Unique Henan – land of dramas as a theatrical theme park: artistic creation, audience reception, and the tensions of cross-cultural dissemination

Abstract

Over the past decade, immersive cultural tourism has expanded rapidly in China, giving rise to large-scale projects that integrate performance, spatial design, and cultural narration. Unique Henan – Land of Dramas, widely described as China’s first panoramic immersive theatrical theme park of this scale, reconstructs regional history and cultural memory through 21 purpose-built theatres with diverse narrative forms and spatial configurations. Owing to its scale, organisational structure, and emphasis on holistic immersion, the project provides a significant case for examining how immersive cultural tourism constructs and disseminates local cultural meanings.

Taking Unique Henan as its core case, this thesis investigates how immersive cultural tourism projects construct, negotiate, and circulate local cultural meanings across production, reception, and dissemination contexts. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the study approaches immersive experience as a mediating framework that links creative production, audience interpretation, and broader communicative positioning. Accordingly, the analysis is structured around three interconnected dimensions: artistic creation and spatial narration, audience experience and meaning-making, and cross-cultural dissemination tensions.

At the level of artistic creation, the study examines how the creative team led by Wang Chaoge selects, reorganises, and symbolically encodes elements of Henan’s regional history and cultural memory through spatial design, dramaturgical structure, and emotional pacing. Building on field observation and analysis of creative discourse, the research develops Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia by proposing the notion of local cultural heterotopia. This concept is used to explain how immersive theatrical space functions as a culturally constructed environment in which local culture is extracted from everyday context and reorganised into a perceptible, affective, and memorable symbolic field.

At the level of audience experience, the study explores how audiences with different cultural backgrounds, motivations, and positionalities interpret these encoded meanings and generate differentiated emotional and cognitive responses. Based on field observation and in-depth interviews with a focused sample of 30 audience members, the analysis adopts a reflexive thematic approach to trace experiential pathways and meaning negotiation processes. Edward Relph’s theory of sense of place informs the examination of how immersive participation facilitates varying degrees of cultural recognition, emotional attachment, and place-based identification, highlighting the non-uniform and negotiated nature of immersive reception.

At the level of cultural dissemination, the study examines the potential constraints and structural tensions that highly localised immersive theatrical theme parks may encounter when positioned for cross-cultural dissemination. Rather than relying on extensive international audience feedback, this analysis adopts an inferential approach grounded in creative mechanisms, domestic reception patterns, and global cultural tourism contexts. The Universal Theme Park Adaptation Model (UTPAM), developed in this study and derived from comparative analysis of global theme park practices, is introduced as a heuristic diagnostic framework to identify potential points of friction in narrative universality, emotional accessibility, IP extensibility, and cultural adaptation. The findings suggest that while Unique Henan demonstrates strong cultural depth and resonance within its local context, its high-context expressive strategies may pose tensions to accessibility and comprehension when considered in broader or cross-cultural contexts.

Overall, by integrating perspectives on artistic creation, audience reception, and dissemination logic, this study reflects on how immersive cultural tourism organises the circulation of cultural meaning from local encoding to audience decoding and assesses potential pathways for cross-cultural transmission. It contributes a holistic analytical framework for understanding immersive cultural projects rooted in local culture, while also highlighting the opportunities and limitations of immersion as a mechanism for cultural dissemination in globalised contexts.

Date of Award	15 Nov 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Derek Irwin (Supervisor), Filippo Gilardi (Supervisor) & Bjarke Liboriussen (Supervisor)