Impacting Theatre Audiences

Methods for Studying Change

Dani Snyder-Young, Matt Omasta, Dani Snyder-Young, Matt Omasta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000545913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Storytelling

This edited collection explores methods for conducting critical empirical research examining the potential impacts of theatrical events on audience members.

Dani Snyder-Young and Matt Omasta present an overview of the burgeoning subfield of audience studies in theatre and performance studies, followed by an introduction to the wide range of ways scholars can study the experiences of spectators. Consisting of chapter-length case studies, the book addresses methodologies for examining spectatorship, including qualitative, quantitative, historical/historiographic, arts-based, participatory, and mixed methods approaches.

This volume will be of great interest to theatre and performance studies scholars as well as industry professionals working in marketing, audience development, and community engagement.

1 Contemporary spectatorship research

Dani Snyder-Young and Matt Omasta

DOI: 10.4324/9781032214146-1

In a 40-seat thrust theatre on the third floor of a church in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago, an audience dominated by Latinx theatre patrons of all ages sits still and quiet in their seats through a preview performance of Caridad Svich’s De Troya at Halcyon Theatre. They laugh loudly at a spit take over a mouthful of soup. They lean in and cover their mouths at a staged moment of attempted sexual assault. When a charismatic actor performs a poetic ritual communing with a projected representation of a river, some audience members lean in, drawn to the heightened theatricality, while others sit back in their seats with eyes glazed over, checked out of the moment of abstraction. A white man in his fifties yawns in the back row.

If as Peter Brook has famously said, “The relationship between the actor and the audience is the only theatre reality” (Croyden 2009, 28), the intellectual, affective, and social experiences of audience members are integral components of theatrical events. Freshwater (2009) points out, however, that “engagement with ‘ordinary’ members of the audience is notably absent from theatre studies” (29).

Exploring how performances impact audiences is messy and multifaceted. Rancière’s (2009) work on emancipated spectatorship highlights the value-laden nature of interpretation. He writes of how we cannot be in each other’s heads, and because each individual filters signs and symbols and actions and stories through their own experience, we spend our entire lives trying to bridge gaps between each other’s understandings. “Distance is not an evil to be abolished, but the normal condition of any communication” (10), he posits. Rancière articulates how the spectator “observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of places” (13). Spectators “develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make it their own story” (22). Theatrical spectating is as active as acting in co-creating meaning.

The individualized and internalized nature of spectating makes it difficult – but not impossible – to study performances’ possible impacts on audiences. The fields of media and cultural studies have rich traditions of empirical audience research, but, as Sedgman (2016) notes, such research has been slow to take root in theatre and performance studies. Audience research in the theatre remains stubbornly linked, in many minds, to market research, surveys focused primarily on counting demographic attendance patterns, and research rooted in what Belfiore and Bennett (2008) call an “advocacy agenda.” Such research is designed to produce results that can be used for marketing or advocacy, without attempting to understand the complexity of audience members’ experiences participating in performance events.

A growing community of scholars are finding ways to study the nuance, complexity, and polyvocality of audience experiences. Reinelt et al. (2014) identify a conspicuous gap in theatre and performance studies’ methodological training in the social science techniques needed to carry out participant-based research on spectators’ experiences (338). They argue for a combination of empirical and politically engaged scholarship to achieve robust analysis of the impacts of performances on real audience members. At the Emerging Emancipation Symposium hosted by the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research at the University of Toronto, Freeman (2019) recognized that we are highly engaged with questions of how to do this, working out the methodologies, epistemologies, and ethical practices needed for such study. This book looks to fill that gap, offering a wide range of research methodologies scholars can use to study the ways performances impact audience members.

Theatre and change

Many artists want to use theatre to make change. Woodson and Underiner (2018) propose that “change, as an object of inquiry in our particular fields [of theatre and performance studies], is an under-interrogated category – even as it over-determines theatre as an artistic, social, educational, and material practice” (2). They critique how followers of Brecht and Boal have expanded their techniques but “have not necessarily tracked the actual effects of these kinds of performance events” (3).

Theatrical events can impact spectators in many ways; this collection describes many projects aiming to provoke personal transformation via affective experience, sharpened political analysis via critical engagement, and enhanced community cohesion via shared social experience. As artists create work with such goals, it is essential to study their real material impacts on their actual audience members. Artists’ intentions do not always lead directly to desired impacts on participants in performance events (Omasta 2011). Rancière theorizes, “There is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact of understanding the state of the world; no direct road from intellectual awareness to political action” (75). Other projects described in this collection have goals primarily oriented toward entertainment. These may provoke changes in audience members that performance creators did not anticipate. For this reason, we examine a wide range of theatrical events with a wide range of goals, examining evidence of change and the absence of evidence of change. After all, evidence of change cannot always be found.

Given the complex nature of reception, well-intentioned artistic choices can sometimes have negative, unintended effects. Freebody and Finneran (2016):

provide a vital counter-narrative to the received idea that simply by intending to do “good,” drama work will therefore automatically, always do “good.” Besides, with the complexities that exist between practice, context and intention – maybe good isn’t good enough anymore.

(184)

Reflexively examining the intended – and unintended – impacts of artistic work is essential for ethical praxis. As artists we must hold ourselves accountable for the impacts of our performances and allow audience responses to change us.

We use the language of impact in full recognition of its neoliberal, quasi-positivist implications. In the context of higher education in the UK, academics are required to demonstrate the “wider impact” of research projects on “the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (Higher Education Funding Council for England 2011, 26). In artistic contexts in many countries, demands for impact evaluation/assessment similarly require artists to demonstrate the value of our work on instrumental terms. Many artists and scholars are deeply skeptical of this turn, and with good reason. Most theatre work is funded in part through grants supporting specific projects or broad institutional initiatives; either way, funders require artists to provide evidence that their money has been well spent. As Feiner (2016) highlights, within this paradigm, “grant evaluation replaces true critique and reflection” and deliverability displaces accountability.

We believe audience-centered research can help displace the efficacy model by breaking down false divisions between “impact” and “affect,” examining the multifaceted effects aspects of performance – including pleasure, fun, and beauty – have on audiences. As Snyder-Young (2013) writes elsewhere, efficacy and affect are not opposites; “in many contexts, the ‘unarticulated’ byproducts of participation in theatrical events are actually the very things meeting a project’s interventionist goals” (7–8). Because many artists and scholars are under such pressure to articulate the impacts of theatrical work, it is essential to utilize appropriate methodological tools to examine (and language to discuss) what these ephemeral and integral aspects of performance do to audience members by finding ways to access evidence of what audience members do with them.

Muñoz (1996) critiques demands for “proof” as performances of power that maintain the status of those who do such calling. He argues that “rigor is owned, made, and deployed through institutional ideology” (7), and we recognize the power dynamics at play as we look to re-direct demands for impact evaluation. We advocate for critical empirical audience research that gives weight to diverse forms of evidence and ways of knowing, making “traces” and “glimmers” of affect legible evidence of social worlds. As Muñoz highlights, bricolage, performed, and thickly presented “anecdotal and ephemeral evidence grants entrance and access to those who have been locked out of official histories and, for that matter, ‘material reality’” (11). This ethos pervades many approaches to empirical audience research that authors describe throughout this collection.

Scholars have responded to recent demands requiring measurement of instrumental qualities of art by identifying and measuring the intrinsic impacts of the arts. Recent works including Brown and Novak’s (2007) Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of a Live Performance, Lord’s (2012) Counting New Beans, and Rad-bourne, Glow, and Johanson’s (2013) The Audience Experience use empirical methods to capture and communicate these intrinsic qualities. These studies frequently take for granted “the intrinsic value of cultural engagement” (Rad-bourne, Glow, and Johanson, xiv). We caution against the assumption that all arts experiences automatically add positive value to the lives of their spectators and advocate instead for scholars and artists to look critically at potentially adverse impacts alongside the positive.

Significant developments in spectatorship studies

“What do audiences experience?” is an old question. Plato and Aristotle developed theories about audience reception in the fourth century BCE, and in 1925 Zagorski asked, “Who experiences what in a theatrical performance, and why?” (Sauter 1988, 5). The question remains valid. The last decade has seen an increased interest in audience research, as a rich field of scholars has begun to directly examine the experiences of real spectators. Prior to this turn, reception research in theatre and performance studies tended to rely on published and archived reviews, personal responses of individual critic/scholars, and analysis of the ways in which performance texts invite audience responses.

The fields of media and cultural studies have long traditions of audience research. Reception studies in these fields began to incorporate audience ethnography (or qualitative reception studies) beginning in the 1980s (Alasuutari 1999). Common methods included showing audiences media products (e.g., television programs) and conducting in-depth interviews with viewers. Audience ethnography frequently focused on media in social contexts, investigating, for example, television as an impetus for family conversations (Morley 1986). Such studies asked how audience members used media, engaging in critical analyses of how media culture operates – what genres or pieces of media do and what audience members do with them (Alasuutari 1999).

In contrast with this approach, many theatre and performance studies scholars of reception prior to the recent empirical turn have approached the task as Blau (1990) does. He writes:

I am not going to presume or reconstruct ‘audience response,’ except to suggest from the evidence we have what possibilities or inflections of response there may have been. … So far as this study approaches the problem of meaning, I shall try to suggest what meanings were/are (probably) unavoidable for the audience materializing within a constitutional range of questions, some of which, like certain of the plays themselves, appear to be more or less urgent or muted (or subject to gender and class differences) at particular moments of history.

(47)

Blau’s approach to audience studies is to interrogate the details of artworks in historic and social context, drawing inferences as to how they were most likely to have been received and interpreted. This tradition of reception research has proved durable in theatre and performance studies, including the work of Ben Chaim (1984) and Bleeker (2008), among others. Freshwater (2009) critiques this approach as “discursively producing the audience the critic would like to imagine rather than accurately reflecting the complexity and potential diversity of collective and individual response” (8–9).

This tradition roots theatre reception in literary reader response theory. Bennett (1997) takes this approach, recognizing spectators as “productive and emancipated” makers of meaning (2). She notes that audience members arrive with socially formed ideas and values, making sense of what they see through interpretation processes that are culturally constructed. Bennett critiques empirical audience studies as limited in value, concerned with the narrow scope of marketing-focused research conducted by theatres. These studies, Bennett argues, exist primarily to maintain the relationship between mainstream theatres and their small extant audience bases. When Bennett wrote a generation ago, these were the only empirical audience studies she saw conducted with theatre audiences; she operated under the assumption that empirical audience research could not do anything else.

Bennett focuses on audience members’ cultural expectations of theatre broadly – of what spectators expect when they choose to go see a particular kind of play at a particular kind of theatre. These expectations inform an audience member’s experience of a theatrical event and interpretation of a fictional stage world. Such expectations are heavily informed by audience members’ lived experience, and postmodern spectatorship studies recognize the value-laden nature of interpretation. Jill Dolan (1988) emphasizes the significance of subject positioning to spectatorship, highlighting how audience members’ relationships to artistic works influence their readings of those works. When a feminist spectator views a work representing, for example, a male hero and an objectified woman, “She cannot find a comfortable way into the representation, since she finds herself, as a woman (and even more so, as a member of the working class, a lesbi...