| Summary: | Following trends of "local revitalization" policies, arts administration teams from modern metropolitan areas have increasingly entered local communities by means of government subsidies, instigating various levels of disturbance and intervention within local communities and even attempting to reshape the temple-centric culture of religious fields--as can be seen in the "Daxi daxi" local revitalization project (2018--2022). This paper examines a representative case of modern theatre creators and visual arts curatorial units within cultural fields, and illustrates how "intellectual elites" utilize their familiarity with artistic production regulations to reconstruct local cultures and their own aesthetic discourses. Simultaneously, professional troupe artists situated within economic and religious fields--upon which their livelihoods depend--face shifts in metropolitan lifestyle habits (such as new regulations on noise control) and changes in social media entertainments. Therefore, they must continuously adapt the contents of their ways of doing improvisational "living plays" (huoxi) and their troupes' management styles, striving to transcend and negotiate various habitual challenges present in both cultural and religious fields. By employing their respective field-specific regulations in arts production, both the intellectual elites of modern theatre and professional troupe artists have unsettled traditional aesthetic perceptions. Through substantial and bold expressions of subjective reality, they manifest the individualized dimensions of religion. The ritual materiality and symbolic metaphors which saturate popular religious practices appear to offer performers and cultural elites who intervene in the religious arena a meaningful space for exploring new forms of identity.
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