The Audience Experience

Katya Johanson, Hilary Glow, Jennifer Radbourne

Description

The Audience Experience identifies a momentous change in what it means to be part of an audience for a live arts performance. Together, new communication technologies and new kinds of audiences have transformed the expectations of performance, and The Audience Experience explores key trends in the contemporary presentation of performing arts. The book also presents case studies of audience engagement and methodology, reviewing both conventional and innovative ways of collecting and using audience feedback data. Directed to performing arts companies, sponsors, stakeholders and scholars, this collection of essays moves beyond the conventional arts marketing paradigm to offer new knowledge about how audiences experience the performing arts.

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• Internet
• General
• Engineering
• Technology
• General officer
• Sciences et techniques
• Performing Arts
• Power Resources
• Digital Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 11 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841507781
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Melanie Marshall
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-84150-713-2
EISBN: 978-1-84150-778-1
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction
Chapter 1 Knowing and Measuring the Audience Experience
Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson
Chapter 2 ‘Live at a Cinema Near You’: How Audiences Respond to Digital Streaming of the Arts
Martin Barker
Chapter 3 Challenging Cultural Authority: A Case Study in Participative Audience Engagement
Hilary Glow
Chapter 4 All the World’s a Stage: Venues and Settings, and Their Role in Shaping Patterns of Arts Participation
Alan Brown
Chapter 5 In the Context of Their Lives: How Audience Members Make Sense of Performing Arts Experiences
Lois Foreman-Wernet and Brenda Dervin
Chapter 6 Amateurs as Audiences: Reciprocal Relationships between Playing and Listening to Music
Stephanie E. Pitts
Chapter 7The Longer Experience: Theatre for Young Audiences and Enhancing Engagement
Matthew Reason
Chapter 8Innovative Methods of Inquiry into Arts Engagement
Lisa Baxter, Daragh O’Reilly and Elizabeth Carnegie
Chapter 9Structure and Aesthetics in Audience Responses to Dance
Kim Vincs
Chapter 10Converging with Audiences
Jennifer Radbourne
Chapter 11Listening to the Audience: Methods for a New Era of Audience Research
Katya Johanson
Index
Acknowledgements
This book represents the thinking of an international community of scholars with a passion for new research on new performing arts audiences, and we are grateful to the authors for their participation in this initiative. The editing of this collection would not have been possible without the support of the Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention at Deakin University and Arts Victoria. Thanks in particular to Judy Morton for her ongoing participation and enthusiasm for the research project. We also express our gratitude to research assistants Emma Price and Janet Armstrong. Thanks also to Melanie Marshall at Intellect and Kevin Radbourne for being a generous host.
Contributors
Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. For the last three years he has been working on the growing phenomenon of streamed live performances into cinemas, including providing a report on audience responses to Picturehouse Cinemas, London.
Lisa Baxter is a UK-based qualitative researcher, brand strategist, ideas consultant and trainer. Her company, The Experience Business, is a strategic insight consultancy that helps arts and cultural organizations meet the needs of 21st century audiences through Strategic Value Creation.
Alan Brown , principal of WolfBrown USA, is a leading researcher and management consultant in the arts and culture sector worldwide. His work focuses on understanding consumer demand for cultural experiences and on helping cultural institutions, foundations and agencies to see new opportunities, make informed decisions and respond to changing conditions.
Elizabeth Carnegie is Programme Director for Creative and Cultural Industries Management at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interrogates the role of museums and World Heritage Sites in representing and reflecting cultures and communities.
Brenda Dervin is Professor of Communication and Joan N. Huber Fellow in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ohio State University, USA. She is most widely known for the 35-year development of her Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) designed to study and research audiences in audience-oriented communicative ways and for designing system interfaces that respond better to audiences and users.
Lois Foreman-Wernet is Associate Professor of Communication at Capital University, Columbus, USA. Her research interests focus on audience-centred approaches to institutional communication, with a particular emphasis on the use of Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology in the study of arts and cultural audiences.
Hilary Glow is Associate Professor and Director of the Arts and Entertainment Management Programme at Deakin University, Australia. Her research addresses arts participation and the management and policy settings that frame the operations and sustainability of cultural organizations.
Katya Johanson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Her research focuses on cultural policy at a federal, state and local level, and particularly on policies that aim to increase public participation in the arts.
Daragh O’Reilly is a Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Sheffield, UK. His primary interest is in the relationships between markets, consumption and culture. This translates into ongoing work in the areas of arts marketing and consumption, the creative imagination, popular music and cultural branding.
Stephanie Pitts is a Reader in Music at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her publications include Valuing Musical Participation (Ashgate, 2005) and the recently completed project on musical life histories, Chances and Choices: Exploring the Impact of Music Education (OUP, 2012).
Jennifer Radbourne is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Australia. Her research and consultancy in arts marketing, arts governance and business development in the creative industries has been published in international journals, books and conference proceedings.
Matthew Reason is Reader in Theatre and Head of Programme for MA Studies in Creative Practice at York St John University, UK. His work explores themes relating to performance documentation, reflective practice, audience research, theatre for young audiences, live art and contemporary performance and cultural policy.
Kim Vincs is Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia, where she is also the is the Director of the Deakin Motion.Lab, Deakin University’s motion capture studio and research centre. She is a choreographer, researcher and interactive dance artist who develops new ways of investigating and creating dance using digital technology.
Introduction
Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson
What I love about audiences in the theatre is that collective surge that can sometimes happen. It’s not always palpable but there’s a sense of everyone moving forward, or of relief, or maybe of being uncomfortable, or feeling the person next to you, reacting. It’s a reflection of the emotional character of what’s going on.
(KAGE Focus Group 2011)
Audiences describe their experience at performances in emotional terms. The above quotation and other similar insights from researchers’ conversations with audience members at performances reflect the phenomenon that has shaped the research in this book. The audience and performer crave a connectedness so that creativity is shared. Each audience member attributes the experience with a measure of quality that is entirely personal, based on their own intrinsic needs and their quest for authenticity and spiritual value.
It is this experience that forms the basis of this book as we profile values, benefits, definitions and the means of capturing the dimensions of the experience. For many audience members, the experience is unexpected and uninhibited:
Somehow when you’re in the theatre with the cast and in the moment, you’re part of it, you’re involved and you’re emotionally engaged.
(Victorian Opera Focus Group 2011)
For others, it represents a need to self-actualize through the arts experience. But all audiences can describe in quite powerful ways the impact of a ‘flow’ moment, or a long and compelling engagement with an artist or an arts company. For example:
When you go to a live performance, it’s happening, it’s in the zone, it’s transcendent. You feel like you’re a part of something special: you’ve actually been present, you’ve borne witness to something.
(Australian Art Orchestra Focus Group 2011)
While audiences are becoming increasingly articulate about what happens to them in the theatre, arts organizations can struggle to identify ways of enhancing this experience. This should come as no surprise in a sector where many of the practitioners have trouble articulating what audiences get out of the experience of attending their work. In the course of conducting research into a number of performing arts companies, we found that while many artistic directors and general managers could discuss their audiences’ demographic – the gender, age, postcode, and other subscriber habits – they knew strangely little about what audiences were getting out of the experience. So, despite the great investment of the last twenty years in developing strategic marketing knowhow, we do not know enough about – and do not know how to describe – the benefits that audiences derive from arts experiences. As Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak point out: ‘Many who work in the arts, including those of us who do so because of our belief in the transformative power of art, lack a vernacular for communicating its impacts’ (Brown & Novak 2007: 5).
This book proposes that it is time for a new kind of audience research which addresses the question: what are audiences thinking, feeling and doing as a product of their enga