Scholars have long overlooked entrepreneurship in the performing arts. The difficulty of making firms operating in these contexts economically self-sufficient and the consequent dependence on public funding have long diverted the attention of scholars from this topic. Only recently, especially thanks to the advancements in theory on entrepreneurship, the phenomenon has begun to be examined in these contexts. This paper, which is mainly based on literature on entrepreneurship and on nascent literature focused on arts entrepreneurship, aims at exploring the entrepreneurial phenomenon with reference to a specific art: the theatre. It is focused on a firm operating in Italy, whose institutional system is characterized to be of particular, although decreasing, support for firms operating in cultural industries. The case study identifies the dimensions of entrepreneurship, declined considering the specificity of the activity and the context in which the firm operates.

Arts entrepreneurship is not a new area of investigation, but it is far from constituting a consolidated topic. Scholars coming from several fields rediscovered it only in recent years, after a period in which it has been slow to emerge. Since the early 2000s, they developed a heterogeneous literature, which is difficult to disentangle. The purpose of this study is to shed light on arts entrepreneurship literature, outlining the most significant issues emerged and their trajectories for future development. We attempted to achieve the purpose of this chapter through a qualitative analysis of the relevant literature on the topic. Results revealed the most relevant issues to which scholars are devoting their efforts. With respect to these, we tried to identify subthemes and we attempted to trace the trajectories for future research. The first main theme concerns the entrepreneur in the arts, focusing on aspects such as identity and characteristics, and examining training and entrepreneurial education. Another theme regards entrepreneurship and training, which is attracting increasing attention, thanks also to the emergence of specific curricula and arts incubators. Besides these themes, other collateral issues emerged. Ultimately, literature is complex and multifaceted, but it is possible to read it with greater clarity.

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