Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts

Matthew Reason, Lynne Conner, Katya Johanson, Ben Walmsley, Matthew Reason, Lynne Conner, Katya Johanson, Ben Walmsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000537987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

The Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance.

This study considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within appropriate philosophical and socio-cultural discourses. Ultimately, the collection marks the point where audiences have become central and essential not just to the act of performance itself but also to theatre, dance, opera, music and performance studies as academic disciplines.

This Companion will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates, as well as to theatre, dance, opera and music practitioners and performing arts organisations and stakeholders involved in educational activities.

Part One Histories, theories and questions of social justice

Lynne Conner

DOI: 10.4324/9781003033226-2

The Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts begins in a way typical for volumes of its type, with a section devoted to a discussion of the field’s history and theory that is meant to help shape the reader’s journey by providing key historical and epistemological contexts. But where the chapters within this section depart from the norm is in their acute attention to topical societal matters, particularly Covid-19 and systemic racism, which at the time of writing some are referring to as the dual pandemics of 2020/2021.¹ As a new disease, and one unexpected by most people, Covid-19 caused an immediate shock-wave through the performing arts around the globe. Its impacts on the study and analysis of audiencing are unfolding as I write this introduction, and will continue to do so in ways not fully foreseeable.

Systemic racism is, of course, not a new disease, nor should its impacts on scholarship be shocking for any researcher who has paid attention to the findings of Critical Race Theory over the last five decades. Yet the brutal murder of George Floyd in the US in May 2020 has awakened a zeitgeist of considerable force, occasioning a reckoning within a variety of global cultural operations, including audience studies. The social determinants of racism – the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age – impact public life in multiple ways, creating systemic vulnerabilities ‘analogous to a systemic illness in the body’ (Bright 2020, 140). These systemic vulnerabilities, focused most prominently on people of colour, can be found in the operations of most contemporary societies.

As per normal academic practice, contributors to Part One wrote independently, focusing on their specific scholarly domains and areas of research expertise. But conducting their research and writing their articles between 2019 and 2021 has meant that these authors could not help but view their area of audience research through the prism of these two pandemics; could not help but refract and bend accordingly. Readers will notice, if they read the chapters adjacently, the connective tissue of Part One: a concern about the role of live performance in a post-pandemic (or, perhaps, a pandemic-prone) future; and the dual pandemics’ violent exposure of myriad social inequities embedded in both the subjects we study and the manner of our studying.

Power/inclusion/equity

The urgent need for greater awareness over matters of power, equity and inclusion in our research practices is apparent in all seven chapters. All call, in one way or another, for the unsettling of the field’s established patterns, habits and assumptions that are, upon reflection, informed by systemic racism (overt and subtle) and a perhaps too narrow and under-reported view of what it means to occupy the subject position as audience member and as audience researcher. In that way, each chapter, again in its own fashion, is in conversation with a newly heightened concern for social justice in our research practices.

If social justice is the major theme of Part One, the ontologies of selfhood and power as they apply to our approach to studying and understanding audiences might be seen as leitmotifs, with the question of individual audience member agency recurring frequently throughout the section. One interesting perspective comes from ethologist and cultural theorist Ellen Dissanayake, the noted author of five books on the bio-evolution of arts participation. In the interview that opens the Companion, Dissanayke offers arts researchers a fascinating biological grounding (along with a rich vocabulary) for approaching the study of audiencing, including insights into the formation of the idea of selfhood among Homo sapiens – what she refers to as the ‘infancy of the individual’ – within an arts participation context. Why did premodern people begin to ‘artify’ their lives, and how did that behaviour inform the concept of selfhood? What role does meaning-making play in that evolutionary journey, and how does that inform the action of audiencing?

Embedded in Dissanayake’s analysis of the relationship between art-making and meaning-making is a primer for researchers attempting to identify and analyse audiencing at its most fundamental level. Her theories offer readers a path to trace the Homo sapiens journey from arts participant to arts observer, beginning with a discussion of a set of ‘inborn’ psycho-social needs that are the key biological anchors of audiencing: intimacy/mutuality (love) and identification (belonging). These are, she argues, the ‘germs of our modern construction of meaning or meaning- making.’ Over the course of the interview Dissanayake outlines how our unfolding selfhood (as individuals) is rooted in the evolution of our brain’s cognitive capacity, what she refers to as our ‘making-sense organ.’ ‘In the infancy of the individual,’ she observes, the process of making meaning was purely biological (‘important to survival’) – in the most basic sense meaning was what ‘felt right.’ From the biological imperative to make meaning we are then able, as an evolving species, to recognise ‘connections between past, present, and future, or among experiences or observations’ that define human cognition and ultimately lead to making/participating and observing/evaluating art. In Dissanayake’s world view, this biological journey is a kind of love story for humanity, tracing the need for love and belonging to the aesthetic and arts-going behaviours (innate and learned) that connect us in profoundly trans-cultural ways.

This evolutionary love story notwithstanding, some would argue (including Dissanayake) that much of what connected us in the infancy of the species has been lost to a never-ending series of power moves and resulting hegemonic structures that have, over time, excluded significant portions of the globe from both audiencing and audience research. Dissanayake observes, for example, that ‘one of the effects of capitalism and social stratification is the way in which people are pushed into segmented territories of practice and behaviour.’ The audience field has long since acknowledged that audience studies as an intellectual practice should include many histories, many theories, and many analyses. The question then of why we haven’t managed, as a field, to produce them at a rate or in a way that adequately reflects the heterogenous and plural nature of performing arts audiences around the globe hovers over Part One (as it does over the entire Companion).

In Chapter 2, theatre historian Helen Freshwater acknowledges this by pointing to the essential ‘disquieting’ nature of writing history, a project that is inevitably informed by ‘gaps in knowledge and understanding produced by disciplinary blind spots, distortions in the record created by a desire to defend and promote performance, and complexities elided by the construction of a good story.’ As her chapter subtitle (‘on evidence, mythology and nostalgia’) promises, Freshwater is interested in the way in which ‘myths and nostalgia around past experiences of audiencing’ have framed and shaped audience historiography. Focusing on a selection of well-known audience histories, she explores a range of dominant narrative tropes that have influenced the way Western-focused audience research(ers) have understood the theatrical past, identifying how psycho-social mental operations such as nostalgia can influence our objectivity and pre-determine us to write our histories in comfortable allegiance to hegemonic perspectives (whether conscious or not). Her reflection on the way in which social stratification was built into the construction of historic West End London playhouses is one example of the role that power and authority – operationalised as exclusion – played in the audience experience of the past. ‘Buildings provide detail about the way that audience members were categorised and disciplined: seated, standing, together, apart,’ she notes. ‘They can also contain discomforting truths about performance’s role in the maintenance and display of inherited power.’

Disciplinary blind spots are certainly a central theme in my essay on what I am calling the ‘monolithising habit’ (Chapter 3). I start by looking at the biology of the cognitive function of categorisation (our brain’s tendency to put smaller data points inside bigger data points), which evolved first as a motor/visual operation of the eye and brain and later as semantic and social constructs. The related process of social categorisation (placing individuals into social groups) led to the long-standing practice among audience historians, theorists and applied researchers to create monoliths out of our research subjects – as apparent in the ubiquitous use of the term ‘the audience’ and in practices such as segmentation modelling. The habit of monolithising audiences is routinely evidenced in an array of historical records and narratives of performance and is clearly a product of our cognitive processing, since ‘categorising attendees at live performance events […] allows the record-keeper/narrator to organise a field of unique (and often contradictory) data in order to analyse and convey them in a concise manner.’ But, as I demonstrate in the chapter, these shorthand practices are marked by blind spots that have and continue to play into the biased and ultimately discriminatory approaches to audience research that privilege white-normed cultural ‘understandings’ of who audience members are and what they seek in and through their arts experiences.

In Chapter 4, Laurie Hanquinet reflects on the current and future roles of sociology in audience research, arguing for a shift towards more attention to inclusion and representation in the field as part of ‘more fruitful intersectional approaches (gender, education, age, ethnicity, race, etc.) and how they relate to sets of tastes and practices.’ With this question of inclusion, equity and access as her groundwater, Hanquinet explores the limitations of Bourdieu-inspired scholarship, describing his theorising as more supportive of the democratisation of high culture than of any notion of cultural democracy (foregrounding valuable discussions about the legacy and impacts of Bourdieusian research that appear in chapters from Part Two). Analysing Bourdieu’s seminal work (with Darbel) from the 1960s that led to scores of studies relating individual cultural preferences to socioeconomic characteristics, she notes that while such ‘approaches were initially helpful, especially to debunk the idea that art can touch everyone with no mediation,’ they were ‘only partially useful to grasp the real heterogeneity of audiences, in terms of their taste, their relation to the arts, the artists and the institutions […].’ Hanquinet’s emphasis on the need for a plural approach resonates with the field’s increasing awareness of the subversive power, embedded in the machinery of structural racism and sexism, to reduce and obscure our subject matter.

Power, agency and inclusion are key themes of Jennifer Novak-Leonard’s analysis (Chapter 5) of the portending impact of projected demographic shifts in the US population, particularly in terms of the rising percentages of peoples of colour. She calls attention to the profound impact this should have on audience research methodology, writing that ‘new conceptualisations and perspectives of understanding audiences are needed in response to historic transitions that are underway within the US given the utter and inescapable contrast with the demographic and socioeconomic environment that rooted audience research just a few decades ago.’ In particular, Novak-Leonard calls for a ‘changing’ of the ‘vantage point’ in empirical arts research away from research that frames ‘declines in arts audiences […] as a deficit, a question of why people were not attending performing arts events, that has been the basis for aspects of professional arts practice.’ She also points to the promise of some recent scholarship, influenced by Critical Race Theory, that challenges this white-normed ‘problem-definition’ approach to the analysis of arts participation, which is based on an ‘assumed inferiority of minority groups.’ Calling for a ‘much more democratic approach, one that addresses matters of racial and cultural equity, that values tastes from all social classes and encompasses artistry in its many forms,’ Novak-Leonard asserts that the new challenge for arts researchers is to ‘bring equity into practice and policy.’

In Chapter 6, Glenn Odom and Giri Raghunathan take on these concerns by pointing out the field’s propensity to position Western, white-normed and European-based theories of spectatorship (including Anne Ubersfeld’s and Jacques Rancière’s) as ‘implicitly-assumed-to-be-universal.’ As an antidote, they ask readers to consider audience theory from two non-European sources: various writings from Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka; and the Nāṭyaśāstra, a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts composed sometime between 500 BCE and 500 CE. The authors argue that these theories of performance have ‘no less claim to universality – indeed, given the distributions of world populations, these theories may be more relevant to more audience experience around the globe than something that implicitly takes Europe as its starting point.’ They push the idea of inclusivity further by asking: ‘Is it right to simply use Indian theory to enhance European theory? Should we instead encourage readers to view the material in this chapter as local rather than as participating in globalisation?’ Ultimately, they state, the goal is ‘not to find a universal definition of audience […] but instead to decentre our research practices by acknowledging that our current centres are local’ so that ‘we can begin to trace their interactions with other locals.’ Here Odom and Raghunathan offer audience research(ers) an important concept for consideration and future action – rather than continue to homogenise our research findings by identifying new ‘universal’ subjects (no matter how outside the Western/white-normed world they might be), what we need to do is to reframe our narrative structures so that the very notion of ‘universal’ is no longer relevant to any useful analysis.

And finally, Doris Kolesch and Teresa Schütz (Chapter 7) address the notion of inclusion by analysing the enactme...