The 21st century is referred to as 'the century of culture'. As the people's needs for cultural life increases, the demand for cultural space has been increasing continuously. In accordance with the launch of the autonomous local governing system in ...
The 21st century is referred to as 'the century of culture'. As the people's needs for cultural life increases, the demand for cultural space has been increasing continuously. In accordance with the launch of the autonomous local governing system in 1995, each of the municipalities have carried forward a campaign to 'build one Cultural Center for each city, county and district', and began to focus on improving cultural infrastructure to strengthen competitiveness of local district. Since 2000, autonomous regions, including Seoul, have been pushing ahead with construction of theater for the exclusive use as the cultural arts center and building more cultural infrastructure. As a result of these efforts, a series of local government-established public theaters were opened.
In this paper, through the case studies on Goyang Aram Nuri, Seongnam Arts Center, Chung Mu Art Hall in Jung-gu, Seoul, we derived an initial operational model for local government-established public theaters. For these analysis, we looked at previous studies on the history and nature of theaters, the concepts and form of operations of the public theaters founded by local governments. Through these studies, we were able to come up with a framework of the case study and accordingly, conducted research on Goyang Aram Nuri, in Goyang-si, Seongnam Arts Center in Seongnam-si, and, Chung Mu Art Hall in Jung-gu, Seoul. We analyzed operational performance of each theater including their operational status, concert business, the exhibition business, local cultural projects and customer services, requested data from the practitioners of each theater, and also interviewed experts when it was deemed to be necessary. For the establishment and initial operation of the public theaters, it is necessary to have a practical and reasonable model including aspects such as facilities, form of operation and the contents. First, an infrastructure as a cultural complex should be secured. The public theater should not only be equipped with the infrastructure for performances of various sizes and genres, but should also be equipped with facilities to meet diverse cultural needs of the local people, such as museum of art, convention centers, labs and training facilities. This can be commenced by setting a clear operating goals from the planning and preparing stage of building performing arts centers through consulting with experts. Second, specialization in the theater operation and its personnel management is required. Seongnam Cultural Foundation, Goyang Cultural Foundation and Jung-gu Cultural Foundation, all three of them have adopted a model to establish a separate foundation entity and to operate them independently. Having professional staff who can take advantage of the accumulated know-how and networks of the organization members is an essential factor for the specialization of theater operations. The public theaters should ensure working environment that enables all organization members to get a sense of ownership by hiring industry professionals from the public while forming an organization, building a transparent and systematic personnel system and by building a slimmer decision-making structure. Third, the public theaters should have a specific operating strategy for the contents and develop their own contents and festivals. As seen in the case of Chung Mu Art Hall, focusing on operating as a musical theater since its opening in 2005, it was able to achieve almost 100% utilization rate and high public awareness within a short period of time. High-quality contents contribute to attracting audiences in the early stages and continuous expansion of the theater throughout its operation. Therefore, in order to improve brand value of the theaters, providing customers with high-quality contents should take precedence over the promotion and marketing efforts. Since it could reach levels of active cooperation with local governments with regard to theater infrastructure, stable production budget, the public theater has the ability to create its own contents. Public theaters should take advantage of this fact and develop new contents which can be deemed as the region's cultural brand, and cultural festival programs which can be linked to regional tourism business. These efforts in fact, can also contribute to regional economic development, strengthening of the regional brand values, as well as arousing a sense of pride for the local people. Fourth, it should encourage local people's cultural enjoyment which is the basic goal of the public theater, by promoting resident-friendly cultural projects and introducing invitation and discount services for the residents. Fifth, the public theater should build up structured customer relationship management system by implementing membership services and its own ticket reservation system, and should also provide improved services for its primary customers such as the producers, directors and artists.
In this paper, in order to proceed with the study on the establishment of a public theatre and its operation model in the early stage, we focused on cases of Seongnam Arts Center, Goyang Aram Nuri, Chung Mu Art Hall, and analyzed their quantitative operating performance (operation rate, attendance, etc.) accumulated within the last five years. In this regard, the analysis in this paper is focused mainly on the information related to these case studies, and therefore, has a limitation that it was unable to cover a thorough analysis on substantial level of satisfaction of primary customers such as producers, actors, staffs and secondary customers such as concert audiences, exhibition visitors, including students of the arts academy, through customer surveys.