Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts

A Critical Analysis

verfasst von: Ben Walmsley

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : New Directions in Cultural Policy Research

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book explores the concept of audience engagement from a number of complementary perspectives, including cultural value, arts marketing, co-creation and digital engagement. It offers a critical review of the existing literature on audience research and engagement, and provides an overview of established and emerging methodologies deployed to undertake research with audiences. The book focusses on the performing arts, but draws from a rich diversity of academic fields to make the case for a radically interdisciplinary approach to audience research.

The book’s underlying thesis is that at the heart of audience research there is a mutual exchange of value wherein audiences ideally play the role of strategic partners in the mission fulfilment of arts organisations. Illustrating how audiences have traditionally been side-lined, homogenised and vilified, it contends that the future paradigm of audience studies should be based on an engagement model, wherein audiences take their rightful place as subjects rather than objects of empirical research.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

This chapter constitutes a plea for audiences. It argues that performing arts audiences have been consistently sidelined, homogenised, and disempowered over the past 150 years and that this has had a negative impact on the field of audience studies. The chapter advocates for an engagement-based approach to audience research, which places audiences at the heart of empirical enquiries into the complex multi-sensory experiences that they have before, during and after their performing arts encounters. It also explores the terminology surrounding audience research and illustrates how some of the key terms used to describe audiences are both unhelpful and reductive. The chapter explores the key challenges facing audience research and outlines the aims and scope of the book, highlighting its underlying philosophy of audience centricity.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 2. Understanding Audiences: A Critical Review of Audience Research

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical overview of the existing literature on audience research and audience engagement. It surveys the seminal contributions to the rapidly emerging field of audience studies and classifies its recurrent themes into the following categories: the pacification of audiences; power, elitism and class; cultural policy, participation and co-creation; immersive performance; performance venues, spaces and places; performance as ritual; reception theory and semiotics; research methodologies; the audience experience; value and impact research; young audiences; arts marketing and management; audience engagement and enrichment. The aim of this taxonomy is to inform a new paradigm for audience studies in the context of the performing arts.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 3. Deconstructing Audiences’ Experiences

Abstract

This chapter grapples with some of the most fundamental questions of audiencing: What is going on when audiences engage or are engaged with performance? How important is the live element of audiences’ experiences? What kinds of experiences do audiences have when they engage with the performing arts? Which elements and phenomena characterise and differentiate these experiences from other kinds of experiences? Can audiences’ experiences be truly restorative or even transformative? The chapter offers a theoretical discussion of the nature of performing arts experiences before moving on to explore the relative agency that audiences have in engaging with performance. It then explores the phenomenology of audiency, including the roles that empathy, immersion, arousal, catharsis, intersubjectivity, and embodied and enactive spectatorship play in shaping audiences’ experiences.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 4. Capturing, Interpreting, and Evaluating Cultural Value

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical summary of the existing debates about cultural value and critically explores the diverse and contested notions of value that are relevant to the performing arts. It achieves this by interrogating a series of core questions: What do we know about cultural value and what is the purpose of asking questions about it? Who wants to know what about cultural value? Why and how do they want to know? In what sense are experiences of the performing arts significant to audiences? What are the most effective ways to evaluate these experiences? What are the implications of this for arts organisations and for cultural policy? In response to these questions, the chapter contends that only interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival approaches will ever be nuanced enough to capture the multidimensional value of audiences’ experiences.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 5. Researching (with) Audiences

Abstract

Audience research must strive to capture, illustrate, and interpret the value and impact of audiences’ experiences of the arts from a diverse range of disciplines, including positivist techniques that are primarily geared towards the statistical analysis of audiences’ behaviours and experiences as well as those whose objectives are more anthropological and interpretivist. This chapter provides a critical overview of the most common quantitative, qualitative, and bioscientific audience research methods and illustrates how these different methods can be fruitfully combined and even systematically triangulated to provide a multi-perspectival approach to audience research.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 6. From Consumption to Enrichment: The Long Slow Death of Arts Marketing

Abstract

This chapter presents a critical analysis of the main questions and issues regarding the marketing of the performing arts to audiences. It advocates for a fundamental reconfiguration of the arts marketing concept in order to reflect the conceptual evolution of the field towards notions and processes of audience engagement and enrichment. The underlying thesis behind this chapter is that it is time to reassert the primal role that arts and humanities research can play in tailoring arts marketing back to its creative and not-for-profit origins. The chapter therefore exposes the limitations of the traditional marketing mix for contemporary philosophies, modes, and techniques of audience engagement, and suggests an alternative, audience-centred paradigm fit for contemporary arts marketing scholarship and for twenty-first-century performing arts organisations.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 7. Co-creating Art, Meaning, and Value

Abstract

Co-creative activities have now become an integral part of artistic experiences, as audience engage and are engaged in cognitive, emotional, and imaginal practices to appropriate and make sense of cultural products and experiences. This chapter investigates why and how audience expectations and behaviours are changing, and explores emerging theories, concepts and practices of co-creation, including active spectatorship, co-production, participation, play, interpretation, and facilitation. The chapter reviews the drivers behind co-creation and argues that artists and arts organisations have a strategic, artistic and social responsibility to develop their audiences’ co-creative skills. It investigates how co-creation can be used to generate and extract meaning in a collaborative way, and illustrates how this collaboration can have a positive impact on audience engagement.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 8. Engaging Audiences Through Digital Technologies

Abstract

This chapter investigates how digital communications technologies are starting to transform philosophies and processes of audience engagement. It situates practices of digital engagement within the wider phenomena of participatory culture and social production, and acknowledges the implications of mass online migration for artists, producers, arts marketers, and policymakers. The chapter explores the relative utility of digital platforms in supporting audience development initiatives, elongating the audience experience, and realising the core marketing objective of fostering two-way communication with audiences. In order to illustrate how theories pertaining to digital engagement play out in practice, the chapter presents four case studies: National Theatre of Scotland’s 5-Minute Theatre, Bristol’s Watershed, Brooklyn Museum, and Yorkshire Dance’s Respond project.

Ben Walmsley

Chapter 9. Conclusions and Implications

Abstract

This chapter draws out the key findings and conclusions from the book and explores their implications for the evolving field of audience studies, and, most significantly, for the future of audience research in the performing arts. It hones in on the phenomenon of engagement and outlines how this core concept might be fruitfully reconceptualised to move the field and the performing arts sector forwards. The chapter considers the implications of the book’s findings for external stakeholders, including arts and cultural organisations, artists and arts professionals, and policymakers. It makes the case for audience-centric organisations fuelled by mutually beneficial relationships of artistic exchange. Finally, the chapter offers some overall conclusions and speculates about the likely direction of future research in the field.

Ben Walmsley

Backmatter

Titel: Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts
verfasst von: Ben Walmsley
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-26653-0
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26652-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26653-0