, with 16 modes (12 music; 4 dance) associated with heart rate responses at two intensity levels, 3 modes (1 music–trumpet; 2 dance–ballet, modern) associated with heart rate responses at three intensity levels, and active video game dancing associated with heart rate responses at all four intensity levels. Raw heart rate data underpinning summary results are detailed in the S1 Appendix .

*—instruments / styles with reported heart rate responses at 2 intensity levels.

**—instruments/styles with reported heart rate responses at 3 intensity levels. See S1 Appendix for source data and citations.

*—dance styles with reported heart rate responses at 2 intensity levels

**—dance styles with reported heart rate responses at 3 intensity levels

***—dance styles with reported heart rate responses at all 4 intensity levels. See S1 Appendix for source data and citations.

4. Discussion

4.1 Conclusions

Supporting information

S1 appendix.

Additionally, details of excluded articles are included.

Funding Statement

JMM was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability

PLoS One. 2021; 16(6): e0252956.

Decision Letter 0

PONE-D-20-39389

Dear Dr. McCrary,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

As you can see, both reviewers are generally supportive of this work, however several concerns they raise must be concerned. I felt like this was somewhere between a major and minor revision, but in order to give you more time to complete the revisions, I've decided to issue this as a major revision (but in reality, I am hoping it won't take that long to address the reviewers' comments and resubmit).

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 16 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols .

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Emily S. Cross

Academic Editor

Journal requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. In line with PLOS' guidelines on systematic reviews ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-systematic-reviews-and-meta-analyses ), please update your PRISMA flowchart to provide detailed reasons for the exclusion of manuscripts at each stage of analysis.

*As per PLOS' guidelines regarding the reporting of Materials and Methods ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-materials-and-methods ), authors should ensure that "the Materials and Methods section should provide enough detail to allow suitably skilled investigators to fully replicate your study." Specifically, please consider moving some methodological details from the Supplemental information to the main body of the manuscript, so that your Methods section includes sufficient information to be understood independently of any other methods or measures described elsewhere in your submission.

3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information .

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: N/A

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The current paper provides an indepth review of the health benefits of participation in and engagement with the performing arts. The results show that both music, especially drumming, and expression and exercise-based modes of dance promote health, but specific conclusions are as yet limited. I enjoyed reading the paper and the research questions are important and timely, with the potential to contribute to the field. However, I believe that a few things can be further clarified, and a few concerns need to be addressed before the paper goes forward for publication. I outline both minor and major comments below. For convenience, I outline these chronologically.

1. Page 3, line 63. Please clarify in the introduction what you mean by the ‘mode’ of art.

2. I think it would be helpful in the introduction to clarify front and center that there are a number of performing arts and the authors chose to focus on music and dance, and provide more justification for this choice.

3. Additionally, it would be beneficial for the reader if the authors provide their apriori hypotheses in the introduction itself. What were your predictions and why?

4. Page 4, line 97: “Following informal literature searches, the authors made an a priori decision that an integrated, three component umbrella review would most effectively address study aims” – can you clarify more precisely in the introduction what exactly your study aims were and why you focused on only these three components. Aren’t there other components that can also answer your study aims? I think a more comprehensive justification would be helpful.

5. Page 5, line 117: Please clarify what you mean by an ‘exertive aim.’ Was the exclusion criteria such that studies were excluded if target heart rate or perceived exertion were dependent variables? Can you please justify more why you chose to exclude these studies but include a separate systematic review on heart rate responses? To clarify, I understand why the authors did this but I think the readers would benefit from a clearer justification.

6. Page 6, line 143: it is unclear from the phrasing whether only those systematic reviews where meta-analyses were conducted were included in the current review or whether all systematic reviews were included?

7. Page 6, line 147: please clarify what you mean by narrative synthesis.

8. Page 7, line 54: “For each outcome, the effect of performing arts participation was determined to be ‘positive’, ‘negative’, ‘no effect’, or ‘unclear’” Please clarify in more detail how each of these outcomes were determined.

9. Page 7, line 167: It is not clear why one outcome from one study which was included in multiple meta-analyses was considered twice. Please clarify this.

10. Page 7, line 172: “similar domains associated with the health benefits of physical activity” – why were similar domains chosen? Was the goal of the study to find similar outcomes to any other physical activity including dance and music, or was it to find health outcomes that were specific to dance and music above and beyond health outcomes of just any physical activity? I think this is a concern throughout the paper where the aim is slightly unclear in terms of identifying outcomes that are specific to expressive activity and that are outcomes of any exercise.

11. Page 10, Figure 1: Figure 1 is excellent and a graphical representation of your umbrella review. It would be more helpful to the reader either in text or in the caption to add the specific reason why studies were excluded (Eg. Xx studies excluded because no heart rate data, xx studies excluded because included only in qualitative data etc).

12. Page 15, table 2: this is an excellent, extensive list of studies! Were the studies also grouped by style/instrument of dance or music in order to find whether combined together these studies yielded consistent (intensity) of health outcomes? Were the studies also grouped by participation setting (lab/class/performance etc) to see if there were participation setting specific effects?

13. Page 16 (for some reason line numbers disappear after table 2 � ): Did you have age-specific predictions?

14. Page 22, first paragraph: why is the quality of existing studies low? Is this because of low sample sizes? Or missing control groups? More broadly, I think the discussion needs to address the issue of control groups. What control groups were used in primary studies to dissociate the effects of music and/or dance from the effects of other forms of activity?

15. Page 22, first paragraph: “validated, sensitive instruments for quantifying performing arts participation” – please clarify what you mean by validated and sensitive instruments, and highlight directs for future research more broadly in the discussion that follow on from your findings.

Reviewer #2: Summary

This is a well-written and clear review of an area lacking important research. This review thoroughly collates the present evidence on the health impacts of music and dance participation and provides a solid foundation for future research.

General points

In particular it is commendable that music and dance are both covered in this review. I think it would be nice to acknowledge in the introduction their common evolutionary origins. The review supports the idea that group dancing and musicking fulfil similar psychological and societal functions https://www.pnas.org/content/112/29/8987.short

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0767

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180101

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6092630/

Specific points

1) Page, 3, first paragraph, a recent systematic review on dance interventions for mental health was published by Millman et al., 2020 here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cpp.2490

2) Page 20, line 1/2 – “This umbrella review…” and “…evidence demonstrating that performing arts participation is, broadly, a health promoting activity…”

3) Page 21 line 1 – “…greater amounts of high quality studies of specific…”

4) Page 23, line 18 – “Performing arts participation is a broadly healthy promoting activity, with…” or could do the same as what I suggested for Page 20 “… is, broadly, a health promoting…”

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article ( what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at gro.solp@serugif . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Author response to Decision Letter 0

15 Apr 2021

Thank you for the opportunity to submit revisions of our manuscript for further consideration for publication in PLoS One. We thank the reviewers for their thorough feedback, which has helped us further strengthen our manuscript. Please find a point-by-point response to the reviewers’ comments below:

Author Response: The ‘mode’ of art has been clarified on p.3, lines 63-64 of the revised manuscript. The revised sentence now reads: ‘The specifics of the most effective arts interventions – namely the mode (specific ‘type’ of art – e.g. ballroom dance, singing) and ‘dose’ (frequency and timing/duration) – for various clinical and public health scenarios are still unclear.’

Author Response: The revised manuscript now includes a more detailed justification for the focus of the review on performing arts participation, also incorporating suggestions from Reviewer #2. Page 3, lines 67-73 of the introduction now read:

Participation in the performing arts is the most popular form of arts participation, with up to 40% of EU and US adults participating annually in performing arts activities.[5, 6] Within the performing arts, music and dance participation are the two most popular modes of engagement, both involving engagement with music, and proposed to have common evolutionary origins.[7-9] The health effects of music and dance participation were thus considered likely to be both related and broadly studied and are the focus of this review. ‘Performing arts participation’ will be used to refer, jointly, to music and dance participation from this point forward.

Author Response: A priori hypotheses for the review have been added to the revised introduction on p. 4, lines 92-94: ‘Performing arts participation is hypothesized to have similar health effects as physical activity due to its intrinsic physical exertion, as well as additional effects related to creative expression and engagement with music.’

Author Response: The study aims have been clarified in the revised introduction and further justification for the three selected review components has been added to the revised methods. Clarified aims in the introduction now read (p. 4, lines 86-97):

Section 2.2 of the revised methods now further clarifies the choice of the three umbrella review components selected to meet umbrella review aims (p. 5, lines 104-112):

1) A systematic review of systematic reviews of the health effects of performing arts participation;

2) A systematic review of observational studies investigating the impact of performing arts participation on mortality and non-communicable disease risk. NB: initial searches revealed no prior systematic reviews addressing the effects of performing arts participation on mortality and/or non-communicable disease risk.

3) A systematic review of studies of heart rate responses to performing arts participation.

Author Response: Exclusion criteria related to studies conducted with an exertive vs. expressive aim have been clarified in the revised methods (p. 5-6, lines 125-130):

Articles investigating music and dance participation conducted with an exertive aim (i.e. music or dance session(s) designed to elicit a target heart rate/rating of perceived exertion) were excluded to maintain review focus on performing arts vs. exercise participation. As noted in the introduction, performing arts participation is distinguished from exercise participation by its distinctly expressive, rather than exertive, focus; exertion is an intrinsic byproduct, not an objective.

Author Response: The phrasing in this section has been clarified in the revised methods (p. 7; lines 151-160):

‒ Reviews in which study results were quantitatively synthesized (i.e. meta-analysis) – The majority (>50%) of included studies examined active performing arts participation in healthy populations and met no exclusion criteria;

‒ Reviews in which results were narratively synthesized (i.e. descriptive synthesis of quantitative primary study results) – The results of primary studies of active participation in healthy populations meeting no exclusion criteria could be extracted and re-synthesized for the purposes of this review.

Author Response: The term narrative synthesis has been clarified on p. 7, lines 157-158 of the revised methods: ‘Reviews in which results were narratively synthesized (i.e. descriptive synthesis of quantitative primary study results)…’

Author Response: Further details regarding the determination of positive/negative/no effect/unclear designations of results has been added to the revised methods (p. 7, lines 165-171):

For each outcome, the effect of performing arts participation was determined to be ‘positive’, ‘negative’, ‘no effect’, or ‘unclear’. Designations of ‘positive’, ‘negative’ and ‘no effect’ were given in cases where clear links between changes in a parameter and a corresponding positive/negative health effect exist in healthy populations (e.g. shift from pro- to anti-inflammatory tone – positive effect; delayed pubertal onset – negative effect). An ‘unclear’ designation was given in cases where such links between changes in a parameter and health effects do not exist (e.g. acute increase in IL-6).

Author Response: Treatment of the one outcome included in multiple meta-analyses has been clarified in the revised methods (p. 8, lines 182-187):

Author Response: This sentence has been revised for clarity (p.8, lines 192-194): ‘Outcomes were categorized by domain – domains used to organize evidence of the health benefits of physical activity were used as an initial framework, with additional domains added as required.[12]’

Additionally, justification of the use of domains from physical activity as an initial framework for classifying the health benefits of performing arts participation is further aided by the clarification of study aims and hypotheses in the revised introduction (p. 4, lines 86-97 and detailed above in the response to point #4).

Author Response: Figure 1 has been updated to indicate a breakdown of specific reasons for exclusion. Further, the Figure 1 caption has been revised to direct the reader to the Supplementary Appendix for details regarding excluded reviews and studies (p. 11, lines 251-52): ‘Specific details regarding excluded reviews/studies are contained in the Supplementary Appendix.’

Author Response: We thank the reviewer for their positive appraisal of our work! Studies were also grouped by style/instrument of dance and music, as noted on p. 17, lines 295-300 of the revised methods:

The effects of music participation were supported by moderate to high quality evidence for 11 individual outcomes, with reported positive effects in 5 domains (auditory; cognitive; immune function/inflammation; self-reported health/wellbeing; social functioning). Modes of performing arts participation associated with the broadest positive health effects were: aerobic dance (4 domains); ballroom dance (4 domains); social dance (4 domains); drumming (3 domains); and Zumba dance (3 domains).

Participation setting was not extracted from included primary studies of the health effects of performing arts participation – this information was only extracted from studies of heart rate responses to performing arts participation. We agree, however, that this is an important consideration for future research, and have noted this on p. 23, lines 400-403: ‘Substantial further research is required to determine the impact of the frequency and duration of performing arts participation on health benefits, as well as the potential additional impact of the setting (e.g. laboratory, classroom, live performance) of performing arts participation on observed benefits.’

Author Response: A priori review hypotheses have been included in the revised introduction (p. 4, lines 92-94: ‘Performing arts participation is hypothesized to have similar health effects as physical activity due to its intrinsic physical exertion, as well as additional effects related to creative expression and engagement with music.’

Author Response: Further details regarding the low quality of existing studies and range of control groups used has been added to p. 22, lines 360-365:

The overall quality of included evidence is generally low (26% (45/173) of outcomes backed by moderate-high quality evidence) due to a predominance of non-randomized and observational vs. randomized controlled trial study designs. Control and comparison groups varied widely across all study types, including no-intervention/waitlist control groups and exercise (various types), cognitive and/or language training and other art participation (e.g. visual art, drama) comparison groups.

Author Response: This sentence has been clarified and the directs for future research have been expanded in the revised discussion (p. 23, lines 387-391):

However, the quality of these epidemiologic studies is presently low and specifically limited by the use of a range of bespoke survey instruments with unclear psychometric value to quantify the frequency, timing/duration and type of performing arts participation. Future studies using validated instruments for quantifying performing arts participation are needed.

Reviewer #2: Summary

Author Response: We agree that the common evolutionary origins of music and dance are important to acknowledge and have revised the introduction to include this and key suggested references (p. 3, lines 68-70): ‘Within the performing arts, music and dance participation are the two most popular modes of engagement, both involving engagement with music, and proposed to have common evolutionary origins.[7-9]’

Author Response: While we agree that the Millman review is both relevant to this umbrella review and a valuable recent review, this sentence has been revised to clarify that we are referring specifically to the recent World Health Organization-commissioned scoping review on the health effects of the arts (p. 3, lines 59-61): ‘Participation and receptive engagement in the arts are increasingly recognized as being health promoting, most notably in policy briefs,[1] a recent World Health Organization-commissioned scoping review,[2] and social prescribing initiatives.[3]’

Author Response: We thank the reviewer for these corrections. The suggested changes have been made (p. 21, lines 344-345).

Author Response: We thank the reviewer for these corrections. The suggested changes have been made (p. 22, line 359).

Author Response: We thank the reviewer for these corrections. The suggested changes have been made (p. 25, line 432).

Submitted filename: PLOS One Reviewer Response 15.4.21.docx

Decision Letter 1

26 May 2021

PONE-D-20-39389R1

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ , click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at gro.solp@gnillibrohtua .

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

6. Review Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: All comments have been satisfactorily addressed, and I wish the authors good luck for their publication!

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article ( what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Kohinoor M. Darda

Acceptance letter

28 May 2021

Dear Dr. McCrary:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .

If we can help with anything else, please email us at gro.solp@enosolp .

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Professor Emily S. Cross

Articles on Performing arts

Displaying 1 - 20 of 37 articles.

This engineering course has students use their brainwaves to create performing art

Francesco Fedele , Georgia Institute of Technology

Puttin’ on the Ritz and improving well-being with older adults through virtual music theatre

Julia Brook , Queen's University, Ontario and Colleen Renihan , Queen's University, Ontario

Exploring the St. Lawrence River through the performing arts

Geneviève Dupéré , Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Keeping injured voices hush-hush : Why professional singers and actors often don’t seek treatment for vocal illness

Nicole Y.K. Li-Jessen , McGill University and Colin Jones , McGill University

A white librettist wrote an opera about Emmett Till – and some critics are calling for its cancellation

Anita Gonzalez , Georgetown University

63.5% of Australia’s performing artists reported worsening mental health during COVID

Helen Rusak , Edith Cowan University

Arts venues set the stage for wonder, the critical sense we need for post-pandemic innovation

David Weitzner , York University, Canada

We used performing arts to map out gender violence in Sierra Leone. What we found

Aisha Fofana Ibrahim , University of Sierra Leone ; Helen Shutt , University of Glasgow , and Laura S. Martin , University of Sheffield

Belvoir’s The Cherry Orchard is a laugh-out -loud tragedy for uncertain times

Huw Griffiths , University of Sydney

NZ Budget 2021: we need the arts to live, but artists need to earn a living

Mark Harvey , University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Ghana’s politics has strong ties with performing arts. This is how it started

Edmund John Collins , University of Ghana

4 lessons from the NBA bubble for the future of live arts performance

Sarah Bay-Cheng , York University, Canada

As COVID wreaks havoc in the performing arts, do we still need a national opera company?

Peter Tregear , The University of Melbourne

Coronavirus: theatres are already closing – the UK government needs to act now

Tim Rhys , Cardiff University

The arts needed a champion – it got a package to prop up the major players 100 days later

Jo Caust , The University of Melbourne

Friday essay: training a new generation of performers about intimacy, safety and creativity

David Shirley , Edith Cowan University

Giving it away for free – why the performing arts risks making the same mistake newspapers did

Caitlin Vincent , The University of Melbourne

Performers and sole traders find it hard to get JobKeeper in part because they get behind on their paperwork

Ann Kayis-Kumar , UNSW Sydney ; Fiona Anne Martin , UNSW Sydney ; Jack Noone , UNSW Sydney , and Michael Walpole , UNSW Sydney

Home of the Arts – inside an arts centre keeping body and soul together

Julian Meyrick , Griffith University

What is the place of the performing arts fair in the age of the internet?

Top contributors

Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University

Principal Fellow and Professor of Music, The University of Melbourne

Associate Head of Theatre, The University of Melbourne

Professor of Digital Media, Queen Mary University of London

Senior Lecturer, Arts Management, Edith Cowan University

Adjunct Research Fellow, Griffith University

Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Sydney

Visiting Associate Professor, National Taiwan Normal University

PhD Candidate, University of Newcastle

Lecturer in Music, Queensland University of Technology

Professor, School of Taxation and Business Law, UNSW Sydney

Director of Individualised Studies Degree Program, Dixie State University

Adjunct Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology

Senior Lecturer In Music Literature and Research, Griffith University

X (Twitter)
Unfollow topic Follow topic

Performance Research

Researching performance, anticipating tendencies, mapping practices, documenting processes, stimulating inquiry, performing research.

Since 1996 Performance Research has set a precedent that has become standard for thematic and cross-disciplinary ways of bringing together the varied materials of artistic and theoretical research in the expanded field of performance. Working closely with designers, artists, academics, theorists, performance practitioners and writers Performance Research resists disconnected, disembodied, and disinterested forms of scholarship. We prefer instead the possibilities of imagining the journal as a dynamic space of performance that produces inspiring conversations, unlikely connections, and curious confluences. Our emphasis on contemporary performance arts within changing cultures and technologies is reflected in the interdisciplinary vision and international scope of the journal. Performance Research continues to combine writings and works for the page in an interplay of analysis, anecdote, polemic and criticism; interweaving the oblique with the conflicting, the pivotal with the resistant, and the eclectic with the indispensable.

The Journal

Performance Research is an independent, peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd for ARC, a division of the Centre for Performance Research Ltd, an educational charity limited by guarantee.

Performance Research is a specialist journal that aims to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance. Interdisciplinary in vision and international in scope, its emphasis is on contemporary performance arts within changing cultures.

Performance Research was founded in 1995 by Ric Allsopp, Richard Gough and Claire MacDonald.

Performance Research News
9 November 2023 - New Reviews Editor Transition … read more
31 October 2018 - Performance Archives … read more

Current calls for papers

Volume 29, issue 8 - On Exits and Endings - deadline 2 April 2024 … more details
Volume 30, issue 1 - On Music - deadline 22 April 2024 … more details
Current Issue

Volume 28 Issue 3

On invasion.

Forthcoming

Volume 28 issue 4, on the mundane, volume 28 issue 5, volume 28 issue 6.

Forthcoming Issues
Editorial Process
Calls for Submissions
Submissions Guidelines
Editorial Style Guide
Editorial Board
Performance Research Books
Subscriptions
Mailing List

Organizations on stage: organizational research and the performing arts

Open access
Published: 18 October 2022
Volume 74 , pages 303–352, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

Verena Komander 1 &
Andreas König 1

3549 Accesses

2 Citations

Explore all metrics

Management and organization scholars have long been intrigued by the performing arts—music, theater, and dance—as a rich context for studying organizational phenomena. Indeed, a plethora of studies suggest that the performing arts are more than an interesting sideline for authors, as they offer unique theoretical and empirical lenses for organization studies. However, this stream of literature spreads across multiple research areas, varies with regard to its underlying theories and methods, and fails to pay sufficient attention to the contextuality of the findings. We address the resulting limitations by identifying and reviewing 89 articles on management and organization related to the performing arts published in 15 top-tier journals between 1976 and 2022. We find that research in the performing arts advances organizational theory and the understanding of organizational phenomena in four key ways, namely by studying (1) organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts; (2) performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts; (3) organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories; and (4) organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices. We also find that, in contrast to other settings, the performing arts are uniquely suited for immersive participant-observer research and for generating genuine insights into fundamental organizational structures and processes that are generic conditions of the performing arts and management alike, such as leadership, innovation, and the management of uncertainty. Finally, based on our consolidation of the research gaps and limitations of the reviewed studies, we develop a comprehensive agenda for future research.

For those about to rock… is stability a determinant of rock bands success?

Etienne Farvaque

Authoritarian leadership styles and performance: a systematic literature review and research agenda

Elia Pizzolitto, Ida Verna & Michelina Venditti

The four-day work week: a chronological, systematic review of the academic literature

Timothy T. Campbell

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Over the past thirty years, management scholars have increasingly sought to investigate organizational phenomena in the context of the performing arts—music, theater, and dance (Berniker 1998 ; Harrison and Rouse 2014 ; Kramer and Crespy 2011 ; Ladkin 2008 ; Stephens 2021 ). For example, Murnighan and Conlon ( 1991 ) illuminate trade-offs between leadership and democracy in string quartets; Glynn and Lounsbury ( 2005 ) investigate institutional and discursive change in symphony orchestras; and other well-known studies use theater and music to explore innovation, creativity, and transformation (Berg 2016 ; Cancellieri et al. 2022 ; Hatch 1998 ; Vera and Crossan 2005 ). As Weick indicated, viewing the performing arts as a metaphor for organizational processes can help scholars avoid “stroking toward the white cliffs of the obvious” ( 1974 , p. 487). Not surprisingly thus, a wide range of research leverages the performing arts as a window into (inter)actions, cognitions, and emotions in organizations and their environments.

Notably, bridging the performing arts and organizations has long been a standing tradition in both the social sciences and the arts. In the sixteenth century, “to perform” became a technical term for “acting or representing on a stage” or “sing[ing] or render[ing] on a musical instrument” (Etymonline.com 2020 ). Since the mid-twentieth century, sociologists have increasingly referred to dramaturgy and theater as valid metaphorical source domains to conceptualize and elucidate the hidden theatrical structure of individual and collective behavior (Bourdieu 1990 ; Feldman and Pentland 2003 ; Mangham 1986 ; Pentland and Rueter 1994 ). Goffman, for instance, used the term “performance” to denote “all activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers” ( 1959 , p. 22).

Ever since social scientists established a direct semantic and conceptual connection between the performing arts and performance in organizations, an array of studies have demonstrated that management, innovation, leadership, and other organizational phenomena have much in common with such activities as performing, directing, choreographing, and conducting (Mangham 1990 ). Particularly, scholarly interest rose as Organization Science published a special issue on jazz improvisation and organization theory in 1998 (Lewin 1998 ; Weick 1998 ). This stream of literature has generated rich counter-conventional insights, and scholars continue to debate how they can best apply the vantage point of the performing arts as a prism for understanding issues in organizations (Biehl-Missal 2011 ; Cornelissen 2004 ).

Practitioner-oriented publications advising to use the performing arts as a source of new solutions to pivotal managerial challenges have also increased significantly (Clarkeson 1990 ; Conforto et al. 2016 ; Kao 1996 ). For example, in “Managing as Performing Art,” Vaill ( 1989 ) argues that instead of increasing managerial comprehension and control, managers should embrace paradox and equip themselves with new techniques and options for dealing with uncontrollability and chaos. Meanwhile, companies increasingly seek performing artists, including conductors, musicians, and members of theater companies, to inject knowledge from the performing arts into their organizations (Furu 2012 ; Hunt et al. 2004 ). For instance, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra successfully facilitates its conductor-less “Orpheus process” to executives and consultancies (Orpheus Chamber Orchestra 2020 ). World-famous conductors, such as Herbert Blomstedt, Riccardo Chailly, and Sir Roger Norrington, share their experiences in conducting large ensembles with executives in the “Management Symphony,” a series of orchestra workshops designed for managers held at Leipzig’s Gewandhau s (Orchesterstiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft 2020 ).

Perhaps because of organizational research’s growing interest in the performing arts, the organizational scholarly literature in this regard has spread across multiple research areas and varies substantially as to the underlying theories and methods. Indeed, this literature remains highly fragmented as it relates to the types of performing arts considered, the function of performing-arts-related theories and empirics, and its main contributions and insights. While such multifacetedness can be a source of explanatory power and narrative appeal, fragmentation limits the potential of this research stream to advance organizational science. Fragmentation and lack of synthesis also undermine a fruitful critique of this literature. This seems to be important in light of criticism, for example, against an overly simplistic, naïve portrayal of ‘great’ orchestra conductors and the idealization of the leadership of highly motivated, skilled, and creative people (Hunt et al. 2004 ).

Our systematic literature review (Fisch and Block 2018 ) seeks to address these issues by pursuing three main objectives. First, we aim to map the theories and models used to organize the rather fragmented literature. Second, we adopt a critical perspective on the aptness of the performing arts as a metaphorical source domain for studies of organizational issues (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011 ). Third, we seek to outline promising avenues for future research. In these quests, we followed established procedures in the field (Tranfield et al. 2003 ) and screened 37 scientific top-journals from the field of organization and management science to select, read, and inductively integrate 89 peer-reviewed articles. In particular, using recent approaches on conceptual metaphors in organization science (Cornelissen 2005 , 2006 ; Lakoff and Johnson 1980 ) and idiosyncrasies in cross-contextual research (Whetten 1989 , 2009 ) as our taxonomical guideposts, we organize the literature in four broader categories: (1) research that studies organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts; (2) research that studies performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts; (3) research that views organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories; and (4) research that views organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices.

We offer three major contributions. First, our induced conceptual framework of the literature broadens the focus from singular phenomena highlighted in prior reviews, such as organizational improvisation (Hadida et al. 2015 ; Pina e Cunha et al. 1999 ), towards a general perspective on organizational research in the context of the performing arts. Second, we demonstrate how and why research in the context of the performing arts can be particularly valuable to organization and management theory. In particular, both contexts face similar challenges in terms of timing (Albert and Bell 2002 ), coordination (Harrison and Rouse 2014 ), leadership (Hunt et al. 2004 ), creativity (Berg 2016 ), and innovation (Kamoche and Pina e Cunha 2001 ). As such, scholarly conversations on these phenomena are the ones that are most richly and validly informed by organizational literature in the context of the performing arts (Cohen et al. 1996 ). As we outline, this is especially true in times of instability and uncertainty (Vaill 1989 ). Third, we enhance prior scholarship that has highlighted the specificities of organizational research in idiosyncratic empirical contexts (Hällgren et al. 2018 ). In particular, whereas scholars have explained the intricacies of sports as an empirical background (Day et al. 2012 ), we delineate the opportunities and limitations of the performing arts as an alternative research context for organization scholars. Altogether, by organizing knowledge gained from the cross-fertilization of the performing arts and organization science, we respond to recent calls for more context-sensitive organizational research and counterfactual reasoning (Whetten 2009 ).

2 Research method

In line with established procedures (Booth et al. 2016 ; Fisch and Block 2018 ; Tranfield et al. 2003 ), we highlight three aspects as to the scope of our review and the relevance of the selected literature. First, we focused on theories stemming from the performing arts or empirical data directly related to performing-arts practices. That is, we excluded accounts that frame organizations as, for instance, “social drama” (Rosen 1985 , p. 31) or leadership as an art (Conger 1989 ) but lack any concrete theoretical or empirical reference to the performing arts. Second, in line with our theoretical orientation, we only investigated papers concerned with the performing arts in the sense of “types of art (such as music, dance, or drama) that are performed for an audience” (Merriam-Webster.com 2020 ). Therefore, we excluded studies that focus on types of art that are not performed in front of an audience, such as movies and recorded music. Footnote 1 Third, as we are interested in management and organizational issues, we excluded studies from the fields of marketing, (occupational) psychology, and economics. Moreover, while we acknowledge that other disciplines, such as communication studies, musicology, theater studies, and cultural studies, provide valuable insights regarding the performing arts and their implications for management-related topics, we decided to select those journals that are most relevant for management and organization scholars.

Specifically, to focus our literature review on the most relevant results for organizational research, we centered our search on top-tier outlets from the fields of management, organization, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In this vein and consistent with recent literature reviews in this field (e.g., Graf-Vlachy et al. 2020 ; Gutmann 2019 ), we used the VHB JOURQUAL 3 expert-survey ranking of the German Academic Association for Business Research to identify all journals rated A or A+. Footnote 2 As shown in Harzing ( 2020 ), this ranking identifies the most renowned, high-quality journals quasi-identically to other international journal rankings, such as the Chartered Association of Business Schools or the Financial Times rankings . We considered each journal rated A or A+ from the VHB JOURQUAL 3 sub-ratings business administration , organization , human resource management , international management, strategic management , technology , innovation , and entrepreneurship . In total, we considered 37 scientific journals. Table 1 shows the number of articles in the sample classified by journal.

We followed a structured content-analysis process involving three stages—sampling, coding, and analysis (Duriau et al. 2007 )—to inductively identify key themes. First, we utilized a keyword search to develop our sample (Krippendorff 2013 ). We used the EBSCO database to search for the following keywords and their respective word stems, as indicated by the Boolean asterisc operators, in the title or abstract of the articles: ballet, circus, dance, drama*, jazz, music*, opera, orchestra, performing arts, and theat*. After screening the abstracts of the 257 identified papers, we excluded all papers that did not match the scope of this review, which yielded a sample of 108 articles. After that, we removed 29 articles when a full reading suggested they were outside our research scope. Moreover, following Graf-Vlachy et al. ( 2020 ), we identified ten relevant articles through backward and forward searches (excluding books, chapters, and journals not A/A+ ranked). The final sample included 89 peer-reviewed articles published in 15 journals, as depicted in Table 1 .

Second, we coded the articles in our final sample. To do so, we developed a codebook containing different types of codes (Krippendorff 2013 ). The preliminary set of codes included nominal variables, such as type of data or methods, and qualitative categories, such as the paper’s key contributions or theoretical conversations to which the paper contributed.

Third, we iterated between the purely inductive coding (Gioia et al. 2013 ; Glaser and Strauss 1980 ) described in stage two and searching for suitable existing categorizations and constructs in the literature. Consequently, we arrived at a research framework for categorizing our sample along two dimensions, namely, first, the role of performing arts as empirical and/or conceptual source domain, and, second, the approach to making a theoretical contribution. We explain this research framework and its interpretation in the “Research framework” section.

3 Descriptive overview of the relevant literature

Figure 1 shows the distribution and cumulative citations of sample articles per year. The articles in the sample were published between 1976 and 2022. Positive outliers in the number of articles per year arise from the publication of special issues of Organization Science in 1998 and Organization Studies in 2004.

Distribution and cumulative citations of sample articles, per year

In terms of their methodology, most of the studies are empirical (74%), with 60% thereof relying on qualitative methods, 25% on quantitative methods, and 15% on mixed methods. Most articles draw on the context of drama or theater, followed by music and dance. Few relate to other contexts, such as stand-up comedy, circuses, or festivals. A Web of Science search for citations of the sampled articles revealed that research in the context of the performing arts is of increasing interest to organization scholars, as depicted in Fig. 1 .

In the period 1976 to 2022, the sampled articles have cumulatively received nearly 12,000 citations. Footnote 3 As shown in Fig. 1 , interest started to increase significantly in the late 1990s. Notably, the cumulative annual citations of the articles in our sample have been growing by about 350 citations on average per year since 1999. In comparison, the average annual citation growth of all papers published in the journals in our sample during the same time span was only 76 citations. Footnote 4 This over-proportional growth in interest in the sample articles seems to support the idea that organization scholars are indeed interested strongly in investigations in the performing arts context. Table 2 presents the most widely cited articles in the sample as measured by average annual Web of Science citations. Five articles—Grandey ( 2003 ), Maitlis ( 2005 ), Voss et al. ( 2008 ), Goldin and Rouse ( 2000 ), and Maitlis and Lawrence ( 2007 )—have achieved mean annual citation counts between 25 and 57, well above the sample average of 13.

4 Research framework

Table 3 shows the first outcome of our coding exercise—the categorization of the reviewed articles into four groups along two dimensions. As the first dimension, on the horizontal axis, we categorized the articles according to the role of performing arts as empirical and/or conceptual source domain for the organizational structures and processes under investigation . We induced this dimension from the frequency with which the notion of ‘performing arts as a metaphor for organizational phenomena’ (e.g., Lewin 1998 ; Weick 1998 ) surfaced in the sampled literature. At the heart of a metaphor is the description or understanding of a rather complex and unfamiliar concept A—i.e., the target domain—through the frame of a simpler, more familiar concept B—i.e., the source domain (Cornelissen 2005 , 2006 ; Lakoff and Johnson 1980 ). In this vein, we split the sample into studies in which the performing arts are the primary source domain for the organizational structures and processes under investigation, and studies in which the performing arts are a secondary source domain for the organizational structures and processes under investigation.

Specifically, we categorized any given paper as performing arts are the primary source domain if the authors observed or analyzed phenomena in a performing arts context. For example, studies that primarily used data from and/or ideas about symphony orchestras, jazz combos, opera houses, or improvisation techniques to investigate organizational phenomena fall in this category. Conversely, we allocated a paper to the category of performing arts are a secondary source domain if it drew from contexts that are merely indirectly related to the performing arts. For example, studies that analyzed theater performances within otherwise not performing-arts-related organizations fall into this category. This categorization was useful as the performing arts as primary context category identifies studies that might be directly associated with the theme of our review, while the performing arts as secondary source domain category highlights the ubiquity of more latent but equally rich applications of (concepts from) the performing arts in organizational research.

As the second dimension, on the vertical axis, we categorized the literature depending on the respective approach to making a theoretical contribution —namely, as either uses observation to inform theory or uses theory to inform observation . This category builds on Whetten’s ( 2009 ) differentiation between two—equally valuable—ways of creating novel and interesting theoretical contributions from context-spanning research: first, “ theory improvement ,” (Whetten 2009 , p. 35), where research in a foreign context allows scholars to develop contributions to theory in a focal discipline; and second, “ theory application ,” (Whetten 2009 , p. 35) where an established theoretical framework from a foreign epistemic context or discipline is used to better understand a phenomenon in a focal discipline (Whetten 2002 , 2009 ). In this vein, for example, we categorized papers that collected data from music competitions to advance theory on the influence of auditive versus visual cues on decision-making (Goldin and Rouse 2000 ; Tsay 2014 ) as uses observation to inform theory . In contrast, for example, we categorized papers that analyzed organizational crisis through the lens of music theory (e.g., Albert and Bell 2002 ) as uses theory to inform observation . Whetten’s ( 2009 ) categorization scheme proved particularly helpful because it directly matches the inherently cross-contextual overall logic of our review. It also allows us to highlight that the performing arts provide an interesting empirical context and encompass a broad and rich epistemic tradition and conceptual reservoir.

Taken together, our two conceptual dimensions generated a two-by-two matrix that allowed us to cluster the literature into four categories, as depicted in Table 3 . We labeled the quadrants as follows: (1) “advancing organizational theory by studying organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts” (‘performing arts as primary source domain’ and ‘uses observation to inform theory’—47 studies); (2) “advancing organizational theory by studying performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts” (‘performing arts as secondary source domain’ and ‘uses observation to inform theory’—10 studies); (3) “understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories” (‘performing arts as secondary source domain’ and ‘uses theory to inform observation’—19 studies); and (4) “understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices” (‘performing arts as primary source domain’ and ‘uses theory to inform observation’—13 studies). In addition, for the sake of taxonomic order and comprehensibility, we further categorized all studies within each quadrant according to the major topics of two divisions of the Academy of Management that seemed closest to the papers’ central contributions: Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC), and Organizational Behavior (OB). Footnote 5 This deductive exercise prompted us to categorize studies in quadrants one, two, and four using selected topics of the MOC division and studies in quadrant three using selected topics of the OB division. Footnote 6 We provide a more detailed overview of the selected studies in the Appendix .

Below, we elaborate on the key theoretical contributions of the papers in each quadrant. Following Alvesson and Sandberg’s ( 2020 ) approach, which suggests a rather selective but detailed description of the field of research in a literature review, we focus on the most cited and what appeared to us as the most representative studies.

4.1 Quadrant 1: advancing organizational theory by studying organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts

Quit studying [corporate] organizations [—study organizations] elsewhere. (Weick 1974 , p. 487)

All studies in this category aim to inform organizational theory by observing and analyzing organizational phenomena in the context of the performing arts. Table 3 shows that most studies in our sample (47 papers; 52 percent of the sample) fall into this category. Generally, the authors of these studies followed Weick’s ( 1974 ) recommendation to test accepted assumptions and hypotheses in different contexts until organizational theories are valid approximations of reality (Weick 1995 ). Research in this category predominantly offers theoretical contributions to four scholarly conversations highlighted by the AOM’s MOC division: (social) identity (e.g., Hales et al. 2021 ; Hunt et al. 2004 ; Kim and Jensen 2011 ; Voss et al. 2006 ), social construction (e.g., Ladkin 2008 ; Riza and Heller 2015 ; Sagiv et al. 2019 ; Stephens 2021 ; Toraldo et al. 2019 ), judgment and decision making (e.g., Cattani et al. 2013 ; Goldin and Rouse 2000 ; Tsay 2014 ), and communities of practice (e.g., Eikhof and Haunschild 2007 ; Harrison and Rouse 2014 ; Kramer and Crespy 2011 ).

4.1.1 Contributions to the conversation on “(social) identity”

The studies in this category leverage the fact that values, identity perceptions, and related institutions are particularly salient among performing artists and stakeholders of performing-arts organizations (Kim and Jensen 2011 ; Voss et al. 2006 ). Performing artists, such as musicians or dancers, often profoundly identify with their profession and strongly socially identify with their organizations, such as their orchestra or dance ensemble (Hunt et al. 2004 ; Riza and Heller 2015 ). Moreover, by design, members of and leaders in performing-arts organizations need to deal with the endemic paradox of contradictory but interdependent artistic and economic logics, many of which are tied to profound identity perceptions (Eikhof and Haunschild 2007 ; Parker 2011 ; Shymko and Roulet 2017 ; Voss et al. 2000 ).

As such, the works in this category aim to develop an understanding of core organizational values and identities as well as their emergence and implications (Jensen and Kim 2014 ). Glynn ( 2000 ), for example, studies the 1996 musician strike at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to address the challenges leaders face in reconciling conflicting organizational identity perceptions among organizational members. Specifically, she describes how musicians identified with the objective of artistic excellence and how that identification clashed with administrators’ goals of allocating resources in ways that seemed economically helpful. From her observations, Glynn induces a model that shows how the process of identifying core competencies becomes contested, “nonlinear, nonrational, and socially constructed” ( 2000 , p. 286) because of conflicting identities and related norms and values. This model stood in notable contrast to the notion of capability construction held among scholars at the time of the study.

Other studies investigate related phenomena in other performing-arts contexts. Parker, for example, studies “the circus as an institutionalized questioning of forms of stability and classification” ( 2011 , p. 555) to describe the paradoxically related institutions of spatially mobile, but at the same time excessive and stable, organizations. Intriguingly, these organizations need to ‘keep things moving’ while simultaneously hiding that mobility to preserve the illusion of magic. As another example, Hales et al. ( 2021 ) ethnographically tap into the—potentially “dark”—context of the lap dancing industry to understand how individuals and their bodies are materialized in organizational settings and how organizations themselves are determined through complex sensory processes. The authors find that organizations come into being through the three interrelated processes of encoding, embodying, and embedding. Relatedly, Voss et al. ( 2000 ) study organizational values that characterize firms in the nonprofit professional theater industry and how those values influence firms’ relationships with external stakeholders. Using grounded research methods and a two-wave survey of 97 nonprofit theaters, they find that theaters striving for publicly recognized excellence receive higher revenues from external constituents than theaters scoring high in artistic values. In other words, organizations need to adapt their external communication in ways that may contradict their deeply held norms and values to acquire economic resources. Furthermore, in their study of Russian theaters, Shymko and Roulet ( 2017 ) find that, apart from being providers of economic resources, external constituents are important for ensuring organizations’ social capital. Specifically, the authors identify the paradox that theaters need external donors to ensure the quality of their product, but simultaneously risk losing legitimacy as ascribed by their peers because of those corporate donors. Shymko and Roulet ( 2017 ) suggest that theaters (and organizations, for that matter) address that dilemma by limiting the pervasiveness, longevity, and negative salience of relationships with external stakeholders.

We also categorized studies that illuminate the performing arts to understand perceptions of status as belonging to this conversation. Two of these studies—Prato et al. ( 2019 ) and Durand and Kremp ( 2016 )—use symphony orchestras’ programming decisions to investigate how status perceptions create a boundary condition for the middle-status conformity hypotheses, i.e., the idea that middle-status organizations deviate less from norms than low- or high-status organizations (Phillips and Zuckerman 2001 ). Decisions regarding whether to conform with or deviate from institutionalized norms of composer and composition selection is at the discretion of the musical director or chief conductor. Frederick Stock, for example, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director from 1905 to 1942, was known for spending “endless time pondering over the problem of program-making” (Ewen 1943 , pp. 133–134). Thus, chief conductors’ discretion in program-making provides a unique opportunity to isolate the status of decision-makers and its effects on the (dis)conformity of organizational behavior.

In this vein, Prato et al. ( 2019 ) analyze programming decisions made by the chief conductors of the 27 largest symphony orchestras in the US from 1918 to 1969 to uncover the conditions that shape dispositions toward conformity. The authors find that it is necessary to distinguish between achieved status and ascribed status (i.e., the status actors receive based on individual achievements versus the status they receive because of, for example, their nationality or gender). Within the group of conductors with high ascribed status (i.e., German or Austrian), the middle-status conformity hypothesis holds true. In other words, conductors with a middle level of achieved status were more likely to present a repertoire of canonical composers (e.g., Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) than a repertoire of unconventional composers (e.g., Moszkowski, Bartók) than those with high or low levels of achieved status. In contrast, among conductors with low ascribed status (i.e., non-German or non-Austrian), conductors with a middle level of achieved status were more likely to deviate than conductors with high or low levels of achieved status.

Relatedly, Durand and Kremp ( 2016 ) investigate the development of the concert programs of major U.S. symphony orchestras between 1879 and 1969 to differentiate between two forms of conformity—alignment and conventionality—and their relation to the respective status of organizations and their leaders. The authors consider an orchestra to exhibit alignment when it performs a repertoire similar to the programming of the other orchestras in a given season. Conversely, an orchestra exhibits conventionality when it focuses on highly salient and emblematic composers. Durand and Kremp ( 2016 ) find that norms and expectations lead middle-status organizations toward more alignment but middle-status individual leaders toward more conventionality than their respective low- and high-status peers. In addition, the relationship between middle-status conductors and the conventionality of their programming decisions is weaker the higher the orchestra’s status or alignment.

Taking a somewhat different tack, Innis ( 2022 ) analyzes how deviating from conventional practices can stimulate category gatekeepers, such as music critics, to redefine and even change category boundaries and meanings. In this quest, the author gathers and analyzes a corpus of reviews of jazz records between 1968 and 1975. In the late 1960s, there was a shift in the category of jazz music towards a fusion with other music styles and instruments. By 1975, the practices considered part of the jazz category had expanded considerably (Fellezs 2011 ). The author offers a process model that shows how category gatekeepers, i.e., jazz critics, interpret deviating practices by rearranging their evaluation criteria, and maintaining the coherence of the core meanings of the jazz category.

4.1.2 Contributions to the conversation on “social construction”

Another group of studies examines how creative workers socially construct meaningfulness and try to reconcile meaningfulness with the economic instrumentality of work. Riza and Heller ( 2015 ) approach this topic from the perspective of calling, i.e., experiencing one’s work as highly meaningful (Pratt and Ashforth 2003 ). The authors trace the professional development of 405 young amateur musicians over time. They find that those musicians who perceived music as a calling early in their lives did not perceive their musical abilities more favorably but were more likely to launch a career as a professional musician. In other words, perceptions of calling lead amateur musicians to opt for meaningfulness rather than an economic focus in their professional lives. Intriguingly, as Eikhof and Haunschild ( 2007 ) find in their study of creativity and business practices in German theaters, economic logics tend to crowd out artistic logics over time. This process is particularly problematic as artistic motivation is a vital resource for creative production, and, in turn, its marketability. There are no standardized routines in human resource management to deal with this economics/artistry paradox, and the pressure to master the paradox lies entirely with individuals.

Another prominent topic is the social construction of aesthetics. Barnard, for example, encourages organizational scholars to frame the process of organization as “a matter of art rather than science,” as it is, in his view, an “aesthetic rather than logical” ( 1983 , p. 235) endeavor. In this vein, studies examine how conductors and musical leaders construct aesthetic leadership via their physical and artistic practices. Specifically, Ladkin studies a performance of vocal artist and conductor Bobby McFerrin with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at the Proms. This leads her to lay out the aesthetic concept of leading “beautifully” ( 2008 , p. 31)—defined as a mix of mastery, congruence, and purpose—and to argue that such leadership is particularly relevant during creative processes.

However, construals related to aesthetics also seem to influence the creative process in a broader, multi-faceted sense. In this regard, Sagiv et al. ( 2019 ) observe how 23 contemporary (i.e., highly improvisational and interdisciplinary) dance companies in Israel develop aesthetic choreographies (i.e., choreographies that are evaluated as an authentic type of artistic dance). They observe the rehearsals of these companies and conduct in-depth interviews with dancers and choreographers to induce a three-step process theory on how choreographers construct type and moral authenticity (Carroll and Wheaton 2009 ) through creating a new, aesthetic choreography. First, in the improvisation phase, choreographers construct moral authenticity. In other words, they signal artistic expressiveness by freely generating unstructured movements not belonging to the repertoire of, for example, classical dance. Second, in the composition phase, choreographers construct type authenticity—they justify the inclusion of the choreography in the category of artistic dance by selecting and reorganizing the movements from phase one into virtuous choreographies. Third, in the run-through phase, choreographers integrated moral authenticity and type authenticity by instructing dancers to master the technique of the movements and, simultaneously, enter an expressive dialogue with the audience.

While Sagiv et al. 2019 describe how choreographers create an aesthetic, Beyes and Steyaert use the aesthetics of defamiliarization to look at well-known “everyday sites of organizing” ( 2013 , p. 1445) in order to create something new. They present the concept of the “aesthetics of the uncanny” (Beyes and Steyaert 2013 , p. 1445) based on Brecht’s Verfremdung (“alienation”) and Freud’s das Unheimliche (“the uncanny”) (Cixous 1976 ). Both concepts describe audiences’ feelings of unease and alienation when presented with the familiar becoming estranged (Doherty 2007 ). The authors empirically illustrate their theorizing with an urban intervention in the streets of Berlin called “50 Kilometres of Files—A Walkable Stasi Radio Play” by the theater collective Rimini Protokoll. Footnote 7 This interactive performance independently navigated participants through various streets of central Berlin while playing original recordings of witnesses and describing events that happened in those places during the East German regime. The authors conclude that organizational scholars should view their research as an affective, spatial, and performative intervention that does not simply describe the world but also creates it.

In a related quest to disentangle the effects of aesthetic experiences on group performance, Stephens ( 2021 ) conducts an 18-month ethnographic study as a singer-member in a community choir. The author proposes a process model as to how choir members continuously oscillate between an aesthetic experience of fragmentation and an aesthetic experience of wholeness. The experience of fragmentation aroused negative emotions among group members, spurring them to redirect their attention and adapt their behavior. Ultimately, by increasing their focus on the musical score, the conductor, and the singers’ contributions, the group coordinated successfully towards restoring an aesthetic of wholeness.

4.1.3 Contributions to the conversation on “judgment and decision making”

Another area of interest for studies in quadrant one is how audiences judge performance and their level of creativity, authenticity, or artistry. For example, Tsay ( 2014 ) observes how 1062 expert and novice raters across six studies evaluate orchestras in live ensemble competitions based on video recordings without sound, sound recordings without video, or complete recordings. Interestingly, counter to the widespread assumption that sound is the utmost goal of professional music ensembles (Murnighan and Conlon 1991 ), raters predominantly rely on visual rather than auditive information (Tsay 2013 ). When raters are asked to distinguish the winner of each competition and rank each orchestra, their judgments based on visible group dynamics are a better predictor than their judgments based on purely auditive information or auditive and visual information together. Relatedly, Tskhay et al. ( 2014 ) analyze 51 YouTube videos of conductors leading an orchestra with a focus on implicit leadership prototypes (i.e., how validly leadership prototypes predict the actual success of conductors). Independent groups of raters evaluate the videos in terms of music parameters and in terms of how famous, expressive, old, skilled, fast, and experienced the conductor is. Surprisingly, perceivers can accurately predict conductors’ success, and they base their judgment of success predominantly on conductors’ expressiveness and age. In other words, as implicit leadership theory suggests, perceived expressiveness and age correlate with perceived conductor success, which, in turn, predicts conductors’ actual success.

Visual judgment seems to drive not only the general evaluation of artists but also decisions regarding which artists to hire. In this regard, Goldin and Rouse ( 2000 ) collect a sample of auditions submitted to eight symphony orchestras between the late 1950s through 1995 as well as the results of the respective audition processes. They analyze the impact of blind auditions (i.e., auditions in which the applicants’ gender and identity are hidden) and find that blind auditions explain up to 25% of the increase of women in symphony orchestras since the 1950s.

However, not every judgment in the performing arts is about a ‘book’s cover.’ Han and Ravid ( 2020 ) set out to assess the value of highly qualified personnel to organizations. To do so, they compile a sample of 215 Broadway shows opened between 1990 and 2013 that included changes in their casts. By comparing revenues, capacity, and ticket prices before and after a “star turnover” (Han and Ravid 2020 , p. 1), they assess the actual value of human capital for each show. They differentiate among different types of stars (i.e., renowned theatre stars and celebrities). The authors find that while decorated theatre stars significantly and positively affect the financial success of Broadway shows, celebrities and movie stars fail to have such an effect. All in all, for human capital to be of value to the (creative) organization, relevant talent and skills seem to be more critical than pure visibility.

Studies in this quadrant also analyze how evaluation criteria for creative products evolve and affect knowledge creation (Cattani et al. 2013 ; Glynn and Lounsbury 2005 ). Cattani et al. ( 2013 ), for instance, analyze the unique craftmanship necessary to produce Cremonese string instruments and how their ascribed value changed over time. Based on an analysis of archival and interview data, the authors find a significant time delay between the production of string instruments made by Cremonese masters such as Stradivari and Guarneri starting in the sixteenth century and their recognition as the instruments most suitable for performing Romantic era music in the nineteenth century. This delay between production and recognition led to the loss of the tacit knowledge needed to produce comparable instruments, ultimately leading to ever-increasing product values over time. Footnote 8 This process could explain why, even though present-day luthiers claim to be able to reproduce the quality of Cremonese masters, only the originals fetch auction prices in the millions of dollars, such as the Lady Blunt Stradivarius , which was sold for USD 15.9 million in 2011 (BBC 2011 ).

Studies in this quadrant discuss not only how creative products are judged but also who should judge them (Berg 2016 ; Marotto et al. 2007 ). For example, in an endeavor to analyze the conditions that help accurately predict the success of creative ideas, Berg ( 2016 ) relies on a field study in the circus-arts industry and a lab experiment. In the field study, he asks 489 individuals, including laypeople, circus artists (i.e., “creators”), circus directors, producers, and agents (i.e., “managers”), to forecast the success of online videos of circus acts. In the lab experiment, 206 participants are assigned to different conditions and asked to rank product ideas according to their presumed novelty and success with consumers. The study shows that artists, or creators, are more successful than managers in predicting the success of others’ ideas. At the same time, creators overestimate the success of their own ideas. These findings imply that idea generation and evaluation, when exclusively executed by the same person, might hamper creativity and innovation.

4.1.4 Contributions to the conversation on “communities of practice”

Another prominent theme is the depiction and analysis of theatre groups, orchestras, or string quartets as communities of practice. This term denotes the idiosyncratic habits found in performing-arts-related organizations, which makes them unique units of analysis for organizational studies (Weick 1992 ). For example, Kramer and Crespy ( 2011 ) study collaborative leadership practices by acting as participant-observers in a theater production. With one author serving as the play's director and one taking part as an actor, they find that the director uses specific communicative practices to make their collaborative leadership style more efficient. This includes selecting skilled, experienced, and confident theatre personnel open to collaborative leadership practices. Furthermore, the director encourages casual relationships among cast members to facilitate collaboration within the team. Notably, the leader explicitly defines the work context as collaborative, reinforces openness to shared creation, and responds positively and supportively to attempts at collaboration. Moreover, short collaboration-seeking pieces of communication, instead of prolonged discussions, were crucial, ultimately creating positive synergies within the group.

Harrison and Rouse ( 2014 ) uncover a related type of collaborative practices in their study of modern dance group rehearsals. Modern dance is particularly suited for analyses of coordination in creative group work because—in contrast to the more canonized forms of traditional dance—it emphasizes creative group actions aimed at finding novel movements (Atler 1999 ). The authors gather observational and interview data from four dance groups selected for a 10-week review process to possibly perform in a tri-annual concert. They uncover three aggregate dimensions that describe the types of interaction patterns occurring during a rehearsal: “surfacing boundaries,” “discovering discontinuities,” and “parsing solutions” (Harrison and Rouse 2014 , p. 1265). When starting to improvise, dancers actively seek constraints from the choreographer by asking detailed questions. In the next stage, dancers highlight problems or propose options, engaging the entire dance group in a dialogue. In the last stage, dancers attempt to find a suitable solution through negotiations, which also means they willingly limit their autonomy.

Instead of focusing on emerging coordination in groups, Chiles et al. ( 2004 ) explain the emergence of new organizational collectives using the case of live musical performance theaters in Branson, Missouri. Over a single century, this small town evolved from a remote area of the Ozarks into the second most popular road-trip destination in the US, with more than six million tourists visiting its live theaters every year. The authors collect interviews, observational data, and archival data, and describe the evolution of Branson between 1895 and 1995. They find four dynamics that explain this phenomenon. First, spontaneous fluctuations, such as a famous novel praising Branson’s natural beauty and the connection to the national rail line, started a new social order. Second, positive feedback loops, such as improved highway infrastructure and communal marketing organizations, corroborated these fluctuations. Third, stabilizing mechanisms, such as government enforcement of Branson’s bible belt culture, underpinned the emerging order. Fourth, successful ventures left their facilities to build larger theaters, while failed theaters left their facilities empty. This dynamic recombined the elements existing in the Branson collective, leaving vacant facilities available to new entrepreneurs.

Relatedly, Sgourev investigates recombination in the context of the performing arts and the effects of this kind of “brokerage” ( 2015 , p. 343). Brokerage denotes the process of connecting social actors in order to provide access to various resources (Sgourev 2015 ). The author analyzes Sergej Diaghilev, the famous founder and producer of the Ballets Russes , one of the most influential ballet companies in history, whose ballets such as “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” “Les Sylphides,” and “Le Sacré du Printemps” revolutionized the arts in the beginning of the twentieth century. The author finds that Diaghilev was a catalyst for social change in the arts and in broader society because he was the first to broker between artists from different professional and cultural backgrounds, such as Coco Chanel, Claude Debussy, Vaslav Nijinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. Diaghilev’s brokerage undermined the established social order and gave rise to the avant-garde, ultimately escalating modernism.

In a similar vein, Allmendinger and Hackman ( 1996 ) scrutinize radical environmental changes and the circumstances under which organizations eventually adapt to those changes. The authors study the impact of two political-economic changes on organizations: the spread of the socialist regime after World War II and the collapse of that regime in 1990. To do so, the authors gather longitudinal data from 78 symphony orchestras from East Germany, West Germany, the UK, and the US, including archival data, interviews with and surveys of players and managers, and observational data from visits to each orchestra. Interestingly, they find that while the arrival of socialist rules did not particularly affect orchestras, the demise of socialism triggered a wide array of reactions among orchestras, with some orchestras adapting much more successfully than others. This effect was moderated by the orchestra’s standing and its leadership such that well-financed orchestras became stronger, while weaker orchestras lost prestige and already scarce resources.

Studies in this category observe not only external shocks but also internal challenges. In this vein, Murnighan and Conlon ( 1991 ) collect archival data and interview 80 professional string-quartet musicians playing in 20 British string quartets to study internal group dynamics and how they affect the ensembles’ success. They find that players must reconcile three paradoxes: leadership versus democracy, the paradox of the second violinist, and confrontation versus compromise. As the authors conclude, the most successful quartets are aware of these paradoxes and manage them—the first violinist acts as a leader and simultaneously advocates for democracy; the second violinist accepts their secondary role and is openly appreciated by the group’s members; and group members exchange conflicting views but also drop issues at a certain point to enable the group’s progress.

While studies in this quadrant often focus on performing-arts organizations that serve as self-governing work groups, other studies focus on the more formalized aspect of performing-arts organizations. In this vein, Maitlis ( 2004 ) focuses on symphony orchestras and explores which practices chief executive officers use to influence their boards. For two years, the author gathers longitudinal data from two British symphony orchestras by attending meetings of the boards and their subcommittees, shadowing the CEO, observing rehearsals, and interviewing the CEO, managers, players, board members, and the conductor. Maitlis ( 2004 ) proposes four key processes that sustain successful CEO influence on their boards. First, a CEO who interacts frequently with the director in a trustful and open manner is more likely to exploit that relationship successfully. Second, the ability to manage the board’s impressions, especially about a CEO’s competence and legitimacy, is a crucial factor. Third, a CEO who intends to influence the board needs relevant data, which must be disseminated “just enough and at just the right times” (Maitlis 2004 , p. 1299). Fourth, a CEO should be willing to take on the role and protect their formal authority instead of letting others assume a similar decision-making position.

4.2 Quadrant 2: advancing organizational theory by studying performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. (Jacques in Shakespeare 2009 , act II, scene VII)

Studies in this category analyze performing-arts phenomena within organizations, such as the production of pieces of theater within organizations. Table 3 shows that this category is the smallest, with only 10 papers (12 percent of the sample). They all contribute to the conversation on sensemaking and sensegiving in organizations (Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991 ). Cronin ( 2008 ), for example, compares the sensegiving in organizations to the appearance of any person on stage. He argues that effective leaders, politicians, and actors alike connect with their audience, understand and exploit symbols, listen empathetically, improvise, and radiate confidence while projecting discipline, toughness, and honesty.

Most studies in this category focus on theater, especially on theater in organizations. This corporate theater or organizational theater is referred to as a “technology” within organizations (Clark and Mangham 2004a , p. 37) and includes directors, actors, and musicians, performing for an audience. In other words, theater pieces are performed within an organization, either by consultancies and professional actors or by organizational members who become amateur actors. The use of theater and staged performances in firms emerged about 100 years ago, when large US corporations, such as Coca-Cola and IBM, wanted to enhance their annual sales conferences with shows (Pineault 1989 ). In this vein, Clark and Mangham ( 2004a ) analyze a piece of corporate theater called Your Life. Your Bank , which had been commissioned by a large bank in order to celebrate and consolidate its merger with another bank. Over a period of eight months, the authors observe meetings between the consultancy commissioned to produce the performance and firm representatives, rehearsals, and, finally, the performance in front of 5000 people. The cast primarily consisted of senior executives who had prepared and executed the merger. The stage design included the audience walking down an avenue of exhibition stands on their way to the impressive auditorium, which the authors interpret as similar to a “Roman processional route provided for a conquering general” (Clark and Mangham 2004a , p. 50). The appearance of The Corrs , one of the most successful bands at the time, and one of the best-known UK television presenters, made the audience cheer and dance. The authors find that, after attending the performance, the audience members were motivated, inspired, and felt greater pride in their new employer.

Notably, some authors take a critical stance toward these performances, as theatrical techniques are often used to seduce organizational members. In this vein, scholars criticize such forms of “visual extravaganza” (Clark and Mangham 2004a , p. 54) as a “theater of the oppressor” (Nissley et al. 2004 , p. 829) that promotes a reality on stage that is convenient for senior management. In line with the Brechtian tradition of forum theater, which aims to be a “weapon for liberation” (Boal 1979 , p. vi), some authors side with Brazilian director and actor Augusto Boal ( 1979 ), who views theater as a tool for activating the audience and inspiring critical reflection (Meisiek 2004 ).

In sum, scholars in this category argue about whether the goal of corporate theater is purely motivational (Clark and Mangham 2004a ) or to represent organizational reality as contingent by speaking to the hearts and minds of the audience (Meisiek 2004 ). According to Schreyögg and Häpfl ( 2004 ), the goal of organizational theater is to discuss critical issues in organizational life, such as communication barriers between middle and lower management, groupthink in management meetings, sexual harassment, and workaholism. As such, organizational theater is meant to intervene in organizational development and can suggest a different perspective on problems, thereby initiating “a closer examination of habituated patterns of behavior, established perceptual constructions, and possibly prejudicial views” (Schreyögg and Häpfl 2004 , p. 698).

4.3 Quadrant 3: understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories

The great leaders have always carefully stage-managed their effects. (Charles de Gaulle, as cited by Schoenbrun 1966 , p. 91)

Studies in quadrant three apply theories from the field of the performing arts to the analysis of organizational phenomena. Quadrant three is the second-largest category, with 19 studies (22 percent of the sample). Studies in this category predominantly contribute to two topics that the AOM’s MOC division lists among its major topics of interest: perception (e.g., Albert and Bell 2002 ; Biehl-Missal 2011 ; Boje et al. 2004 , 2006 ; Grandey 2003 ) and leadership (e.g., Gardner and Avolio 1998 ; Sinha et al. 2012 ; Weischer et al. 2013 ).

4.3.1 Contributions to the conversation on “perception”

Studies in this sub-stream of quadrant three apply performing-arts theories to perception in organizations. Albert and Bell ( 2002 ), for instance, apply music-theory principles to the case of a religious cult in Texas to understand “point-moment questions” (Albert and Bell 2002 , p. 574), i.e., questions on when to act. In 1993, after weeks of fruitless negotiations, the FBI had decided to storm a compound in Waco, Texas, where they believed fanatic David Koresh to be encouraging his group of followers to commit mass suicide. The authors use theory on tonality, rhythm, musical shape, and harmony to understand the FBI’s decision to launch its assault. They conclude that the inferno that marked the end of the Waco plot line follows a linear and strongly progressive temporal structure (Kramer 1988 ). They suggest that the temporal dynamic could have been slowed by the troops moving back. Similarly, a change in the tonality, Footnote 9 which could have been introduced by, for instance, putting barbed wire around the compound and, thus, putting Koresh under house arrest, could have changed the meaning of elapsed time and have provided the FBI with more time to decide how and when to act.

Relatedly, Grandey ( 2003 ) analyzes how employees display affect in their service encounters and how those encounters are perceived. She surveys 131 university administrative assistants about their service encounters and the degree to which they employ “surface acting” (Grandey 2003 , p. 86) in which they express positive emotions exclusively with their face or “deep acting” (Grandey 2003 , p. 86) in which they genuinely feel positive. As a dramaturgical perspective on these types of acting would suggest (Grove and Fisk 1989 ), service encounters that involve surface acting are rated less positive than those using deep acting. Furthermore, only surface acting is associated with emotional exhaustion among employees.

Other studies set out to investigate how constituents perceive and construe theatrical, aesthetic experiences in and around corporations. For example, to this end, Biehl-Missal ( 2011 ) attends about 40 annual general meetings, press conferences, and analyst meetings of German companies listed on the stock exchange. Drawing on performance theory, she describes how companies strategically employed lighting and other dramaturgical techniques to either make audience members feel more like passive spectators (e.g., in press conferences or annual general meetings) or invoke a feeling of equality (e.g., during analyst meetings). Similarly, Boje et al. ( 2004 ) examine the scandalous bankruptcy of Houston-based energy company Enron. The authors use critical dramaturgy theory to guide their analysis of a large body of news articles, US Congress transcripts, and web reports about the scandal. They find that Enron used a wide array of narratives to deceive employees, auditors, and the public in general, which ultimately led to the “Greek mega-tragedy” (Boje et al. 2004 , p. 757) that was Enron’s collapse. The authors suggest that transnational corporations, such as Enron, employ theatrical spectacles that “heroize global virtual corporations and free markets, while distancing (…) [themselves] from responsibility over their far-flung global energy-supply chains, where particularly exploitive conditions flourish” (Boje et al. 2004 , p. 752). Organizations are even conceptualized as modern incarnations of spectacles that completely mask, replace, or perform their underlying realities (Flyverbom and Reinecke 2017 ).

4.3.2 Contributions to the conversation on “leadership”

The second sub-stream of literature in quadrant three contributes to research on leadership. These studies inject an interactive perspective derived from dramaturgical theories (Goffman 1959 ) into leadership research. According to this view, leaders, and followers construct leader authenticity, celebrity, and charisma in a reciprocal process (Gardner and Avolio 1998 ; Jackson 1996 ; Ladkin and Taylor 2010 ). Specifically, Gardner and Avolio ( 1998 ) propose a four-phase model through which the leader secures their image as a charismatic leader. First, by framing their vision, leaders enable “people to see the world that (…) [they] see” (Fairhurst and Sarr 1996 , p. 50). Second, leaders extend their framing into scripts to coordinate and integrate actors’ behaviors. Third, leaders stage their appearance by selecting and manipulating symbols. Fourth, leaders perform their script by using “exemplification,” “promotion,” and “facework” (Gardner and Avolio 1998 , p. 44–47) as impression-management strategies.

Weischer et al. ( 2013 ) analyze the concept of authentic leadership (Avolio and Gardner 2005 ). The authors conduct two online experiments in order to assess the influence of “enactment,” i.e., the physical and nonverbal parts of leaders’ communication (Stanislavski 1996 ), and “life storytelling,” i.e., narratives about the leader’s personal history (Luthans and Avolio 2003 ) on perceived leader authenticity. Under different experimental conditions, participants watch CEO speeches given by professional actors in which enactment and life storytelling are manipulated. In line with theories on organizational dramaturgy (Gardner 1992 ) and theoretical pieces on “embodied authentic leadership” (Ladkin and Taylor 2010 , p. 65), the authors find that enactment predicts perceived leader authenticity, while storytelling partially predicts perceived leader authenticity. Furthermore, high perceived leader authenticity gives rise to high levels of trust and positive emotions among followers (Weischer et al. 2013 ).

Scholars in this sub-stream also scrutinize how leaders can project distorted images of themselves and their organizations by employing dramaturgical techniques (Jackson 1996 ; Kendall 1993 ; Sinha et al. 2012 ). Sinha et al. ( 2012 ), for example, study how celebrity CEOs’ characteristics and actions affect organizational outcomes. By applying a dramaturgical perspective (Goffman 1959 ) to the case of the failed acquisition of the airline Ansett Australia by Air New Zealand in 2001, the authors find that the newly appointed celebrity CEO Gary Toomey, the media, and other stakeholders co-created a drama through a series of performances. Specifically, the CEO and his co-participants preserved the illusion of control over the events, ultimately resulting in Toomey’s over-commitment to a failing strategy. Finally, the authors suggest that organizational performance is highly influenced by their celebrity CEOs’ sense-making processes (Sinha et al. 2012 ).

4.4 Quadrant 4: understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices

You can’t improvise on nothin’, man. You gotta improvise on somethin’ . (Bassist-composer Charles Mingus, as cited by Kernfeld 1995 , p. 120)

The 13 studies (15% of the sample) categorized in this quadrant employ performing-arts practices to guide their analysis of organizational phenomena. Weick ( 1992 ), for example, views jazz ensembles, orchestras, and drama groups as prototypical organizations that offer rich grounds for transferring principles of improvising, performing, acting, and persuading to the organizational context. One of the most important issues in this regard is how to achieve and foster creativity and innovation in organizations.

Similarly to practitioner-oriented literature that views creativity as consisting of specific vocabulary and grammar, the authors of the studies in this quadrant suggest that creativity can be replicated, taught, and practiced (Kao 1996 ). Practitioners like Vaill even recommend that managers “practice, practice, practice” ( 1989 , p. 109) in order to successfully apply performing-arts practices in organizational contexts and create a basis from which creativity can blossom. In this vein, studies predominantly contribute to the conversations on mental models and representations (e.g., Berniker 1998 ; Ortmann and Sydow 2018 ; Weick 1998 ; Zack 2000 ), and organizational learning and memory (e.g., Barrett and Peplowski 1998 ; Kamoche and Pina e Cunha 2001 ), both of which the AOM’s MOC division lists as major topics of interest.

4.4.1 Contributions to the conversation on “mental models and representations”

Studies contributing to the conversation on mental models and representations focus on jazz music and theater as suitable sources for mental models that can be transferred from the context of the performing arts to the organizational context. Weick’s ( 1998 ) essay on “Improvisation as a mindset for organizational analysis” introduced the jazz metaphor to organizations by transferring the mental model and practice of improvising to organizational theory. Specifically, Weick ( 1998 ) proposes that the mindset of jazz improvisation can inform organizational theory, especially the framing and understanding of organizational improvisation. The author defines improvisation as “composing on the spur of the moment” (Weick, 1998 , p. 548), which he conceptualizes as the end of a continuum that starts with interpreting, embellishing, or varying a melody. In other words, “improvisation is guided activity whose guidance comes from elapsed patterns discovered retrospectively” (Weick, 1998 , p. 547). Weick ( 1998 ) also claims that the jazz improvisation metaphor can help conceptualize organizational improvisation as “mixing the intended and the emergent” (p. 551)—as order borne out of variation and retention, which can adapt spontaneously but is also often ignored in favor of routines.

Relatedly, Ortmann and Sydow ( 2018 ) explore Nietzsche’s invocation of the creative potential of constraints, and examine how the concept of “dancing in chains” (Nietzsche 1986 , p. 343) can serve as a mindset for creativity-enhancing practices in organizations. While constraints, such as formal rules or scarce resources, have long been conceptualized as exclusively inhibiting creativity (e.g., Shalley et al. 2004 ), contemporary organizational theory has begun to embrace the idea that they might also enable creativity (Lampel et al. 2014 ). The authors argue that Nietzsche’s metaphor adds three layers to the idea of creativity-provoking constraints. First, organizational inertia is conceptualized as “old chains,” which restrict and enable creativity by reducing feasible alternatives. Second, within these chains, organizations and individual actors can “dance.” In other words, they can create freely—even more so than without any constraints, as there is no creatio ex nihilo , or “pure primary production” (Ortmann and Sydow 2018 , p. 904). Third, “dancing in old chains” can have unintended effects and create “new chains,” or constraints. These new constraints might even restrict future organizational actions, similar to the path dependence experienced by the devil Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust I. Footnote 10

4.4.2 Contributions to the conversation on “organizational learning and memory”

Another sub-stream focuses on how specific performance practices can inform organizational learning and memory. In particular, studies pertaining to this category identify best practices in improvisational techniques stemming from jazz music and improvisational theater and investigate how they can be aimed at organization members’ learning, repeating, and imitating of specific rules so that organization members can build a repertoire of skills to build new patterns (Barrett 1998 ; Weick 1992 ). In many ways, this literature follows Louis Armstrong's preconception that creativity requires an internalized and readily available set of skills: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know” (Bartlett 1968 , p. 1046).

Perhaps most comprehensively, Barrett ( 1998 ) proposes seven characteristics of jazz improvisation that can be readily applied to organizational practices of improvisation. First, organizational actors can deliberately interrupt habits to provoke new responses, just like veteran jazz musicians often call tunes in a key that the band has not rehearsed. This technique is similar to “nonsense naming” in improvisational theater, where individuals quickly and deliberately assign incorrect names to everyday objects in order to break habitual perceptions (Crossan 1998 ). Second, organizations and their actors can create an “aesthetic of imperfection” (Barrett 1998 , p. 611), just like jazz improvisers frequently make errors sound intentional, adjust their playing accordingly, and continue (Barrett 1998 ). Similarly, actors often practice “switch,” where an outside actor can freeze a play and rearrange the scene, and then the actors have to continue with the new scene (Crossan 1998 ). Third, organizations can make use of “minimal structures” (Kamoche and Pina e Cunha 2001 , p. 733), such as rapid prototyping, which provides actors with maximum flexibility and a minimum of commonality (Ortmann and Sydow 2018 ; Pasmore 1998 ). Its equivalent in jazz music is the guiding structure of agreed-upon phrases and chords on which musicians improvise (Barrett 1998 ). Fourth, organizational members can strive for an intuitive synchronization in order to achieve flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990 ), just as jazz musicians who have established “a groove” (Barrett 1998 , p. 613) often feel like they “followed the music (…) wherever it wanted to go.” (Bassist Buster Williams in Berliner 1994 , p. 392). Fifth, actors can practice bricolage (e.g., Baker and Nelson 2005 ). In other words, they can manage with “whatever is at hand” (Lévi-Strauss 1967 ), re-directing their actions in any moment based on their prior actions (Ortmann and Sydow 2018 ), just as jazz improvisers make sense of their playing in retrospect but cannot predict what is going to happen next (Gioia 1988 ). Sixth, new organizational members can learn the language of their organization from seasoned practitioners, just like jazz musicians get together in informal jam sessions, and pass on their standard keys and tempos to novices (Barrett 1998 ). Seventh, organizations can provide structures that allow actors to alternate between leading and supporting their colleagues. This practice is called “soloing”—i.e., playing the lead melody—and “comping”—i.e., accompanying the soloist (Barrett 1998 ). Comparably, theater actors practice taking turns by narrating one-word stories in which every participant adds one word to collectively build a story (Crossan 1998 ).

5 Opportunities for future research

As outlined above, interest in the performing arts as an empirical and theoretical research context is surging (Giorcelli and Moser 2020 ; Han and Ravid 2020 ; Janssens and Steyaert 2020 ; Rouse and Harrison 2022 ; Siganos and Tabner 2020 ). The studies in our sample hint at two reasons for this surge. First, the traditional, Taylorist (Merrill 1960 ) view of the organization as a “machine” (Clancy 1999 , p. 15) operating in a stable environment (Perrow 1970 ) seems no longer adequate. Today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments (Bechky and Okhuysen 2011 ; Brown and Eisenhardt 1997 ) undermine the very foundations of established organizations (König et al. 2016 ). As such, alternative, less mechanistic views of organizations and organizing—which characterize much, albeit not all, of the performing arts—might be more adequate lenses for contemporary organization theory. Second, how organizations appear “on stage,” both metaphorically (Cornelissen 2004 ; Hatch and Weick 1998 ) and literally (Gao et al. 2016 ; Love et al. 2017 ), has constantly become more important over time. As a consequence, it has also become more obvious to tap into the performing arts such as jazz (Berniker 1998 ; Weick 1998 ) as a source domain to conceptualize organizations. Our mapping of performing-arts-related organizational research uncovers several topics and research gaps that deserve the attention of organization scholars.

To help fill these gaps, we provide a structured research agenda, organizing future research opportunities according to our framework of organizational research in the context of the performing arts, as depicted in Table 4 .

First, we encourage scholars to build on and extend the studies belonging to quadrant one (“advancing organizational theory by studying organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts”). These studies harness the empirical context of the performing arts as an ‘extreme case’ for many issues at the heart of organizational research (Yin 1994 ). Indeed, careers in theater or music, for example, are generally characterized by more extreme individual dedication than careers in other professional fields, and the intrinsic and extrinsic sides of these careers often clash (Eikhof and Haunschild 2007 ; Riza and Heller 2015 ). Professional musicians’ training usually starts in childhood, making them interesting informants, especially for qualitative research on work motivation (Pratt 2009 ; Toraldo et al. 2019 ) and calling (Bunderson and Thompson 2009 ). The same applies to the “embodied leadership practice” (Ladkin 2008 , p. 31) of musicians and conductors, which is highly suitable for uncovering how leaders use micro-level, implicit leadership practices (Ladkin 2008 ; Ladkin and Taylor 2010 ).

Specifically, we envision scholars to leverage performing-arts organizations and their inherent stability, making it possible to isolate focal organizational mechanisms from confounding variables (Durand and Kremp 2016 ). We recommend, for example, more research on symphony orchestras, which have maintained their core structure and functions since at least the mid-nineteenth century (Raynor 1978 ). As Allmendinger and Hackman noted, data from symphony orchestras are especially valuable because of these organizations’ well-defined core task, which is often similar within and across nations: “symphony orchestras around the world play largely the same repertoire with roughly the same number and mix of players” ( 1996 , p. 340). At the same time, we see promising avenues for research on changes in deeply institutionalized practices in and around the performing arts. For example, the emergence of historically-informed music performance (Butt 2002 ) might allow scholars to gain a deeper understanding of phenomena such as institutional work, institutional entrepreneurship, and discontinuous, non-paradigmatic change (König et al. 2012 ; Lawrence et al. 2013 ; Weber et al. 2019 ).

In a similar vein, we envision scholars to engage in immersive research (e.g., Bougon et al. 1977 ). For instance, scholars can participate in theater productions as participant-observers or actors (Clark and Mangham 2004b ) to better understand the principles and practices of collaborative leadership (Kramer and Crespy 2011 ), and how self-organizing groups work together (Goodman and Goodman 1976 ; Harrison and Rouse 2014 ). Particularly, we encourage scholars to conduct embedded, participant-observer research in dance companies and music ensembles to observe and ‘intuitively’ understand organizational change (Tsoukas and Chia 2002 ).

We further suggest that scholars use the abundant user-generated content on channels like YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, or TikTok, which are platforms for musical, theatrical, and dance performances with millions of users. Given music and theater scholars’ increasing attention to the impact of digitalization on the creation, dissemination, and reception of cultural products (Théberge 2015 ), the lack of organizational research on digitally conveyed performing arts is surprising. Readily available digital data creates an interesting opportunity to analyze performing-arts productions. For instance, the Bolshoi theater and the Metropolitan Opera stream operas and ballet performances for free on YouTube and to more than 1000 theaters worldwide (Bolshoi Theatre 2020 ; The Metropolitan Opera 2020 ). Notably, audio and visual recordings of performances, such as those stored in the British National Archives and other databases, lend to multimodal analyses, which could also provide the ground for applying deep-learning algorithms to support theory development and testing.

Second, concerning quadrant two (“advancing organizational theory by studying performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts”), our review highlights a lack of consensus regarding whether and to what extent organizational theater can or should instill lasting organizational change (Clark and Mangham 2004b ; Meisiek and Barry 2007 ). Apparently, organizations have to carefully design and discuss the implementation of theater-based interventions (Clark and Mangham 2004a ; Czarniawska-Joerges and Wolff 1991 ; Meisiek 2004 ) and consider potential unintended and uncontrollable side effects (Nissley et al. 2004 ). In this spirit, we call for further examinations of the impact of organizational theater on organizational learning and change. To this end, authors might use the many possibilities for participant observation (Clark and Mangham 2004a ) and personally witness how organizational theater is produced, implemented, and evaluated (Clark and Mangham 2004b ).

Third, as to quadrant three (“understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories”), studies mainly propose dramaturgical lenses—drawing on dramatism (Burke 1968 ) and dramaturgy (Goffman 1959 )—to advance our understanding of organizational phenomena. For example, dramaturgical efforts allow scholars to uncover the mechanisms of organizations’ impression management in ‘good’ (Biehl-Missal 2011 ) and ‘bad’ times (Boje et al. 2004 ); to gauge employees’ performance (Grandey 2003 ); and to analyze why leaders are perceived as charismatic and authentic (Gardner and Avolio 1998 ; Weischer et al. 2013 ; Westley and Mintzberg 1989 ).

We further suggest researchers apply dance-related theories (e.g., Ortmann and Sydow 2018 ) and music-related theories (Plack 2014 ). For instance, future studies could investigate dance-related concepts such as “lead and follow,” which is the basis for most social or partner dances (DeMers 2013 ). In this concept, the leader is responsible for guiding the follower, smoothly initiating movement, guiding the duo towards transition, and ultimately coordinating teamwork. In some social dances, such as the Argentinian tango, the roles of leader and follower can even change during one dance. Some scholars have begun to transfer the lead-and-follow concept to organizational change processes, such as the idea that conflict can be overcome by the willingness of all participants to listen to and “get changed by the other” (Wetzel and Nees 2017 , p. 58). As for music-related theories, scholars could apply concepts such as counterpoint or polyphony, for example, to the analysis of executive communication (de Oliveira Kuhn et al. 2019 ).

Fourth, while some researchers in quadrant four (“understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices”) stress the potential of metaphors to yield non-trivial insights into organizational structures (Hatch 1998 ), others highlight their limitations and advocate for their critical use (Cornelissen 2004 , 2005 ; Hatch and Weick 1998 ). This literature extends the tradition of using metaphors to describe organizational reality, such as metaphors of chaos (e.g., Thiétart and Forgues 1995 ), identity (Cornelissen 2002 ; Gioia et al. 2000 ), mind (e.g., Weick and Roberts 1993 ), and memory (e.g., Walsh and Ungson 1991 ). In particular, it conceptualizes jazz combos or theater companies as prototypical organizations (Barrett 1998 ; Meisiek and Barry 2007 ; Schreyögg and Häpfl 2004 ), with managers being the jazz combo and employees dancing to the managers’ tune (e.g., Berniker 1998 ). However, Weick ( 1998 ) points out that most organizations seek to produce standardized outputs while the performing arts generally pursue the creation of something new and previously unheard. In a similar vein, Cornelissen ( 2004 ) highlights that the ‘organization as theater’ metaphor has not advanced organization theory, but has merely labeled organizational concepts differently—organizational members are simply called ‘actors’ or ‘characters’ who play different ‘roles’ and interpret their ‘scripts.’

In light of these limitations, we encourage scholars to conceptualize organizations using performing-arts-related metaphors and test their effects in the field. For example, we recommend adopting Cornelissen’s ( 2005 ) domains-interaction model instead of merely comparing concepts from different contexts. Research in this field might also benefit from Cornelissen’s ( 2006 ) principles to ensure a metaphor’s heuristic value in organizational research. For example, semantically, target and source concepts need to be sufficiently distant, and the source concept needs to be sufficiently concrete. Scholars applying performing-arts-related metaphors could use other types of improvisational music or concepts such as twelve-tone music (Perle 1996 ) as an alternative source domain (Zack 2000 ). In fact, it is striking how little contemporary music, dance, or theatre is represented in organization studies. This is particularly surprising as composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Tōru Takemitsu or choreographers such as Pina Bausch, Martha Graham, and Hans van Manen have also become known for their organizational innovations. The same applies to non-Western performing arts and feminist perspectives. We also suggest that scholars test the effects and implications of performing-arts practices previously proposed in the literature, such as yes-anding and comping, within organizations (Barrett 1998 ; Crossan 1998 ; Vera and Crossan 2005 ).

6 Practical implications, limitations, and conclusions

Our review advances the insights provided in extant studies on the specificities of idiosyncratic empirical contexts (Day et al. 2012 ; Hällgren et al. 2018 ) and, thereby, answers recent calls for more context-sensitive organizational research (Johns 2006 ) that analyzes organizations “elsewhere” (Weick 1974 , p. 487). In this regard, we uncover structural similarities between performing and organizing in a wide array of topics, which also translate into practical implications. Perhaps most importantly, the literature included in our sample suggests top executives develop a basic understanding of art-based techniques and their applications in organizational practice. As highlighted in the section on “understanding organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices,” executives should tap into the potential of training employees in improvisational techniques in order to ensure high-level creative and innovative organizational outcomes (Hatch 1998 ; Vaill 1989 ). In the performing arts and organizations alike, there is no creatio ex nihilo (May 1978 )—managers have to provide structures that embrace errors as a vital source of creativity and ideas (Barrett 1998 ). Organizations also might need to offer specialized training to equip their members with “ready-mades” (Vera and Crossan 2004 , p. 741), i.e., short motifs or routines an employee can spontaneously draw on (Barrett and Peplowski 1998 ). Another important takeaway for practitioners is the oscillation of creative projects between chaos and structure. Managers and team members alike have to accept and embrace both conditions and skillfully and intentionally move between both by ensuring a shared conceptualization of a project’s goals within the team (Engwall and Westling 2004 ).

Although our research design addresses various concerns regarding replicability and validity, our review has three limitations. First, it focuses primarily on articles from peer-reviewed, top-rated journals in organization studies. While this approach ensures a certain level of quality, later research might find value in encompassing other outlets, such as practitioner-oriented literature and journals from other fields. Second, our organization of the literature into a two-by-two matrix might limit our insights. The use of different categories and criteria may enable future review efforts to uncover additional contributions and emerging themes. Third, the scope of this review does not include sport- or game-related performances. As such, we have not included interesting studies such as Mannucci et al. ( 2021 ), who use the empirical context of live-action role-play, i.e., a type of performative game situated in a fictional world, prepared and managed by at least one game master (Tychsen et al. 2006 ).

In conclusion, we have reviewed approximately 50 years of organizational research in the context of the performing arts and outlined a framework that we hope supports researchers as they further explore the context specificities of performing-arts-related research. By organizing the highly fragmented literature, we extend the insights from previous reviews, which focus on single art-based techniques such as improvisation (Hadida et al. 2015 ; Pina e Cunha et al. 1999 ). Our conceptualization of research in the context of the performing arts yields specific contributions for each of the four scholarly domains addressed by performing-arts-related organizational research. Drawing on our research framework, we have offered a wide array of suggestions on how scholars can advance organizational research in the context of the performing arts. We believe that this context is ripe with opportunities for organizational scholars to conduct cross-contextual research and to enable us, in Weick’s words, to “uncover the nonobvious and (…) render the obvious less so” ( 1974 , p. 501).

Availability of data and materials

Database EBSCO Host, licensed by University of Passau.

Code availability

Not applicable.

Because of this boundary condition, we also excluded papers examining the effects of recorded music, such as Keeler and Cortina’s ( 2020 ) conceptual piece on how listening to music can affect executives’ performance outcomes, or Berg’s ( 2022 ) archival study on the U.S. music industry from 1959 to 2010.

The VHB JOURQUAL 3 ranking can be accessed online at https://www.vhbonline.org/vhb4you/vhb-jourqual (accessed on 17 June 2020) or obtained from the authors.

We obtained citation counts for our sample articles from Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The SSCI provides citation counts for articles published in thousands of journals since 1954 and can be accessed at https://www.webofscience.com .

Data on the yearly growth of the journals in our sample was obtained from the Scimago Institutions Rankings, which can be accessed at https://www.scimagojr.com/ . Citation counts are commonly used to assess the impact and quality of scientific journals and articles (Tahai and Meyer 1999 ).

See https://aom.org/network/divisions-interest-groups-%28digs%29 .

When describing key contributions of the studies, we indicate the conversation to which the respective study contributes the most. However, many papers also contribute to a second conversation. For this reason, some papers are mentioned in relation to more than one conversation.

See https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/ .

Relatedly, Cattani et al. ( 2017 ) show that, rather than signaling organizational inertia, such long-term commitment to craftmanship can constitute a valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized competitive advantage. The authors demonstrate this using the example of the differentiation strategy based on pursuing local opportunities adopted by Steinway & Sons (high-end pianos).

Tonality—the arrangement of a piece of music around a central tone to which it also returns in the end (Ammer 1972 )— is an important concept in Western classical music.

Once in Faust’s study room, Mephistopheles cannot leave through the window and explains to Faust: “ ‘s ist ein Gesetz der Teufel und Gespenster: / Wie sie hereingeschlüpft, da müssen sie hinaus. / Das erste steht uns frei, beim zweiten sind wir Knechte ” (“this is the law for devils and ghosts: where they enter, they also must leave. The first choice is ours, but we are servants for the second”) (Goethe 2000 , verses 1410–1412).

Albert S, Bell GG (2002) Timing and music. Acad Manag Rev 27(4):574–593

Article Google Scholar

Allmendinger J, Hackman JR (1996) Organizations in changing environments: the case of East German symphony orchestras. Adm Sci Q 41(3):337–369

Alvesson M, Sandberg J (2020) The problematizing review: a counterpoint to Elsbach and Van Knippenberg’s argument for integrative reviews. J Manag Stud 57(6):1290–1304

Ammer C (1972) Harper’s dictionary of music. Harper & Row, New York

Google Scholar

Atler J (1999) Dance and creativity. In: Runco M, Pritzker S (eds) Encyclopedia of creativity. Academic Press, San Diego, pp 469–481

Avolio BJ, Gardner WL (2005) Authentic leadership development: getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. Leadersh Q 16(3):315–338

Baker T, Nelson RE (2005) Creating something from nothing: resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage. Adm Sci Q 50(3):329–366

Barnard C (1983) The functions of the executive. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Barrett FJ (1998) Coda-creativity and improvisation in jazz and organizations: implications for organizational learning. Organ Sci 9(5):605–621

Barrett FJ, Peplowski K (1998) Minimal structures within a song: an analysis of “All of Me.” Organ Sci 9(5):539–622

Barry D, Carroll B, Hansen H (2006) To text or context? Endotextual, exotextual, and multi-textual approaches to narrative and discursive organizational studies. Organ Stud 27(8):1091–1110

Bartlett J (1968) Bartlett’s familiar quotations: a collection of passages, phrases, and proverbs traced to their sources in ancient and modern literature. Little Brown, New York

BBC (2011) Stradivarius violin sold for £9.8m at charity auction. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-13852872 . Accessed 21 Sept 2021

Bechky BA, Okhuysen GA (2011) Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT officers and film crews handle surprises. Acad Manag J 54(2):239–261

Berg JM (2016) Balancing on the creative highwire: forecasting the success of novel ideas in organizations. Adm Sci Q 61(3):433–468

Berg JM (2022) One-hit wonders versus hit makers: sustaining success in creative industries. Adm Sci Q 67(3):630–673

Berliner P (1994) Thinking in jazz. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Book Google Scholar

Berniker E (1998) Working the jazz metaphor: musings driving down I-5 past midnight. Organ Sci 9(5):583–585

Beyes T, Steyaert C (2013) Strangely familiar: the uncanny and unsiting organizational analysis. Organ Stud 34(10):1445–1465

Biehl-Missal B (2011) Business is show business: management presentations as performance. J Manag Stud 48(3):619–645

Boal A (1979) Theatre of the oppressed. Pluto Press, London

Boje DM, Rosile GA, Durant RA, Luhman JT (2004) Enron spectacles: a critical dramaturgical analysis. Organ Stud 25(5):751–774

Boje DM, Gardner CL, Smith WL (2006) (Mis)using numbers in the Enron story. Organ Res Methods 9(4):456–474

Bolshoi Theatre (2020) The Bolshoi Theatre will broadcast operas and ballet performances on YouTube. https://www.bolshoi.ru/en/about/press/articles/none/5635/ . Accessed 7 July 2020

Booth A, Sutton A, Papaioannou D (2016) Systematic approaches to a successful literature review. Sage Publications, London

Bougon M, Weick K, Binkhorst D (1977) Cognition in organizations: an analysis of the Utrecht jazz orchestra. Admin Sci Quart 22(4):606–639

Bourdieu P (1990) The logic of practice. Stanford University Press, Stanford

Brown SL, Eisenhardt KM (1997) The art of continuous change: linking complexity theory and time-paced evolution in relentlessly shifting organizations. Adm Sci Q 42(1):1

Bunderson JS, Thompson JA (2009) The call of the wild: zookeepers, callings, and the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work. Adm Sci Q 54(1):32–57

Burke K (1968) Dramatism. In: Sills DL (ed) International encyclopaedia of the social sciences, 1st edn. The Macmillan Company & the Free Press, London, pp 445–452

Butt J (2002) Playing with history: the historical approach to musical performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Cancellieri G, Cattani G, Ferriani S (2022) Tradition as a resource: robust and radical interpretations of operatic tradition in the Italian opera industry 1989–2011. Strateg Manag J. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3436

Carroll GR, Wheaton DR (2009) The organizational construction of authenticity: an examination of contemporary food and dining in the U.S. Res Organ Behav 29:255–282

Cattani G, Dunbar RLM, Shapira Z (2013) Value creation and knowledge loss: the case of Cremonese stringed instruments. Organ Sci 24(3):813–830

Cattani G, Dunbar RLM, Shapira Z (2017) How commitment to craftsmanship leads to unique value: Steinway & Sons’ differentiation strategy. Strat Sci 2(1):13–38

Chiles TH, Meyer AD, Hench TJ (2004) Organizational emergence: the origin and transformation of Branson, Missouri’s Musical Theaters. Organ Sci 15(5):499–519

Cixous H (1976) Fiction and its phantoms: a reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (‘The Uncanny’). New Lit Hist 7(3):525–548

Clancy JJ (1999) The invisible powers: the language of business. Lexington Books, Lexington

Clark T, Mangham I (2004a) From dramaturgy to theatre as technology: the case of corporate theatre. J Manag Stud 41(1):37–59

Clark T, Mangham I (2004b) Stripping to the undercoat: a review and reflections on a piece of organization theatre. Organ Stud 25(5):841–851

Clarkeson JS (1990) Jazz vs. symphony. Boston Consulting Group - Perspectives:1–2

Cohen SG, Ledford GE, Spreitzer GM (1996) A predictive model of self-managing work team effectiveness. Hum Relat 49(5):643–676

Conforto E, Rebentisch E, Amaral D (2016) Learning the art of business improvisation. MIT Sloan Manag Rev 57(3):8–10

Conger JA (1989) Leadership: the art of empowering others. Acad Manag Perspect 3(1):17–24

Cornelissen JP (2002) On the ‘organizational identity’ metaphor. Br J Manag 13(3):259–268

Cornelissen JP (2004) What are we playing at? Theatre, organization, and the use of metaphor. Organ Stud 25(5):705–726

Cornelissen JP (2005) Beyond compare: metaphor in organization theory. Acad Manag Rev 30(4):751–764

Cornelissen JP (2006) Making sense of theory construction: metaphor and disciplined imagination. Organ Stud 27(11):1579–1597

Cronin TE (2008) “All the world’s a stage…” Acting and the art of political leadership. Leadership Quart 19(4):459–468

Crossan MM (1998) Improvisation in action. Organ Stud 9(5):593–599

Csikszentmihalyi M (1990) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. J Leisure Res 24(1):93–94

Czarniawska-Joerges B, Jacobsson B (1995) Political organizations and commedia dell'arte. Organ Stud 16(3):375–394

Czarniawska-Joerges B, Wolff R (1991) Leaders, managers, entrepreneurs on and off the organizational stage. Organ Stud 12(4):529–546

Darr A, Pinch T (2013) Performing sales: material scripts and the social organization of obligation. Organ Stud 34(11):1601–1621

Day DV, Gordon S, Fink C (2012) The sporting life: exploring organizations through the lens of sport. Acad Manag Ann 6(1):397–433

DeMers JD (2013) Frame matching and ΔpTED: a framework for teaching Swing and Blues dance partner connection. Res Danc Educ 14(1):71–80

de Oliveira Kuhn HE, Komander V, Graf-Vlachy L, König AS, Busenbark JR (2019) Towards a social role theory of CEOs’ and CFOs’ communication and infomediaries’ evaluations. Acad Manag Proceed 11633

Dobrow SR (2013) Dynamics of calling: a longitudinal study of musicians. J Organ Behav 34(4):431–452

Doherty DP (2007) The question of theoretical excess: folly and fall in theorizing organization. Organ 14(6):837–867

Durand R, Kremp P-A (2016) Classical deviation: organizational and individual status as antecedents of conformity. Acad Manag J 59(1):65–89

Duriau VJ, Reger RK, Pfarrer MD (2007) A content analysis of the content analysis literature in organization studies: research themes, data sources, and methodological refinements. Organ Res Methods 10(1):5–34

Eikhof DR, Haunschild A (2007) For art’s sake! Artistic and economic logics in creative production. J Organ Behav 28(5):523–538

Engwall M, Westling G (2004) Peripety in an R&D drama: capturing a turnaround in project dynamics. Organ Stud 25(9):1557–1578

Etymonline.com (2020) Perform. https://www.etymonline.com/word/perform . Accessed 18 June 2020

Ewen D (1943) Dictators of the baton. Alliance Book Corporation, New York

Fairhurst GT, Sarr RA (1996) The art of framing: managing the language of leadership. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Feldman MS, Pentland BT (2003) Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Adm Sci Q 48(1):94–118

Fellezs K (2011) Birds of fire: jazz, rock, funk, and the creation of fusion. Duke University Press, New York

Fisch C, Block J (2018) Six tips for your (systematic) literature review in business and management research. Manag Rev Q 68(2):103–106

Flyverbom M, Reinecke J (2017) The spectacle and organization studies. Organ Stud 38(11):1625–1643

Furu P (2012) The art of collaborative leadership in jazz bands. In: Caust J (ed) Arts leadership: international case studies. Tilde University Press, Prahran

Gao H, Yu T, Cannella AA (2016) The use of public language in strategy. J Manag 42(1):21–54

Gardner WL (1992) Lessons in organizational dramaturgy: the art of impression management. Organ Dyn 21(1):33–41

Gardner WL, Avolio BJ (1998) The charismatic relationship: a dramaturgical perspective. Acad Manag Rev 23(1):32–58

Gioia T (1988) The imperfect art. Oxford University Press, New York

Gioia DA, Chittipeddi K (1991) Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strateg Manag J 12(6):433–448

Gioia DA, Schultz M, Corley KG (2000) Organizational identity, image, and adaptive instability. Acad Manag Rev 25(1):63–81

Gioia DA, Corley KG, Hamilton AL (2013) Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research. Organ Res Methods 16(1):15–31

Giorcelli M, Moser P (2020) Copyrights and creativity: evidence from Italian opera in the Napoleonic age. J Polit Econ 128(11):4163–4210

Glaser BG, Strauss AL (1980) The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. Aldine, New York

Glynn MA (2000) When cymbals become symbols: conflict over organizational identity within a symphony orchestra. Organ Sci 11(3):285–298

Glynn MA, Lounsbury M (2005) From the critics’ corner: logic blending, discursive change and authenticity in a cultural production system. J Manag Stud 42(5):1031–1055

Goffman E (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books, New York

Goldin C, Rouse C (2000) Orchestrating impartiality: the impact of “blind” auditions on female musicians. Am Econ Rev 90(4):715–741

Goodman RA, Goodman LP (1976) Some management issues in temporary systems: a study of professional development and manpower. The theater case. Adm Sci Q 21(3):494–501

Graf-Vlachy L, Oliver AG, Banfield R, König A, Bundy J (2020) Media coverage of firms: background, integration, and directions for future research. J Manag 46(1):36–69

Grandey AA (2003) When “the show must go on”: surface acting and deep acting as determinants of emotional exhaustion and peer-rated service delivery. Acad Manag J 46(1):86–96

Grove SJ, Fisk RP (1989) Impression management in service marketing: a dramaturgical perspective. In: Giacalone RA, Rosenfeld P (eds) Impression management in the organization. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, pp 427–438

Gutmann T (2019) Harmonizing corporate venturing modes: an integrative review and research agenda. Manag Rev Q 69(2):121–157

Hackman JR (2003) Learning more by crossing levels: evidence from airplanes, hospitals, and orchestras. J Organ Behav 24(8):905–922

Hadida AL, Tarvainen W, Rose J (2015) Organizational improvisation: a consolidating review and framework. Int J Manag Rev 17(4):437–459

Hales S, Riach K, Tyler M (2021) Close encounters: Intimate service interactions in lap dancing work as a nexus of ‘self-others-things.’ Organ Stud 42(4):555–574

Hällgren M, Rouleau L, de Rond M (2018) A matter of life or death: how extreme context research matters for management and organization studies. Acad Manag Ann 12(1):111–153

Han S, Ravid SA (2020) Star turnover and the value of human capital: evidence from Broadway shows. Manag Sci 66(2):958–978

Harrison SH, Rouse ED (2014) Let’s dance! Elastic coordination in creative group work: a qualitative study of modern dancers. Acad Manag J 57(5):1256–1283

Harrison SH, Rouse ED (2015) An inductive study of feedback interactions over the course of creative projects. Acad Manag J 58(2):375–404

Harzing A-W (2020) Journal quality list. https://harzing.com/download/jql2019-07_subject.pdf . Accessed 13 Oct 2020

Hatch MJ (1998) The Vancouver academy of management jazz symposium: jazz as a metaphor for organizing in the 21 st century. Organ Sci 9(5):556–568

Hatch MJ (1999) Exploring the empty spaces of organizing: how improvisational jazz helps redescribe organizational structure. Organ Sci 20(1):75–100

Hatch MJ, Weick KE (1998) Critics’ corner: critical resistance to the jazz metaphors. Organ Sci 9(5):600–604

Hunt JG, Stelluto GE, Hooijberg R (2004) Toward new-wave organization creativity: beyond romance and analogy in the relationship between orchestra-conductor leadership and musician creativity. Leadersh Q 15(1):145–162

Innis BD (2022) Category change in cultural fields: Practice deviation and the discursive maintenance of category meanings in jazz music. Organ Stud. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221074152

Jackson BG (1996) Re-engineering the sense of self: the manager and the management guru. J Manag Stud 33(5):571–590

Janssens M, Steyaert C (2019) A practice-based theory of diversity: respecifying (in)equality in organizations. Acad Manag Rev 44(3):518–537

Janssens M, Steyaert C (2020) The site of diversalizing: the accomplishment of inclusion in intergenerational dance. J Manag Stud 57(6):1143–1173

Jensen M, Kim BK (2014) Great, Madama Butterfly again! How robust market identity shapes opera repertoires. Organ Sci 25(1):109–126

Johns G (2006) The essential impact of context on organizational behavior. Acad Manag Rev 31(2):386–408

Kamoche K, Pina e Cunha M (2001) Minimal structures: from jazz improvisation to product innovation. Organ Stud 22(5):733–764

Kao JJ (1996) Jamming: the art and discipline of business creativity. Harpercollins, New York

Keeler KR, Cortina JM (2020) Working to the beat: a self-regulatory framework linking music characteristics to job performance. Acad Manag Rev 45(2):447–471

Kendall JE (1993) Good and evil in the chairmen’s ‘boiler plate’: an analysis of corporate visions of the 1970s. Organ Stud 14(4):571–592

Kernfeld BD (1995) What to listen for in jazz. Yale University Press, New Haven

Kim BK, Jensen M (2011) How product order affects market identity: repertoire ordering in the U.S. opera market. Adm Sci Q 56(2):238–256

König A, Schulte M, Enders A (2012) Inertia in response to non-paradigmatic change: the case of meta-organizations. Res Policy 41(8):1325–1343

König A, Enders A, Barsoux J-L (2016) Stop jumping to solutions! MIT Sloan Manag Rev 57(4):62–70

Kramer JD (1988) The time of music. Schirmer Books, New York

Kramer MW, Crespy DA (2011) Communicating collaborative leadership. Leadersh Q 22:1024–1037

Kriger MP, Barnes LB (1992) Organizational decision-making as hierarchical levels of drama. J Manag Stud 29(4):439–457

Krippendorff K (2013) Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. Sage Publications, California

Ladkin D (2008) Leading beautifully: how mastery, congruence and purpose create the aesthetic of embodied leadership practice. Leadersh Q 19(1):31–41

Ladkin D, Taylor SS (2010) Enacting the ‘true self’: towards a theory of embodied authentic leadership. Leadersh Q 21(1):64–74

Lakoff G, Johnson M (1980) Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Lamertz K, Heugens P (2009) Institutional translation through spectatorship: collective consumption and editing of symbolic organizational texts by firms and their audiences. Organ Stud 30(11):1249–1279

Lampel J, Honig B, Drori I (2014) Organizational ingenuity: concept, processes and strategies. Organ Stud 35(4):465–482

Lawrence TB, Leca B, Zilber TB (2013) Institutional work: current research, new directions and overlooked issues. Organ Stud 34(8):1023–1033

Lévi-Strauss C (1967) The savage mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Lewin AY (1998) Jazz improvisation as a metaphor for organization theory. Organ Sci 9(5):539

Linstead SA (2018) Feeling the reel of the real: framing the play of critically affective organizational research between art and the everyday. Organ Stud 39(2–3):319–344

Love EG, Lim J, Bednar MK (2017) The face of the firm: the influence of CEOs on corporate reputation. Acad Manag J 60(4):1462–1481

Luthans F, Avolio BJ (2003) Authentic leadership: a positive developmental approach. In: Cameron KS, Dutton JE, Quinn RE (eds) Positive organizational scholarship: foundations of a new discipline. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, pp 241–261

Maitlis S (2004) Taking it from the top: how CEOs influence (and fail to influence) their boards. Organ Stud 25(8):1275–1311

Maitlis S (2005) The social processes of organizational sensemaking. Acad Manag J 48(1):21–49

Maitlis S, Lawrence TB (2003) Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: understanding failure in organizational strategizing. J Manag Stud 40(1):109–139

Maitlis S, Lawrence TB (2007) Triggers and enablers of sensegiving in organizations. Acad Manag J 50(1):57–84

Mangham IL (1986) Power and performance in organizations. Blackwell, Oxford

Mangham IL (1990) Managing as a performing art. Brit J Manag 1(2):105–115

Mannucci PV, Orazi DC, de Valck K (2021) Developing improvisation skills: the influence of individual orientations. Admin Sci Q 66(3):612–658

Marotto M, Roos J, Victor B (2007) Collective virtuosity in organizations: a study of peak performance in an orchestra. J Manag Stud 44(3):388–413

May G (1978) Schöpfung aus dem Nichts: Die Entstehung der Lehre von der creatio ex nihilo. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte. de Gruyter, Berlin

Meisiek S (2004) Which catharsis do they mean? Aristotle, Moreno, Boal and organization theatre. Organ Stud 25(5):797–816

Meisiek S, Barry D (2007) Through the looking glass of organizational theatre: analogically mediated inquiry in organizations. Organ Stud 28(12):1805–1827

Merriam-Webster.com (2020) Performing arts. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/performing%20arts . Accessed 29 June 2020

Merrill HF (1960) Classics in management. AMA, New York

Murnighan JK, Conlon DE (1991) The dynamics of intense work groups: a study of British string quartets. Adm Sci Q 36(2):165

Nietzsche F (1986) Human, all too human. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Nissley N, Taylor SS, Houden L (2004) The politics of performance in organizational theatre-based training and interventions. Organ Stud 25(5):817–839

Orchesterstiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (2020) The management symphony. https://themanagementsymphony.com/ . Accessed 15 June 2020

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (2020) Orpheus. https://orpheusnyc.org/ . Accessed 15 June 2020

Ortmann G, Sydow J (2018) Dancing in chains: creative practices in/of organizations. Organ Stud 39(7):899–921

Parker M (2011) Organizing the circus: the engineering of miracles. Organ Stud 32(4):555–596

Pasmore WA (1998) Organizing for jazz. Organ Sci 9(5):562–568

Pentland BT, Rueter HH (1994) Organizational routines as grammars of action. Admin Sci Quart 39(3):484–510

Perle G (1996) Twelve-tone tonality. University of California Press, Berkeley

Perrow C (1970) Organizational analysis: a sociological view. Tavistock, London

Pescosolido AT (2002) Emergent leaders as managers of group emotion. Leadersh Q 13(5):583–599

Phillips DJ, Zuckerman EW (2001) Middle-status conformity: theoretical restatement and empirical demonstration in two markets. Am J Sociol 107(2):379–429

Pina e Cunha M, Vieira da Cunha J, Kamoche K (1999) Organizational improvisation: what, when, how and why. Int J Manag Rev 1(3):299–341

Pineault WJ (1989) Industrial theatre: the businessman’s Broadway. Dissertation. Bowling Green State University

Plack CJ (2014) The sense of hearing. Psychology Press, New York

Prato M, Kypraios E, Ertug G, Lee YG (2019) Middle-status conformity revisited: the interplay between achieved and ascribed status. Acad Manag J 62(4):1003–1027

Pratt MG (2009) From the editors: for the lack of a boilerplate: tips on writing up (and reviewing) qualitative research. Acad Manag J 52(5):856–862

Pratt MG, Ashforth BE (2003) Fostering meaningfulness in working and at work. In: Cameron KS, Dutton JE, Quinn RE (eds) Positive organizational scholarship: foundations of a new discipline. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, pp 309–327

Raynor H (1978) The orchestra. Scribner’s, New York

Riza SD, Heller D (2015) Follow your heart or your head? A longitudinal study of the facilitating role of calling and ability in the pursuit of a challenging career. J Appl Psychol 100(3):695–712

Rosen M (1985) Breakfast at Spiro’s: dramaturgy and dominance. J Manag 11(2):31–48

Rouse ED, Harrison SH (2022) Choreographing creativity: exploring creative centralization in project groups. Acad Manag Discov 8(3):384–413

Sagiv T, Simons T, Drori I (2019) The construction of authenticity in the creative process: lessons from choreographers of contemporary dance. Organ Sci 31(1):23–46

Schoenbrun D (1966) The three lives of Charles de Gaulle. Atheneum, New York

Schreyögg G, Häpfl H (2004) Theatre and organization: editorial introduction. Organ Stud 25(5):691–704

Sgourev SV (2015) Brokerage as catalysis: how Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes escalated modernism. Organ Stud 36(3):343–361

Shakespeare W (2009) As you like it. The new Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Shalley CE, Zhou J, Oldham GR (2004) The effects of personal and contextual characteristics on creativity: where should we go from here? J Manag 30(6):933–958

Shymko Y, Roulet TJ (2017) When does Medici hurt Da Vinci? Mitigating the signaling effect of extraneous stakeholder relationships in the field of cultural production. Acad Manag J 60(4):1307–1338

Siganos A, Tabner IT (2020) Capturing the role of societal affinity in cross-border mergers with the Eurovision Song Contest. J Int Bus Stud 51(2):263–273

Sinha PN, Inkson K, Barker JR (2012) Committed to a failing strategy: celebrity CEO, intermediaries, media and stakeholders in a co-created drama. Organ Stud 33(2):223–245

Stanislavski C (1996) An actor prepares. Eyre Methuen, London

Stephens JP (2021) How the show goes on: Using the aesthetic experince of collective performance to adapt while coordinating. Adm Sci Q 66(1):1–41

Tahai A, Meyer MJ (1999) A revealed preference study of management journals’ direct influences. Strateg Manag J 20(3):279–296

Tereyağoğlu N, Fader PS, Veeraraghavan S (2018) Multiattribute loss aversion and reference dependence: evidence from the performing arts industry. Manag Sci 64(1):421–436

The Metropolitan Opera (2020) Nightly met opera streams. https://www.metopera.org/user-information/nightly-met-opera-streams/ . Accessed 7 July 2020

Théberge P (2015) Digitalization. In: Shepherd J, Devine K (eds) The Routledge reader on the sociology of music. Routledge, New York, pp 329–338

Thibodeau PH, Boroditsky L (2011) Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2):1–11

Thiétart RA, Forgues B (1995) Chaos theory and organization. Organ Sci 6(1):19–31

Toraldo ML, Islam G, Mangia G (2019) Serving time: volunteer work, liminality and the uses of meaningfulness at music festivals. J Manag Stud 56(3):617–654

Tranfield D, Denyer D, Smart P (2003) Towards a methodology for developing evidence-informed management knowledge by means of systematic review. Br J Manag 14(3):207–222

Tsay C-J (2013) Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance. Proc Natl Acad Sci 110(36):14580–14585

Tsay CJ (2014) The vision heuristic: judging music ensembles by sight alone. Organ Behav Hum Dec 124(1):845–858

Tskhay KO, Xu H, Rule NO (2014) Perceptions of leadership success from nonverbal cues communicated by orchestra conductors. Leadersh Q 25(5):901–911

Tsoukas H, Chia R (2002) On organizational becoming: rethinking organizational change. Organ Sci 13(5):567–582

Tychsen A, Hitchens M, Brolund T, Kavakli M (2006) Live action role-playing games: control, communication, storytelling, and MMORPG similarities. Games Cult 1(3):252–275

Vaill PB (1989) Managing as a performing art: new ideas for a world of chaotic change. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Vera D, Crossan M (2004) Theatrical improvisation: lessons for organizations. Organ Stud 25(5):727–749

Vera D, Crossan M (2005) Improvisation and innovative performance in teams. Organ Sci 16(3):203–224

Visser LM, Bleijenbergh IL, Benschop YWM, van Riel AC (2017) Prying eyes: a dramaturgical approach to professional surveillance. J Manag Stud 55(4):703–727

von Goethe JW (2000) Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil. Universal-Bibliothek, vol 1. Reclam, Stuttgart

Voss GB, Cable DM, Voss ZG (2000) Linking organizational values to relationships with external constituents: a study of nonprofit professional theatres. Organ Sci 11(3):330–347

Voss ZG, Cable DM, Voss GB (2006) Organizational identity and firm performance: what happens when leaders disagree about “who we are?” Organ Sci 17(6):741–755

Voss GB, Sirdeshmukh D, Voss ZG (2008) The effects of slack resources and environmental threat on product exploration and exploitation. Acad Manag J 51(1):147–164

Walsh JP, Ungson GR (1991) Organizational memory. Acad Manag Rev 16(1):57–91

Weber F, Lehmann J, Graf-Vlachy L, König A (2019) Institution-infused sensemaking of discontinuous innovations: the case of the sharing economy. J Prod Innov Manag 36(5):632–660

Weick KE (1974) Amendments to organizational theorizing. Acad Manag J 17(3):487–502

Weick KE (1992) Agenda setting in organizational behavior. J Manag Inq 1(3):171–182

Weick KE (1995) What theory is not, theorizing is. Adm Sci Q 40(3):385

Weick KE (1998) Introductory essay: improvisation as a mindset for organizational analysis. Organ Sci 9(5):543–555

Weick KE, Roberts KH (1993) Collective mind in organizations: heedful interrelating on flight decks. Adm Sci Quart 38(3):357

Weischer AE, Weibler J, Petersen M (2013) “To thine own self be true”: the effects of enactment and life storytelling on perceived leader authenticity. Leadersh Q 24(4):477–495

Westley F, Mintzberg H (1989) Visionary leadership and strategic management. Strateg Manag J 10(S1):17–32

Westwood R (2004) Comic relief: subversion and catharsis in organizational comedic theatre. Organ Stud 25(5):775–795

Wetzel R, Nees F (2017) Asymmetry revisited: what leadership of organizational change can learn from tango argentino. SCMS 14(2):57–66

Whetten DA (1989) What constitutes a theoretical contribution? Acad Manag Rev 14(4):490–495

Whetten DA (2002) Modeling-as-theorizing: a systematic methodology for theory development. In: Partington D (ed) Essential skills for management research. Sage Publications, London, pp 45–71

Whetten DA (2009) An examination of the interface between context and theory applied to the study of Chinese organizations. Manag Organ Rev 5(1):29–56

Yin RK (1994) Case study research: design and methods, 2nd edn. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks

Zack MH (2000) Jazz improvisation and organizing: once more from the top. Organ Sci 11(2):227–234

Download references

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Passau, Innstr. 27, 94032, Passau, Germany

Verena Komander & Andreas König

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

The authors designed the overall framing and co-authored the manuscript. Data collection and analysis were performed by the first author. Both authors commented on and revised previous versions of the manuscript and approved the final manuscript. We thank Editor Jörn Block and an anonymous reviewer for their guidance and comments in revising this paper. Furthermore, we gratefully acknowledge valuable contributions from Maja Joetten, and helpful comments from Steven Boivie and Jeff Reuer as well as participants at the 2019 Doctoral Research Workshop for Organization, Innovation, and Strategy at the University of Passau. Andi König dedicates this paper to his parents, who sparked in him the love for music and science, and to his mentors and trumpet professors at the Royal Academy of Music, London, Edward Carroll and John Wallace, CBE, in gratitude for their invaluable support and inspiration.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Verena Komander .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest, additional information, publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendix: Sample of performing arts-related studies (89 studies, in alphabetical order)

Rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Komander, V., König, A. Organizations on stage: organizational research and the performing arts. Manag Rev Q 74 , 303–352 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-022-00301-9

Download citation

Received : 19 October 2021

Accepted : 30 September 2022

Published : 18 October 2022

Issue Date : February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-022-00301-9

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Performing arts
Organization

JEL Classification

Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

Bristol Neuroscience Research Network

Report warns performing arts under threat from future global shocks unless lessons are learned from pandemic.

Press release issued: 28 March 2024

Live performing arts are facing an existential threat from a range of potential global shocks unless there is significant and sustained investment in resilience planning, according to a new international study.

Climate-related emergencies, political unrest, economic pressures, and public health crises all threaten the viability of drama, dance, opera and other live events, as well as their benefits to society and community wellbeing.

This is the conclusion of research, led by the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, looking at the varied responses of the G7 nations to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying major lessons must be learned to safeguard the future of the sector.

Commissioned by the British Academy, Pandemic Preparedness in the Live Performing Arts: Lessons to Learn from COVID-19 has been researched and written by academics from leading institutions across the G7. Unprecedented in its geographical scope, the report was unveiled and discussed at an online briefing on Tuesday, 26 March 2024.

Its five major recommendations are:

UK and regional government should support arts councils and development agencies to establish a clear resilience strategy for live performance
A UK-wide strategy should be developed to ensure that creative organisations, individuals and audiences have access to digital infrastructure, skills and rights frameworks
Work should be undertaken to better understand the value of culture to society alongside its economic contribution
Research and analysis is needed of the live performing arts sector’s workforce, ecosystem and audience to identify vulnerabilities
Addressing skills gaps and recruiting a more diverse workforce are required to improve the sector’s crisis response.

Read the University of Bristol news item

Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL)

J.t. & margaret talkington, college of visual & performing arts, performing arts research lab.

The Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) uses a combination of interdisciplinary experimental and computational methods to address fundamental questions about the composition, performance, and reception of music, theatre and dance, and the visual arts.

We focus primarily on learning and memory, the formation of expectations, and emotion and empirical aesthetics. The lab employs methods from psychophysics, cognitive psychology, psychophysiology, corpus linguistics, information retrieval, systematic musicology, and music theory and analysis.

The Performing Arts Research Laboratory is housed in the School of Music at the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts at Texas Tech University.

Research Areas Spotlight

Music & language, popular music & the radio, creativity & emotion, film music & video games, lab members.

Dr. David R. W. Sears Director Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts

Dr. Peter A. Martens Director Associate Professor of Music Theory

Elizabeth Acosta PhD Student Fine Arts – Interdisciplinary Arts Lab Manager

Brad Cawyer DMA Student Conducting

Devin Guerrero PhD Student Fine Arts – Music Theory

Justin Glosson PhD Candidate Fine Arts – Musicology

Kathryn Kelley PhD Candidate Fine Arts – Visual Art

Alissa Stolt MM Student Fine Arts – Music Theory

Lucas Hess BA/MA Psychology

Hannah Percival PhD Fine Arts – Music Theory

Jonathan Verbeten PhD Fine Arts – Musicology

Sylvia Weintraub PhD Fine Arts – Visual Art

Recent Graduates

Hannah Percival (“Can You Hear the Connection? A Study on Musical-Social Bonding”) and Sylvia Weintraub (“Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Online: Why Making Matters on Pinterest”) successfully defended their dissertations! Congratulations!

National/International Conference Presentations in 2021

Members of the PeARL have presented papers at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Future Directions in Music Cognition, the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021), and the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). Congrats to Justin Glosson, Hannah Percival, Jonathan Verbeten, Sylvia Weintraub, and David Sears!

Awards & Prizes in 2021

Brad Cawyer won 1st place in the Visual and Performing Arts Category for a paper (“Syntactic Processing of Tonal Harmony: Evidence from Aphasia”) presented at the 11th Annual Arts and Humanities Conference at TTU (2021)!

recent publications

Sears, Verbeten, & Percival. (2021). Intonation discrimination for tonal chord sequences in a priming paradigm: Effects of target predictability and musical expertise. Auditory Perception & Cognition .

Weintraub & Sears (2021). Why making matters online: The Pinterest-DIY data set. Proceedings of the Association of Internet Researchers .

Sears & Forrest. (2021) . Triadic patterns across classical and popular music corpora: Stylistic conventions, or characteristic idioms?” Journal of Mathematics and Music .

Abri, Gutierrez, Datta, Sears, Namin, & Jones. (2021). A comparative analysis of modeling perceived and induced emotions in sonification. Electronics .

See More Publications

Research Areas

This research area explores the structural parallels between music and language, with particular attention devoted to tonal harmony. Current projects examine behavioral evidence for spared processing of music despite impaired language processing in people with aphasia (PWA).

popular music & the Radio

This research area examines Anglophone popular music traditions associated with the latter half of the twentieth century (e.g., 50s doo-wop, 70s rock) using both close- and distant-reading (i.e., corpus-driven) methodologies. Current projects explore (1) the rise of synthesizer timbres in 80s pop; and (2) the characteristic scales and chord progressions encountered in popular music corpora like the Billboard “Hot” 100 and the Rolling-Stone data set .

creativity & Emotion

This research area explores how methods for expressive communication (e.g., writing, participation in online communities) can affect creative behaviors like sculpting or painting. Current projects examine (1) the rise of DIY communities on social-networking systems like Pinterest; and (2) whether expressive writing serves as an implicit intervention strategy by mitigating the effects of stress and reinforcing creative performance.

film music & video games

This research area investigates the multi-modal effects of movies and video games on memory, attention, and emotion using both behavioral and computational methods. Current projects examine (1) whether music facilitates the visual recognition of emotions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder; (2) the function of sound during “jump scares” in horror films; and (3) the interaction between virtual audiences and musical performer(s) in online video games.

Like Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) on Facebook Like Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) on Facebook
Follow Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) on X (twitter) Follow Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) on X (twitter)

The performing arts support student achievement

Federal funding for arts education expands student access to the arts.

The performing arts boost local economies.

The NEA plays a key role in America’s arts infrastructure and economy.

Performing arts organizations serve public needs.

Charitable giving to the arts is an investment in their public value.

The Performing Arts Alliance advocates for America’s professional nonprofit arts sector before Congress and key policy makers ( Learn More ).

Alliance of Artists Communities

Alternate ROOTS

American Composers Forum

Association of Performing Arts Professionals

Chamber Music America

Chorus America

Folk Alliance International

The International Association of Blacks in Dance

League of American Orchestras

National Alliance for Musical Theatre

National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures

National Performance Network

Network of Ensemble Theaters

OPERA America

Theatre Communications Group

Advocacy Priorities

The NEA provides strategic leadership and investment in the arts.

US Dept. of Education grants aid model arts education programs.

News Updates

Performing Arts Research Paper

View sample art research paper on the performing arts. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

The Sociology of the Performing Arts

This field involves the study of the social context of theater, motion pictures, drama, music, dance, and opera. The performing arts are distinguished from the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, and photography since they are expressed somatically, using the artist’s own body, face, and/or presence as a medium. The performing arts also differ from the plastic arts, which use material objects such as clay, metal, or paint, which can be molded or transformed to create some art object. Of course, this distinction is not absolute since the performing arts often involve some form of plastic art, such as props and scenery. For example, modern dance uses space like any other three-dimensional object made of wood or clay by occupying it, relating to it, and influencing the perception of it (Ness 2004:137).

Academic Writing, Editing, Proofreading, And Problem Solving Services

Get 10% off with 24start discount code.

Current research in the sociology of the performing arts provides a systematic way to study the performing arts as a social process wedding art, culture, emotion, and the body as part of the systematic study of society. Empirical studies focusing on the social context of art forms focus on the different aspects of either production or consumption processes (Gornostaeva 2004:92). For example, opera combines elements of singing and dancing while employing visual arts, such as painting, to create a visual spectacle on the stage. Whether the words, the music, or dance movements are paramount has been the subject of debate for several centuries. For example, theatrical dancing was originally embedded in opera, gradually becoming a separate art form in the late eighteenth century after audiences began to attend ballet as performance separate from rather than within opera.

Sociological aspects of the performing arts include all those elements pertaining to the performing arts as a social and cultural phenomenon. Currently, research on these aspects is concentrated in anthropology, but there is a growing interest by sociologists in considering the performing arts as social institutions. Sociological research on the performing arts ranges from trying to formulate an understanding of the social roots of artistic production, distribution, and consumption to work on the relationship between arts institutions and audiences or communities (Griswold 1986; DiMaggio 1987; Zolberg 1990). This area also overlaps with American pragmatism and symbolic interactionist theoretical interests in the political aspects of interactive performance as empowerment leading to participatory democracy (Denzin 2003). Sociology has always had an uneasy relationship with studying the particular, but recent developments in sociological theory, particularly postmodernist articulations of the authenticity of personal experience, has opened up a dialogue between those concerned with objective formulations (structural functionalism, conflict theory, and exchange theory) and those theories explaining subjective experiences, including symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and ethnomethdology (Gornostaeva 2004:91–92). Finally, the sociology of the performing arts offers a way to better understand the inherent contradictions of structure and agency. This essay will provide a general overview of the subfield of the sociology of the performing arts and conclude with a discussion of the insights this area offers for sociology in general.

The Performing Arts in Society

Sociology of the performing arts is a subtopic of “art and society” that emerged as a specialized field in the 1950s (Wilson 1964; Weil and Hartley 1975). This topic explores the relationship between social processes and creative artists and is concerned with a wide variety of aesthetic products, including literature, the visual arts, and music (Alexander 2003). This area is particularly concerned with the social institution of theater, especially in how it relates to music (DeNora 2003), dance (Thomas 1995), and opera (Evans 1999).

The sociology of the performing arts is by its very nature interdisciplinary, drawing scholars from a variety of fields in both the humanities and social sciences. Most recently, in 1999, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) launched a multidisciplinary initiative to foster a social science investigation of the arts (Liben and Szechter 2002:385). This program was broadly aimed at developing social science interest and scholarship on the arts and to bring social science theory and methods to bear on a broad range of issues in the arts, including the individual experience of art, the social, historical, and economic context of that experience, and cultural policy.

This SSRC initiative, led by the pioneering sociologist of art, Howard Becker, builds on his previous work on the sociology of art, Art Worlds (1982), which examines the social production of art, particularly painting. His seminal works nevertheless pertains to analyzing the performing arts since he initially recognized that art is a collective process, in how it is produced and consumed, regardless of form. Becker demystified the arts as “miraculous revelations” making them “objects for naturalistic analysis” (Zolberg 1990:2). In doing so, Becker’s work led to the growing interest in the arts as an area of inquiry by social scientists.

Zolberg (1990:29) argues that sociologists have generally neglected the arts as an area of inquiry due to the positivistic nature of American sociology that came to dominate the overall discipline of sociology for several decades. This neglect is also partially related to the fact that sociologists judged the arts as being of far less importance than other issues for their professional concerns and consequently allocated them little space in sociology. The reason the arts are taken more seriously now by sociologists, as well as the general public, is due to (1) their increased subsidization by the state, (2) the collapse of the boundaries between “fine art” and “popular art,” and (3) “mainstream recognition of art previously marginalized, such as the arts of women, ‘amateurs,’ and minorities” (p. 30).

This renewed scholarly interest in the arts is also related to the concerns of sociology’s founding as a discipline in the nineteenth century that prioritized rationality and disembodiment over emotions and the body. The predominance of interest in rationality also led to the overall devaluation of performing arts as an academic concern. These tendencies have been gradually replaced by a growing general interest in taking seriously the embodiment of experience as part of sociological inquiry.

Mind/Body Dualism

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984) laid the theoretical foundations to challenge conceptions of the body as a mere object by focusing on “the relationships between personal identity, the human body and social practices” (Wainwright and Turner 2004:100). Bourdieu’s theoretical insights are particularly important in grounding embodiment with sociological analysis (Turner 1992; Fowler 1997, 2000) in arguing for a new understanding of the body as an agent actively involved in world making and in the production of thought and knowledge.

This section will emphasize dance since the performing arts are primarily expressed somatically, using the artist’s own body as the primary means of expression. Dance also often incorporates other elements of theater, such as a stage and accompanying music. Sociological interest in the performing arts has been marginalized due to its association with emotions and the body rather than rationality and the mind. Prior to the mid-1970s, “sociologists who were interested in the arts . . . were situated on the margins of the discipline . . . ‘often considered eccentric and dilettantish’” (Thomas 1995:18). This is due, in part, to the mind/body dualism in Western culture that dates back to Descartes who articulated the essence of the human subject as constituted through the mind. This privileging of the rational thinking subject has placed the mind in binary opposition to the body, constructing it as a nonverbal object or voiceless ‘other.’ Since the performing arts, especially dance, largely depend on the body, it has led to them not being viewed as legitimate areas of sociological interest.

The Cartesian mind/body dualism was incorporated into the emerging discipline of sociology in the nineteenth century. Sociology focused on problems of modernity; trying to understand the processes of rationalization associated with the rise of industrial society and the development of science. The social role of the performing arts diminished in general and their relevance to human experience was reduced to either psychological or aesthetic aspects. These processes of rationalization that prioritized the intellectual occurred even as the body was becoming the main instrument in capitalist production (Brinson 1983a:104). The general decline in the legitimacy of emotions in industrial society was not limited to the arts alone but also to the general relevancy of ritual and religion (Thomas 1995:9). Even when the arts were considered as a social fact, as by Max Weber (1958) in The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, interest was focused on its relationship to processes of rationalization in modernity. The hierarchy of reason mandated that anything pertaining to aesthetic experiences would be an object, not a subject, of sociological inquiry.

Scholarship on the sociology of dance begins with work published by Hammond and Hammond (1979, 1989), Brinson (1983a, 1983b), and Thomas (1995). Hammond and Hammond (1979) apply Weber’s ideas on rationalization to analyze changes in ballet technique that gradually increased the physical demand on dancer’s capacity for linear extension in the use of the legs and arms. Furthermore, this increased range of motion was accompanied by an unprecedented “fleetness and precision” due to the “toothpick” ideal ballerina body (Hammond and Hammond 1979:601). As ballet became more technically demanding, its aesthetic changed, dancers became lighter, longer, and leaner.

This approach toward historicizing ballet in terms of the development of its technique rather than “dominant performances and personalities” (Hammond and Hammond 1989:15) provided a basis of comparison with technical developments in the other performing arts as well as other areas (Van Delinder 2003, 2005a, 2005b). The technical history of ballet “exhibits a discernable order, an accumulative character” (Hammond and Hammond 1979:602), a process of rationalization that is generally characteristic of modernity. However, after Weber, rationality is not a uniform process; it proceeds at different rates in different institutional spheres.

In 1983, British dance scholar Peter Brinson (1983a) outlined some initial scholastic tasks toward a more coherent sociology of dance. Brinson thought that the recent intellectual interest in culture laid some promising theoretical groundwork to begin systematically examining the relevance of dance in industrial society (p. 101). Conceptualizing dance as a “social fact” Brinson argued that “dance can be as much a social response to human experience as it can be psychological or aesthetic, and we need to study the nature of that social response” (p. 104). Dance rituals are an integral part of national cultural identities, ranging from ballroom dancing being used as social education to reinforce traditional attitudes and customs to being used “to develop community action and strength” in public protests in a variety of places, including Western Europe and South America (p. 104).

Brinson also argues that dance is a part of collective experience, an expression of community that fills a void in industrial society. As a mode of nonverbal communication, dance is one way to integrate the arts back into society without worrying about language barriers. The bias toward literacy in industrial society led to the devaluation of dance as a mode of communication (Brinson 1983b:60). What makes dance interesting is its ability to communicate emotions and feelings that accompany ideas. In addition, dance fills an aesthetic, political, and social value (i.e., dances of national identity reflect the body politic). Thomas (1995) formulated a more comprehensive sociology of dance partially as a response to its neglect as an area of concern by sociologists. Thomas also points out that although dance is “bound up with the processes of gender roles and identification,” it has been largely overlooked by many feminist scholars (pp. 4–5). What is particularly puzzling is why dance has not been taken seriously by feminists since it has long been the target of “negative puritanical sexual connotations,” thus making it rich material to explore in terms of race and gender representations in contemporary society (p. 5).

Looking more generally at themes of embodiment, contemporary sociological theories of embodiment beginning with Mauss ([1934] 1973), Goffman (1959, 1971, 1979), and Bourdieu (1990) focus on understanding social action as performance or performing ‘bodily presentation’ of largely unconscious cues communicating meaning to others. An example of this overlap between dance theorists and sociologists is Morris (2001:56) who notes the similarities between the way dancers use their bodies as art and Mauss’s early interest in “everyday movement, such as the social construction of walking or shoveling,” latter followed up by Goffman’s attention to the embodiment of communication, particularly at the level of the unconscious. Finally, Bourdieu’s corporal theory weds Mauss’s anthropological sensitivity toward materiality of human culture and Goffman’s more nuanced conceptual understanding of bodily movement. Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of bodily hexis is a “political mythology realized, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking and thereby feeling and thinking.” Bourdieu argues that the body, as separate from the mind, constitutes a type of intelligence, a physicality long appreciated by dancers (Foster 1996:15) and other performing artists.

One fruitful avenue of inquiry combining these different approaches from sociology and the humanities would be to examine the objectification of the female body in modern ballet. In the early twentieth century ballet became less representational and more abstract; ballets became movement of the body in space rather than conveying emotions or a character in a story. The female body that was further objectified as an androgynous ideal of the body became synonymous with a “ballet body.” This transformation of women’s bodies in modern ballet is similar to other processes of modernity that resulted in the domination, subjection, and finally objectification of the individual self or personality through technical innovation.

In the world of ballet, choreographers like George Balanchine adopted modernist notions of regularity, consistency, and predictability, making the choreographer, not the dancer, in control of the dancer’s movements. This process also resulted in women’s bodies being transformed and regulated, not only in ballet but also in other spheres, such as the home. Balanchine’s carefully measured and precise choreography in ballets like Apollo (1928), The Four Temperaments (1946), and Agon (1957) resulted in the appropriation of the dancer’s autonomy and control over individual artistic expression (Van Delinder 2005b). The result of this was the production of disciplined, objective female bodies whose subjectivity was constituted, or made, by the choreographer (Van Delinder 2005a).

At the same time, these changes in ballet were taking place concurrently with other structural changes to the nature of modern work. Synott (1992:97) argues, “constructions of the body, particularly in matters of gender and race, were in flux.”As Thomas (1995) argues, even in the highly structured work world of ballet, female dancers “often confronted conventional (patriarchal) representations of women’s bodies through their expansive use of space and their attire” (Thomas 1995:5). The twentieth century also saw the emergence of the modern dance movement, which was mostly led by women. This is an area that has only been recently noticed by sociologists (Thomas 1995, 2003).

Contradictions of Aesthetic Experiences and Rationality

Sociology of the performing arts also provides a vocabulary and framework to examine how social reality generally is constantly being organized and reorganized. First, by focusing on the embodiment of action, it draws attention to how “actors produce themselves as identifiable agents and how this production is achieved through ‘aesthetic reflexive’practices” (DeNora 2003:91). Second, it acknowledges the importance of the emotions, particularly aesthetic experiences, which have been largely lost in modernity. Interest in the body as content (Foster 1996; Morris 2001) rather than as the passive recipient of discipline (Foucault 1979) has been accompanied by recent interest in the idea of renewal of social life as a “performance” (Denzin 2003).

Research in the sociology of the performing arts incorporates both referential (objective, cognitive) and emotive (subjective, expressive) analysis. For example, Jordan and Thomas (1994) offer an important insight into how dance can be studied in this way. In discussing Balanchine’s 1947 ballet The Four Temperaments, the ballet can be discussed as an extrinsic form representing “existing gender relations in the ‘real world’ outside the dance . . . a symmetry between the dancer’s movements and the ways in which women are subordinated by the ‘male gaze’ or look” in patriarchal society (Jordan and Thomas 1994:7). While dancers would focus on its subjective elements, “on the intrinsic, structural and connotative features of a dance work” rendering its “referential function . . . subservient to the aesthetic dimension where the focus is on the symbol which is self-referring, as opposed to the sign which is concerned with denotation” (Jordan and Thomas 1994:7–8). Thinking of dance just in terms of its referential characteristics, one would miss what is going on in the moment of the dance performance, or as Becker (2001) says one would miss “the work of art as a thing to be appreciated in itself and for itself, for what it is just by existing” (p. 1 ). But then the question becomes how to reconcile these two opposing tendencies?

One way this question has been addressed is by the immediate and the consequential aspects of Dewey’s ([1929] 1988d) consummatory experience. The immediacy part of experience is at the level of the individual artist’s creative energy (pp. 188–189). The other aspect of experience—the consequential—provides a relationship between the individual artist to some type of continuum beginning with the past and leading forward into the future. Consummatory experience is the vehicle through which the artist’s power captures for a moment—if only fleeting—the integration of the definite (finite or immediate) with the indefinite (infinite or illimitable). Dewey suggests that the way to resolve this “problematic situation . . . [of] . . . incompatibility between the traits of an object in its direct individual and unique nature and those traits that belong to it in its relations or continuities” is to incorporate the immediacy of individuality suggested by the consummatory with the consequential (p. 189).

The inherent dualisms of Western philosophy mentioned earlier in this essay first led Dewey to search for a possible way to value immediacy (ecstatic) within the context of rationality. Intrigued by the power of the arts to evoke “simply [the aesthetic] experience itself, having experiences at their best and at their fullest,” Dewey’s interest led him to investigate the arts (painting as well as dance) as a potential way to achieve a balance between the conscious and the unconscious, reason and emotion and, thereby, unify the mind/body dualism that had been split asunder by modernity.

In Art as Experience, Dewey (1934) argues that aesthetics had become an experience separated from the daily living, or what Dewey terms “the practical.” To approach the problem of integrating the aesthetic experience into everyday life, he undertook a historical analysis of the arts (Dewey [1938–1939] 1988a, [1938–1939] 1988b, [1929–1930] 1988c, [1938–1939] 1988d, [1929] 1988e). This analysis led him to the conclusion that the arts were a collectivity with the potential to create a shared aesthetic appreciation between the artist and their art as well as the art object and the viewer. Dewey’s interest in the arts was related to his overall search for suitable tactics in creating participatory democracy. Dewey recognized that the arts had the capacity to evoke a consummatory experience with “the characteristics of the human experiences that have the quality . . . we call esthetic” (Dewey [1938–1939] 1988d:358). The value of consummatory experience, evoked aesthetically, is in its ability to create an immediacy that has largely been lost in modernity: “Moments of intense emotional appreciation when . . . the beauty and harmony of existence is disclosed in experiences which are the immediate consummation of all for which we long” (Dewey [1929] 1988e:241). The power of the aesthetic experience was something Dewey sought to bring down to the level of everyday life and integrate it into the consequential order of experience.

Echoing Dewey’s sentiments, Denzin (2003:187) recently invited “symbolic interactionists to think through the practical, progressive politics of a performative cultural studies . . . [in order to create] . . . an emancipatory discourse connecting critical pedagogy with new ways of writing and performing culture” (p. 187). The genealogy of this emancipatory discourse can be traced back to Mead’s (1938:460) initial model of the act as “discursive and performative,” opening the way to understand performance as imitation (Goffman 1959), liminality or construction (Turner 1986), and as motion or movement (Conquergood 1998; Denzin 2003:187). These three dimensions of performance—imitation, construction, and movement— outline the emancipatory discourse of gender and race, which is one of the most promising directions for the sociology of performing arts.

Over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) addressed the problem of the color line in American society as being enacted using “definitions and meanings of blackness . . . intricately linked to issues of theatre and performance” (Denzin 2003:188). Du Bois recognized that an all-black theater was one way for blacks to assert agency and start to combat racism and white privilege. Du Bois’s (1926) idea of politicizing race by performing it as radical theater (Elam 2001) was also carried out by dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham (Perpener 2001; Aschenbrenner 2002). Noting the lack of dance venues featuring African dance or other cultural forms of the African Diaspora in New York of the 1920s, Dunham began to create both dancers and audiences for these forgotten cultural practices based on her anthropological research in the Caribbean and Africa. Dunham’s pedagogy, later called the Dunham Technique, fused African and European cultures to create a new, modern style of moving. The staging of her choreography challenged her largely white audiences to confront non-European culture and social issues facing African Americans in the United States. As a dancer and choreographer on Broadway and in Hollywood films, Dunham opened doors for future generations of black choreographers and dancers to celebrate their African heritage, encouraging greater understanding of the African Diaspora cultures (Emery 1988). As a teacher, she promoted the study and preservation of these Diaspora dances not as museum pieces but to foster crosscultural communication of ideas and knowledge. Through theater and dance performances, black Americans attempted to “break through ‘sedimented’ meanings and normative traditions” (Denzin 2003:188).

The binary discourses that racialize bodies as black or white also engender them as male or female (Butler 1993; Banes 1998). Transgressive performances of race and gender also provide ways to blur the boundaries enacted by civil restraint. For example, contesting gender identities creates “spaces for a queer politics of resistance” (Denzin 2003:190).

Using the bodily techniques of theater to transcend conventional understandings of race and gender has also been used to engage in praxis or political empowerment. The potential of performance tactics to disrupt the hegemony of the bourgeoisie developed along with democratizing effects of the mass media in the early twentieth century. Walter Benjamin ([1937] 1976) saw the possibility to wrestle control of the production of ideology using technological developments in photography (in both still photography and in moving pictures). Using cameras, the masses now had the tools to demystify art by being able to mechanically reproduce it; they also had the ability to disrupt the bourgeois sense of time through film techniques of reordering the presumed linear sequence of reality. Benjamin’s interest in generally disrupting the performance of consumption enacted through the street life of Paris’Arcades was later elaborated on and enacted through the situationist praxis of Guy Debord (1967), selfproclaimed leader of the Situationist International. Debord recognized performance and performing as transmuting everything that had once been real and directly lived into a representational shadow or what Baudrillard (1988, 2005) would later term hyperreality.

Sociology of the Performing Arts in the 21st Century

The sociology of the performing arts promises to be a rich area of inquiry in the twenty-first century. As an emerging subfield, the sociology of the performing arts touches on many core themes of sociological theory, the rise of modernity and its accompanying processes of rationalization. The sociology of the performing arts can broaden our understanding of the social context of theater, motion pictures, drama, music, dance, and opera. The relevance of the performing arts as part of, rather than separate from, social life is discussed in recent research on the significance of opera (Evans 1999), particularly its overlooked role in political activism (Stamatov 2002). The “cultural objects” studied in the sociology of the performing arts (dance, opera, theater) also contribute to a better understanding of how they, as all the arts, are part of a social system (Luhmann 2000). Studies on the transnational careers of ballet dancers can lead to a better understanding of the global context of artistic work and the realization that ballet companies, like other artistic fields, “are social worlds with their own power dynamics, yet subordinated to larger power structures in society” (Wulff 1998:33).

Research on the social context of London theater has led to the development of the cultural diamond conceptual tool helping us to understand the complex social relationships between art, society, creators, and consumers (Griswold 1986, 1994). As a heuristic device, the cultural diamond sharpens our understanding of “any cultural object’s relationship to the social world” (Griswold 1994:15).

In addition, viewing the performing arts as a “sequence of events” offers new opportunities to alter our understanding of time, conceiving it as an unfolding process by innovative thrusts in technique and form (Luhmann 2000:21, 228). This helps us appreciate the fluidity of social reality as no longer being fixed as either in time or space. The performing arts “depend on light—a visual medium—whereas the lyric, like narrative (the epic, the novel) relies on language” (p. 116).

Finally, by integrating and understanding theories of performance and the body in terms of the politics of resistance in participatory democracy (West 1989), it helps us to avoid nihilism or meaninglessness of human activity—since the performing arts are human aesthetic activity defined by the meaning of the participants and observers—while retaining a focus on the immediate and the local. Further research on cultural objects of the performing arts will also continue to remind us not to lose sight of how the individual or particular are embedded in macrosocial processes.

Bibliography:

Alexander, Victoria. 2003. Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Aschenbrenner, Joyce. 2002. Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press.
Banes, Sally. 1998. Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. “Simulacra and Simulation” (The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism). Pp. 166–84 in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, edited by M. Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e).
Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Becker, Howard S. 2001. “L’Oeuvre elle-même” [The Work Itself]. Pp. 449–63 in Vers une sociologie des oeuvres, edited by J.-O. Majastre and A. Pessin. Paris, France: L’Harmattan.
Benjamin, Walter. [1937] 1976. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Pp. 612–34 in Film Theory and Criticism, translated by H. Zohn, edited by G. Mast and M. Cohen. London, England: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London, England: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brinson, Peter. 1983a. “Scholastic Tasks of a Sociology of Dance: Part 1.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 1(1):100–107.
Brinson, Peter. 1983b. “Scholastic Tasks of a Sociology of Dance: Part 2.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 1(2):59–68.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.
Conquergood, Dwight. 1998. “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Culture Politics.” Pp. 25–36 in The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, edited by S. J. Dailey. Washington, DC: National Communication Association.
Debord, Guy. [1967] 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books:
DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music in Sociology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Denzin, Norman K. 2003. “The Call to Performance.” Symbolic Interaction 26:187–207.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. Perigee Books: New York.
Dewey, John. [1938–1939] 1988a. “Experience and Education.” Pp. 1–62 in Later Works: 1925–53, 13, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. [1938–1939] 1988b. “Freedom and Culture.” Pp. 63–188 in Later Works: 1925–53, 13, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. [1929–1930] 1988c. “Individualism, Old and New.” Pp. 41–123 in Later Works: 1925–53, 5, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. [1938–1939] 1988d. “The Philosophy of the Arts.” Pp. 357–68 in Later Works: 1925–53, 13, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. [1929] 1988e. “The Quest for Certainty:A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action.” In Later Works: 1925–53, 4, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
DiMaggio, Paul. 1987. “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52:440–55.
Du Bois,W. E. B. 1926. “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement.” Crisis 32(July):134–36.
Du Bois, W. E. B. [1903] 1999. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Books.
Elam, Harry J., Jr. 2001. “The Device of Race.” Pp. 3–16 in African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, edited by H. J. Elam Jr. and D. Krasner. New York: Oxford University Press.
Emery, Lynne Fauley. 1988. Black Dance from 1619 to Today. Princeton, NJ: Dance Horizons Book.
Evans, David T. 1999. Phantasmagoria: A Sociology of Opera. London, England: Ashgate.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1996. Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture and Power. London, England: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Fowler, Bridget. 1997. Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations. London, England: Sage.
Fowler, Beidget, ed. 2000. Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gornostaeva, Maria. 2004. “Review Essay: Art, Self and Society.” Current Sociology 52:91–102.
Griswold, Wendy. 1986. Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1575–1980. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Griswold, Wendy. 1994. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. London, England: Pine Forge Press.
Hammond, Phillip E. and Sandra N. Hammond. 1979. “The Internal Logic of Dance: A Weberian Perspective on the History of Ballet.” Journal of Social History September:591–608.
Hammond, Sandra N. and Phillip E. Hammond. 1989. “Technique and Autonomy in the Development of Art: A Case Study in Ballet.” Dance Research Journal 21(2):15–24.
Jordan, Stephanie and Helen Thomas. 1994. “Dance and Gender: Formalism and Semiotics Reconsidered.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 12(2):3–14.
Liben, Lynn S. and Lisa E. Szechter. 2002. “A Social Science of the Arts: An Emerging Organizational Initiative and an Illustrative Investigation of Photography.” Qualitative Sociology 23(3):385–408.
Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as a Social System. Translated by E. M. Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mauss, Marcel. [1934] 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2(February):70–88.
Mead, George H. 1938. Philosophy of the Act. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Morris, Gay. 2001. “Bourdieu, the Body, and Graham’s Post-War Dance.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 19:52–82.
Ness, Sally Ann Allen. 2004. “Being a Body in a Cultural Way: Understanding the Cultural in the Embodiment of Dance.” Pp. 123–44 in Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, edited by H. Thomas and J. Ahmed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Perpener, John O., III. 2001. African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press.
Stamatov, Peter. 2002. “Interpretative Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi’s Operas in the 1840s.” American Sociological Review 67:345–466.
Synott, Anthony. 1992. “Tomb, Temple, Machine and Self: The Social Construction of the Body.” British Journal of Sociology 43:79–110.
Thomas, Helen. 1995. Dance, Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of Dance. London, England: Routledge.
Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Turner, Bryan S. 1992. Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London, England: Routledge.
Turner, Victor. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.
Van Delinder, Jean. 2003. ‘Le style frigidaire’: Managerial Control Strategies and Discourses of Embodiment in Taylorism, Balanchine and the Ballet Music of Igor Stravinsky. Presented at miniconference on the Sociology of Music, August 20, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
Van Delinder, Jean. 2005a. “Time and Motion: Balanchine, Taylorism and Modern Ballet.” Studi Culturi (in Italian) 1(June):23–44.
Van Delinder, Jean. 2005b. “Taylorism, Managerial Control Strategies, and the Ballets of Balanchine and Stravinsky.” American Behavioral Scientist 48(11):1439–52.
Wainwright, Steven P. and Bryan S. Turner. 2004. “Narratives of Embodiment: Body, Aging, and Career in Royal Ballet Dancers.” Pp. 98–120 in Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, edited by H. Thomas and J. Ahmed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Weber, Max. 1958. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Translated and edited by D. Martindale, J. Riedel, and G. Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Weil, Mildred and Duncan Hartley, eds. 1975. The Sociology of the Arts. Danville, IL: Interstate.
West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Wilson, Robert N., ed. 1964. The Arts in Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Wulff, Helen. 1998. Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers. Oxford, England: Berg.
Zolberg, Vera L. 1990. Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER

Let your curiosity lead the way:

Apply Today

Arts & Sciences
Graduate Studies in A&S

Sophie Capobianco recognized at the 29th Annual Graduate Research Symposium

On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, Sophie Capobianco , graduate student in the Theater and Performance Studies Master’s Program, presented their poster "Live Stillness: Dichotomies of Indigenous Performance in James Luna’s Artifact Piece ” at the 29th Annual Graduate Research Symposium.

We are proud to announce that Sophie’s research was awarded 2nd place in the Professional Studies Division. Their research presentation examined James Luna’s 1987 performance of Artifact Piece as a challenge to dominant representations of Indigenous culture in museums and the reduction of Indigenous personhood to artifact. Sophie argues that Luna’s performance subverts expectations of authentic cultural representation and Indigeneity through the display of his body among objectified artifacts. Luna’s live performance effectively disrupts the structuring white gaze that guides curatorial practices around cultural representations of Otherness and presents new considerations for audiences in their consumption of “authentic” Indigenous culture.

Congratulations to Sophie!

Click here for more information on the 29th Annual Graduate Research Symposium.

in the news:

PAD Faculty, Alumni and Edison Theatre Colleagues Among 2024 St. Louis Theatre Circle Award Nominees and Honorees

The man and the March

In digital worlds and on physical stages, directors invite audiences into the story

Meet WashU’s new ballet master, Antonio Douthit-Boyd

ASU’s Theatre for Youth and Community Collection still in spotlight after all these years

Expanded archive remains a repository for emerging artists and educators; jan. 24 open house will offer public a rare opportunity to view items without appointment.

Woman handling collection materials in library.

ASU Performing Arts Librarian Caelin Ross unboxes part of the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection, including costume pieces by Irene Corey for “The Tempest,” in the Wurzburger Reading Room at Hayden Library in Tempe. The collection dates back to the 16th century and contains international items pertaining to the history of theater for youth and theater education. Photo by Samantha Chow/ASU

Editor’s note: This is the first of a monthly series spotlighting special collections from ASU Library’s archives throughout 2024.

As far as performing arts collections go, Arizona State University has been a star attraction for more than four decades.

Its Theatre for Youth and Community Collection is the largest, most utilized and internationally renowned youth-theater repository in the world, according to university officials.

With items dating back to the 17th century, the collection attracts scholars, playwrights, teaching artists, performers and students from far and wide to study its costumes, scripts, rare books, designs and ephemera, allowing youth and educators to take center stage and empowering them to tell their own stories.

“We often forget about the importance of theater for youth because it’s really the start of their creative engagement with the outside world,” said ASU Performing Arts Librarian Caelin Ross . “This collection is about sustaining them in a craft that is important and helping them build community, (centering) them in their own decision-making and artistic practice. The collection is important, but the engagement and the impact it can have on their lives can be invaluable.”

Ross took on curatorial responsibilities in 2023 when she relocated to Tempe from Chicago to begin the position. She continues the work of curator Katherine Krzys , who retired in 2019.

“This job is nothing I ever imagined or could have envisioned for myself,” said Ross, who is a former youth performer. “In the beginning, I did not fully understand the significance of the collection to the university or the field, but now I do. Today, I am humbled and grateful to be in this role.”

Formerly known as the Child Drama Collection , the archive has welcomed visitors to ASU since 1979 — that’s when it was established by librarian Marilyn Wurzburger , head of Special Collections, and by Lin Wright, then chair of the ASU Department of Theatre. They recommended developing a repository in response to the academic needs of youth-theater students and faculty at ASU and the research needs of professional artists and educators worldwide.

“We started the collection because a number of leaders in the field of child drama were retiring at the time and their materials were valuable to the teachers and directors,” said Wright, who has been retired from ASU for nearly a quarter-century and had her papers dedicated to the collection. “I was very active nationally at that time and thus was able to be helpful. I did see that the collection started to grow and tried to see that those in the field knew of its existence.”

Many who come to study the collection are astounded by its content and breadth, which measures approximately 3,000 linear feet. That’s about the length of eight football fields or a dozen 747 jumbo jets lined up back to back.

While it is securely housed in offsite remote storage, the collection is part of the ASU Library system and can be requested to view by appointment. Ross has plans to engage even more closely with students and community members.

“There’s this perception that archivists and librarians just want to collect things and keep them away from the public, but that’s not the case at all,” Ross said. “My job is to think about how we can foster stronger partnerships at the university and in our community to make them aware of the resources we can provide. We also want to let them know what we have, how we can help, and that we genuinely care about collaboration.”

To that end, Hayden Library on ASU’s Tempe campus will host an open house in the Wurzburger Reading Room from noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 24. Visitors will have a chance to meet Ross and view a display of the items, including educational materials and manuscripts related to the history of youth theater. For more information, visit the ASU Events website .

David Saar, an ASU graduate and past contributor to the collection, said he plans to attend.

“The collection is the most complete historical record of the development of youth theater, which has come a very long way in 50-some years,” said Saar, the founding artistic director of Childsplay Theatre , a Tempe-based acting troupe that ASU frequently collaborates with. “It is so professionally preserved and well-documented.”

That’s why he decided to donate the David, Sonja, and Benjamin Saar Yellow Boat Collection to ASU in 2000. It contains framed drawings, posters, correspondence from audience members, letters and drawings from schoolchildren, photographs, press releases and other materials documenting the writing and production of “The Yellow Boat,” a play Saar wrote for his son Benjamin, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion and died from related complications in 1987 at the age of 8.

Saar also gifted the Childsplay records to ASU. It includes 181 boxes of videotapes and DVDs from past productions, scripts, posters, workshop and planning materials, and set models. His successor, Dwayne Hartford, said he makes trips to Hayden Library when the need arises.

“I go there when I’m researching our history or when we are looking for a song in a show that was never published or maybe a lobby card we used in previous play,” said Hartford, who has been Childsplay’s artistic director since 2016, “or perhaps when there’s an anniversary or some kind of special event where we need to draw on something from the past.”

In addition to those two collections, the archive is filled with other treasures. They include such gems such as a 17th-century bound book of plays by Greek tragedian Aeschylus, a stained glass-inspired costume from the “Book of Job,” and a scrapbook of photos from the Children’s Theatre of Evanston, which shows the first national meeting of child-drama pioneers at Northwestern University in 1944. It also includes founding records from the first international association focused on theater for youth, ASSITEJ International , discovered during the Cold War in 1965.

Other highlights of the Theatre for Youth and Community include:

• Irene Corey Collection: For over a half-century Corey designed costumes, sets and makeup for theater classics, theme-park characters and television shows, most notably “Barney and Friends.” She first became nationally known for the “Book of Job” in the 1950s, which had a 22-year run throughout the world. This collection, donated in 1995, includes historical costumes, animal makeup renderings, production photographs, and her historical and cultural research files.

• Jonathan Levy Collection: Donated in 1999, it contains more than 350 books with copyrights from the 17th through 20th centuries and manuscripts chronicling Levy's academic and professional career. Before getting this archive, the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection documented the field's history only from 1900 onward. The Levy collection expanded research possibilities back to the 16th century.

• Lowell and Nancy Swortzell Theatre Arts Collection: The award-winning Swortzells, who created the Educational Theatre Program at New York University, saved every scrap of paper — every letter, photo and class note — from their careers and started donating them to the collection so that their scholarship and teaching methods could be shared by scholars. This was the largest single donation of books and manuscripts to the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection.

The collection is not an archive of the past — it is active and forward-looking. And it’s constantly being accessed by the youth-theater community, scholars and higher education students like Ali Brady.

Brady, a second-year MFA candidate in the Theatre for Youth and Community program, said the collection sparks the imagination.

“Working with the collection has allowed me to think more creatively about research methods and primary resources,” said Brady, a student worker who works directly with Ross. “There is no end to the amount that can be explored and created in this collection. As a person interested in community engagement in the arts, I am excited how the collection grows to incorporate more of that field as well as the interests that other scholars and theater enjoyers alike in our community may have.”

Mary McAvoy, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Music, Dance and Theatre , often turns to the collection for research on her books and other teaching materials.

“I use it all the time for research, but more importantly, it’s a teaching resource for our students,” said McAvoy, who is also the program director for the Theatre for Youth and Community undergraduate and graduate programs. “It’s a wonderful place for them to see what other playwrights and directors were thinking about, the memos they were sending to each other to discuss what they wanted to do and what they cared about at the time. That research can inform them in their decision-making and future development.”

And speaking of the future, Ross said upcoming collection plans include integrating collections into new theater courses focused on dramaturgy and devising. She also hopes to work with Rising Youth Theatre in Phoenix to host archival workshops with youth and provide oral history training. Future exhibitions with the collection will provide an immersive experience, integrating audio and video elements.

“I am especially interested in the potential for future collaborations with colleagues in the Community-Driven Archives Initiative to strengthen our connections with community,” Ross said. “There is so much possibility as the field continues to become rich in terms of genre — including eco theater, intergenerational work, queerness, social justice, theater for the very very young, and more. Diverse representation and inclusion are at the center of the future of this collection.

“Theater should belong to everyone.”

Monthly series spotlighting ASU Library’s special collections

January: Expanded Theatre for Youth and Community Collection remains a repository for emerging artists and educators
February: Black Collections aims to document the lives of an underrepresented Arizona community
March: Voices from Latin America can be found in dynamic research collection

More Arts, humanities and education

First ASU California Center artist-in-residence is animated to work with students

Growing up on the San Diego-Tijuana border and being a first-generation Chicano artist, Lalo Alcaraz didn’t see himself reflected in the mainstream media. So he made it his mission to promote…

Woman in a green jacket holding a black-and-white photo while smiling.

Voices from Latin America can be found in dynamic ASU research collection

Editor’s note: This is part of a monthly series spotlighting special collections from ASU Library’s archives throughout 2024. Rebellious nuns. Punk artists. Ecofeminist criticism through the lens of…

Illustrated image of a person's silhouette blending into a DNA structure

ASU professors explore impact of STEM education in US prisons

Arizona State University professors Joe Lockard and Tsafrir Mor have spent years educating inside prisons. From poetry workshops to biology, providing high-quality education for incarcerated people…

National Theatre Main Menu

Experience world-class theatre

London & On Tour

Getting here
Things to do
Lasdun Restaurant
The Understudy
Become a member
Make a donation
Corporate support
Trusts and foundations
Include a gift in your Will
American Associates of the National Theatre
Young people
Training for business
Our history
Careers, opportunities and advice

Back to all posts

Major research opportunity on evolving business models in the performing arts

Posted March 27, 2024

The National Theatre (NT) is looking for an experienced research partner to deliver a major new research piece in collaboration with the NT, and with the wider performing arts sector.

The research will look at the benefits of new approaches to traditional revenue streams, but also at other more novel revenue streams and partnerships, with the working title:

“Shining a light on evolving business models in the performing arts: how varied investments support different financial and social outcomes.”

The National Theatre will be a core case study for the research, but the research will look beyond the NT and engage with other organisations thinking innovatively in this area.

This will be the first research piece commissioned under the National Theatre’s new research strategy. Each year, we plan to commission an agenda-setting piece of research. It is intended that the research will be useful to:

The National Theatre itself, as it delivers its new Strategy and Business Plan
Policy-makers for the arts and culture
Funders of arts and culture
People working in arts and cultural organisations in the UK
Trustees and board members of arts and culture organisations.

Download the Invitation To Tender document (ITT). The deadline for tenders is 12 noon on 12 April 2024.

(Un)Making: CRS Grad Student Conference

(Un)Making : Center for Research & Study Grad Student Conference

Join us on April 5th and 6th for an exciting series of academic panels, discussions, and workshops across a variety of contemporary approaches and topics on the theme of (Un)Making . The conference will include presentations from current students and recent alumni from institutions within New York City and the surrounding areas.

We will be welcoming Mel Y. Chen as the keynote speaker.

The conference and keynote lecture event are free and open to everyone at NYU, NYU alumni, as well as all members and alumni of any NYC graduate consortiums colleges. External guests are also welcome and encouraged to RSVP.

Sponsored by the Center for Research & Study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, the graduate student conference is organized by the joint effort of students at the departments of Performance Studies, Art & Public Policy, and the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies. Together, we seek to consider the close relationship between unmaking and making, where assembly often involves destruction, and decomposition may imbricate a creative force.

The Graduate Student Conference was also made possible with support from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Dean Allyson Green, and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research.

Related Events

About Us Page

Hello! MCPA is proud to have an excellent staff, with the expertise to work with students at every level in their training.

Shannon Torres

Mrs. Torres received her early training at the Susan Ina Dance Studio. She went on to continue her training at the Baltimore School for the Arts and Towson University, where she received her B.F.A. in Dance. She spent her summers studying at the Joffrey Ballet and the Eglevsky Ballet. Mrs. Torres studied with such notables as Sylvester Campbell, Stephanie Powell, John Clifford, and Broadway star and choreographer Hinton Battle. Incredibly, she even found herself performing on the same stage with Nureyev at the BSO.

Students trained by Mrs. Torres have performed on Broadway in Cats, Chicago, Wicked, Rockettes Spectaculars, as well as in companies such as Alivin Ailey, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, ABT, Hubbard Street, and Danceworks. Many of her students have gone on to become teachers themselves.

She has been awarded for her choreography in such diverse arenas as the Youth America Grand Prix and the Jazz Dance World Congress, where in 2003 “Fragile”, her choreography from MCPA, was selected as 1 of the top 20 in the United States.

Our Instructors

Ninel cherevko.

Ninel graduated from Lvov Choreographic Institute (Ukraine) in 1991. One of her teachers was a direct student of the greatest Russian teacher, A. Vaganova. In 1988 Ninel was selected for the Ukrainian Youth Ballet competition and in 1990 to dance with Lvov Ballet Theatre. Ms. Cherevko was a soloist and principal dancer with Lvov Ballet Theatre, Donetsk Ballet Theatre, Moscow City Ballet and Ballet Theatre of Maryland.

Lindsay Curlee

Lindsay began dancing at MCPA at age 2, and is the primary instructor in the Children's program. She attended Baltimore City College as a dance education major, and graduated with a BFA in K-12 certification at the top of her class. She was an extra in the movie "Step Up", and was asked to choreograph a few barre exercises while on set. She continues her training by attending dance teacher seminars and conventions.

Danielle Homan

Danielle trained at MCPA, and attended Carver Center for the Arts as a Dance Major. She is an accomplished choreographer, presenting work at the High School Dance Festival, and receiving accolades at both the regional and national level. She attended Villa Julie college, and recently received her pre-school teaching certification.

Dmitri Malikov

Mr. Malikov graduated from Bolshoi Ballet Academy (Russia) in 1987. Mr. Malikov was a soloist and principal dancer with Donetsk Ballet Company, L'vov Ballet Theatre, Moscow City Ballet, and Ballet Theatre of MD. He has performed internationally in the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Estonia, Taiwan, Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Italy. In 1994 and 1995, Mr.Malikov appeared in the International Festival "Stars of World Ballet", and in 1995 he was promoted to Highest Category Ballet Artist.

Victoria Rucchio

Victoria began her training at the age of four at the Susan Ina Dance Studio where she studied ballet, tap, jazz, lyrical, and hip-hop. Victoria trained in the Vaganova method of ballet under Renee Rassa, Madame Marina of the Kirov Academy of Ballet, Dmitri Malikov, and Ninel Cherevko- both of Donetsk Ballet Theatre, Moscow City Ballet and Ballet Theatre of Maryland. She trained in tap, jazz and lyrical under Ashely Canterna-Hardy, Denise Ebert Rogers, Susan Ingrassia, Michelle Stafford, Karen Antosca, and Erin Vitalos-Banning; she also studied hip-hop under Kevin Clopton. Victoria is a member of Dance Educators of America and currently holds a Level 1 Advanced Teacher Certification in ballet, jazz, modern and tap. She has won numerous awards for her fast, clean footwork and high scoring dances as a both dancer and choreographer. She continues her dance education by training with Vanessa Jackson, Director of the Coppin State Dance Program and Ellen Bast at Charm City Ballet, Anthony Morigerato, Ayodele Casel, and Mike Miney thru Operation Tap.

Guest Faculty- Maeghan McHale

Maeghan McHale, named one of Dance Magazine's " Top 25 to Watch" in 2010. Maeghan is in her 11th year as a company member with Giordano Dance Chicago. Her choreography has appeared in Dance Chicago, YAGP Stars of Today meet the Stars of Tomorrow, at the Joyce Theatre in NYC, Summer Stage in NYC, and she is soon to present her work at the Bolshoi in Russia. Ms. McHale has also had the honor of being on the faculty of the USA IBC Ballet Competition in 2014 and has been a judge and instructor regionally for YAGP.

Guest Faculty- Lauren Carnesi Daniels

Lauren Carnesi Daniels graduated from the MCPA program and went on to continue her dance studies at Shenandoah University where she graduated cum laude and also was the recipient of the programs choreography award. She is a teacher and choreographer for schools throughout our area. Most recently noted, Lauren is the artistic director and choreographer for the Kinetic Canvas dance series in Harford County and most close to her heart, she is the founder, artistic director, and choreographer of InvisibleWings Dance Project, creating awareness for Lupus through dance.

The TDF Sweepstakes is open. Enter now!

Discount Ticket Programs 01
What's On Stage 02
Accessibility Services 03
School and Community Programs 04
For The Makers 05
Support TDF 06

Show Finder

Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker

First Preview: Dec 04, 2017

Opening Date: Dec 09, 2017

Closing Date: Dec 10, 2017

Running Time: 02:00

Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker

Kings Theater

1027 Flatbush Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11226

Age Guidance: 8

Show Notes: 1 Intermission

Audience Advisory:

PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY! For safety purposes, all guests entering Kings Theatre will be scanned and have their belongings searched prior to entry. Guests are encouraged to arrive one (1) hour prior to show time

Performance Schedule:

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9th @ 2 & 7 PM

TDF Tickets Offers:

TDF member tickets:

Not currently available for this show

Full-price tickets

$ 32 - $ 167

Accessibility:

Assisted Listening System

Assistive listening devices, which operate on an FM system, are available for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Please see a Guest Service Usher, Supervisor or visit the Guest Services Center upon your arrival to arrange for the use of an Assistive Listening Device. You will be required to leave valid identification such as a driver's license as collateral, which will be returned upon return of the device in the same condition. There is no charge for this service.

Directions Bus

B49 B35 B41

Directions Subway

B Train - Church Avenue, Q Train - Beverley Road, 2 & 5 Trains – Church Avenue

Elevator\Escalator

Due to the historic restoration of Kings Theatre, there are no elevators for guest use. To access the Mezzanine level, guest must utilize stairs.

Kings Theatre has one main entrance located beneath our marquee on Flatbush Avenue.

There is a large municipal parking lot located immediately behind the Kings Theatre, between Flatbush Avenue and Bedford Avenue, between Tilden and Beverley Rd. This lot is free and open to ticketholders on a first-come-first-served basis. Subject to availability.

Family restrooms off of the lobby level are ADA accessible.

None on premises

Water Fountain

Wheelchair Info

To purchase accessible seating tickets, please visit ticketmaster.com or call 800.745.3000. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us prior to purchasing at [email protected].

Public Transportation

IMAGES

EXPERIENCE AS A RESEARCH METHOD IN PERFORMING ARTS
Doctoral Programme of Artistic Research in Performing Arts
(PDF) Performing Arts Research Dissertation
Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen
Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency
Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency 2024, in Singapore

VIDEO

Oh #Sita ....
2022 TLA Book Awards
School of Creative and Performing Arts, Film and Media Studies

COMMENTS

Research
Research into the value and impact of the arts is a core function of the National Endowment for the Arts. Through accurate, relevant, and timely analyses and reports, the Arts Endowment elucidates the factors, conditions, and characteristics of the U.S. arts ecosystem and the impact of the arts on other domains of American life.
Performance practice as research, learning and teaching
This article considers how the performing arts integrate with research, learning and teaching. In doing so, it addresses the relation between research and performance practice, and the connections between research/practice with learning and teaching. Reference to A/R/Tography is made as a constructivist praxis facilitating integration of these ...
Research Methods in Theatre and Performance on JSTOR
Playwriting is countered by many approaches to scripting and devising shows. Acting is just one of myriad ways of performing. Design is extended into scenography. Audiences are transformed into spectators, witnesses, observers, voyeurs and the rest. Responding to this environment, the methods of theatre and performance studies scholars and ...
Performance Research
Researching performance, anticipating tendencies, mapping practices, documenting processes, stimulating inquiry, performing research. Since 1996 Performance Research has set a precedent that has become standard for thematic and cross-disciplinary ways of bringing together the varied materials of artistic and theoretical research in the expanded field of performance.
Performing arts as a health resource? An umbrella review of the ...
An increasing body of evidence notes the health benefits of arts engagement and participation. However, specific health effects and optimal modes and 'doses' of arts participation remain unclear, limiting evidence-based recommendations and prescriptions. The performing arts are the most popular form of arts participation, presenting substantial scope for established interest to be ...
Performing arts as a health resource? An umbrella review of the health
Performing arts participation is, broadly, a health promoting activity, with beneficial effects reported across healthy (non-clinical) children, adolescents, adults, and older adults in 17 domains (9 supported by moderate-high quality evidence). ... Further research is necessary to optimize modes and doses of performing arts participation ...
31892 PDFs
Josep-Anton Fernàndez. Dec 2023. Dominic Keown. Dec 2023. Explore the latest full-text research PDFs, articles, conference papers, preprints and more on PERFORMING ARTS. Find methods information ...
Performing arts News, Research and Analysis
63.5% of Australia's performing artists reported worsening mental health during COVID. Helen Rusak, Edith Cowan University. 92% of performing artists experienced significant changes to their ...
Performance Research
Performance Research is a specialist journal that aims to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance. Interdisciplinary in vision and international in scope, its emphasis is on contemporary performance arts within changing cultures. Performance Research was founded in 1995 by Ric Allsopp ...
Organizations on stage: organizational research and the performing arts
Management and organization scholars have long been intrigued by the performing arts—music, theater, and dance—as a rich context for studying organizational phenomena. Indeed, a plethora of studies suggest that the performing arts are more than an interesting sideline for authors, as they offer unique theoretical and empirical lenses for organization studies. However, this stream of ...
The latest research on creativity and the arts
The latest research on creativity and the arts. June 2014, Vol 45, No. 6. ... 28 adolescents who majored in acting at a performing arts high school engaged less in "expression suppression" — inhibiting their emotional expression in a way research shows is unhealthy over the long term — than 25 peers who majored in the visual arts or music ...
2024: performing-arts
Research and analysis is needed of the live performing arts sector's workforce, ecosystem and audience to identify vulnerabilities; Addressing skills gaps and recruiting a more diverse workforce are required to improve the sector's crisis response. Read the University of Bristol news item
Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL)
The Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) uses a combination of interdisciplinary experimental and computational methods to address fundamental questions about the composition, performance, and reception of music, theatre and dance, and the visual arts. We focus primarily on learning and memory, the formation of expectations, and emotion and ...
Performing Arts Alliance
The Performing Arts Alliance is the premiere advocate for America's professional nonprofit arts organizations, artists and the publics before Congress. ... Research evidence shows arts education is key to a complete education and academic success. Federal funding for arts education expands student access to the arts.
Arts
Arts is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal promoting significant research on all aspects of the visual and performing arts, published bimonthly online by MDPI.. Open Access — free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.; High Visibility: indexed within ESCI (Web of Science), and other databases.
Digital Economy and Baumol's Cost Disease of Performing Arts: An
By the end of 2021, China has 18,370 performing arts troupes and 3,093 performing arts venues. The research conclusions of this paper include the following four points: (1) Digital live-streaming theater(DLT) is an "innovation" for traditional Stage Theater(ST) performance, and its changes in creation mechanism, audience-actors relationship ...
Performing Arts Research Paper
Current research in the sociology of the performing arts provides a systematic way to study the performing arts as a social process wedding art, culture, emotion, and the body as part of the systematic study of society. Empirical studies focusing on the social context of art forms focus on the different aspects of either production or ...
Sophie Capobianco recognized at the 29th Annual Graduate Research
On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, Sophie Capobianco, graduate student in the Theater and Performance Studies Master's Program, presented their poster "Live Stillness: Dichotomies of Indigenous Performance in James Luna's Artifact Piece" at the 29th Annual Graduate Research Symposium. We are proud to announce that Sophie's research was awarded 2nd place in the Professional Studies Division.
ASU's Theatre for Youth and Community Collection still in spotlight
Editor's note: This is the first of a monthly series spotlighting special collections from ASU Library's archives throughout 2024. As far as performing arts collections go, Arizona State University has been a star attraction for more than four decades. Its Theatre for Youth and Community Collection is the largest, most utilized and internationally renowned youth-theater repository in the ...
Major research opportunity on evolving business models in the
The National Theatre (NT) is looking for an experienced research partner to deliver a major new research piece in collaboration with the NT, and with the wider performing arts sector. The research will look at the benefits of new approaches to traditional revenue streams, but also at other more novel revenue streams and partnerships, with the ...
Students present research on therapeutic alliances, neurodivergent
George Mason University student researchers were among those that gathered on the Fairfax Campus in March for the Access to Research and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) National Conference. In addition to speakers and breakout sessions on various topics, the two-day conference opened with a poster session with 49 groups presenting their research.
(Un)Making: CRS Grad Student Conference
(Un)Making: Center for Research & Study Grad Student Conference. Join us on April 5th and 6th for an exciting series of academic panels, discussions, and workshops across a variety of contemporary approaches and topics on the theme of (Un)Making.The conference will include presentations from current students and recent alumni from institutions within New York City and the surrounding areas.
Music, cinema and more: how the city helps creative industries
Research for such areas as design, advertising, publishing, art, performing arts and music will be completed in the first half of 2022. They allow to assess the market size of a particular industry, the main players, existing business models, the number of employees involved, as well as identify promising niches for the business organization ...
Institute of Culture and Arts
Institute of Culture and Arts. The Institute of Culture and Arts is the creative heart of Moscow City University. The staff mostly consists of Professors with PhD and Dr. degrees. The teaching and learning process of Bachelor's, Master's and PhD programmes is organized on the basis of credit and modular system.
About Us
She went on to continue her training at the Baltimore School for the Arts and Towson University, where she received her B.F.A. in Dance. She spent her summers studying at the Joffrey Ballet and the Eglevsky Ballet. ... Mid-Atlantic Center for the Performing Arts 5543 Harford Road, Baltimore, MD 21214 Get Directions. Phone: (443) 438-4525 ...
Happenings for April
UCLA PRESENTS THE BEST in arts and culture, community events, sports and entertainment. From film screenings to art exhibits, explore the unique and interesting experiences April offers. For more UCLA events, visit community.ucla.edu.
Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker
Making the 25th North American Anniversary Tour in 2017, Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker features over-the-top production values and world class Russian artists. Larger than life puppets and nesting dolls, and gloriously hand-crafted costumes bring the Christmas spirit of life. Gather the family and make memories of a lifetime at Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker