A Plea for Audiences
Back in the 1970s, the French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre made a famous plea for intellectuals in his acclaimed essay Plaidoyer pour les intellectuals (Sartre 1976). In his essay, Sartre argued that society canāt complain about its intellectuals without accusing itself, because we attract the intellectuals that we deserve and create. Despite the facile marketing soundbite that the contemporary customer is king, the same could certainly be said about todayās performing arts audiences, who are often ignored, blamed and even derided by a sector that generally fails to listen to them or engage with them on equal terms.
Another French dramatist, Antonin Artaud, invoked the metaphor of the Fall to explain how audiences have been disempowered and disassociated from the public and are therefore irrevocably doomed in their illusory search for judgement and catharsis (cited in Blau 1990, p. 42). Indeed since the time of Plato, audiences have been variously, but consistently, feared, vilified, victimised, ignored, patronised, pacified, mollified, homogenised, ridiculed, abused, segmented, and even killed-off (both literally and metaphorically). This all points towards the reality that the audience (whatever that slippery construct might mean, and to whom) has fallen from grace.
This unhappy state of affairs is aggravated by the apparent antipathy exhibited towards audiences by many arts professionals and even, somewhat extraordinarily, by audience scholars themselves. Herbert Blau (1990) rightly claims that there is a tradition of disdainful and disconcerted ambivalence towards the audience and that many people who work in the theatre perceive audiences as āa kind of usurper or intruderā (p. 40). This historical and prevalent disdain towards audiences shapes the academic and sociological context of this book, which embarks from the acknowledgement that audiences have been systematically, and sometimes cynically, sidelined, undermined and alienated by scholars, artists, managers, producers, arts organisations, policymakers, and society more broadly. So it is now time to plead on behalf of audiences; and via an in-depth critical analysis of audience research in the performing arts, this monograph makes the case for a more sustained, more authentic, more relational, and ultimately more effective engagement with audiences.
The underlying premise of this book is that we are currently living in a climate of quixotic thinking and theory regarding audience behaviour and engagement. Whilst on the one hand, some scholars, especially in media studies, are hailing the āendā or even the ādeathā of the audience (Livingstone and Das 2015) and conferences in the arts sector are devoted to āthe people formerly known as the audienceā (Rosen 2012), in actual fact, performing arts audiences are thriving, especially the commercial audiences in Londonās West End and on Broadway. What is interesting to observe, however, is how audience behaviour and expectations are changing, as the next generation of āprosumersā matures and as factors such as big data, co-creation, participation, digital engagement, and live streaming continue to impact on the sector. As traditional sources of arts funding start to dissipate and alternative income sources such as philanthropy and crowdfunding continue to rise, audiences are increasingly being targeted as donors, which further complicates and potentially compromises their relationships with artists and arts organisations. Mindful of this evolving context, this book will prioritise audiences and their lived experiences and explore the implications of changing audience expectations and evolving practices of engagement for artists, arts managers, marketers, cultural leaders, policymakers, and, of course, for audiences themselves.
The terminology surrounding audiences is particularly unhelpful in shedding light on the audience experience with core terms such as ātheatreā, āspectatorā, and āaudienceā all reflecting one particular sensory response to the performing arts. There is thus an urgent need to clarify the underlying terms that describe and denote the act of being an audience member and to critique the pernicious etymological associations that conspire to reduce this complex, multisensory pursuit. I will address this endeavour later in this introductory chapter.
Questions of audience engagement naturally beg the fundamental question of what an audience actually is and does. To what extent do audiences constitute a congregation, a collective, a community, or even a public? How do people transform into an audience and how might they best prepare for this transformation? Blau poses an important question in his deconstruction of the audience project: āTo play the part of an audience is to play the part of not playing a part, and how do you rehearse for that?ā (1990, p. 298, original italics). This question goes to the heart of audience engagement because it challenges both the ability and the preparedness of artists and performing arts organisations to develop their audiences aesthetically. As a theorist, Blau defines the audience as a constructed consciousness, an initiated body of thought and desire (1990, p. 25). But as the practitioner Stanislavsky points out, playing to no audience is ālike listening for an echo in a place without resonanceā (cited in Blau 1990, p. 255). As Stanislavsky intimates here, one of the primary roles of the audience is to provide resonance and meaning; and yet surprisingly little research is dedicated to this hermeneutic endeavour.
Helen Freshwater (
2009) rightly contends that without the
audience there
is no real performance. Considering this indubitable primacy of the audience, it is quite simply astonishing that empirical research of and with performing arts audiences remains both contested as a scholarly endeavour and immature as an academic field. In fact, as Kirsty Sedgman (
2016) notes,
audience research is often dismissed as futile and even inimical.
Audience research is frequently considered nonproductive as, through talking about the experience, audiences will only be able to explicate a pale approximate shadow of it; and at its worst, audience research is seen as potentially destructive, as what audiences remember afterwards will be not the ineffable experience itself but the shadow experience as it was described. (p. 24)
Sedgman goes on to heed Bourdieuās portentous warning about the āimplacable hostility to those who try to advance the understanding of the work of art and of aesthetic experienceā because this presents a āmortal threat to the pretension [ā¦] of thinking of oneself as an ineffable individualā (p. 25). So audience research emerges as a sociological power game governed by the rules of cultural capitalāa game in which some powerful cultural gatekeepers have a vested interest in silencing audiences and therefore in undermining audience research. To some extent, then, audience research is not only a policy tool but actually a political act, because it challenges established thinking regarding who actually has the right to express an opinion on questions of cultural engagement and aesthetic experience.
There can be no doubt that scholarship has systematically overlooked audience research in the past. As Susan Bennett observes, āwhat a theory of theatre audiences needs is not the neglect it has historically received, but a systematic, if cautious, approach that would make clearer the relationship between the art form [ā¦] and the audience [ā¦] that supports itā (1997, p. 17). However even revered audience scholars such as Bennett appear to be ambivalent towards empirical audience research, claiming that the performing arts sector itself is making such significant progress in understanding audiences that there is ālittle need or meritā in academics seeking to replicate its efforts (2006, pp. 226ā228).
Fortunately, this beleaguered perspective on
audience research is not shared by the vast majority of contemporary researchers, some of whom, like Janelle Reinelt, have abandoned their historic disregard for empirical research and come to value its ability to explicate audiencesā experiences on their own terms.
Most of the recent scholarship on reception in theatre and performance studies points to a lack of sustained attention to spectator research, or more specifically, to the kind of research that tells us what spectators experience, how they make meanings or feel feelings in relation to theatre, and how they come to value āassisting at performance.ā These features have been much less investigated and interpreted than the theoretical framing of the problems of the audience [ā¦] or the description of the reception of particular performances. (Reinelt 2014, p. 337)
Reineltās reflection here represents the high degree of consensus amongst
audience researchers that the field has suffered from a significant over-reliance on theoretical approaches to explicating the audience experience. Even Blau, that most theoretical of audience scholars, acknowledges, albeit implicitly, the urgent need for an empirical approach.
We simply do not know, in any reliable ā no less ideal or accountable ā sense, who is there nor, in the absence of the classical subject, where to look. We are despite this still likely to generalize ā as I have said and maybe done ā about what the audience, with its disparate, cross-purposed, alienated, and incalculable perceptions, feels and felt. (1990, pp. 355ā356, original italics)
Katya Johanson summarises the research context pithily, noting that āthe audience has been all too absent from past scholarly performing arts studiesā (2013, p. 168). This deficiency is not only a methodological and epistemological failure on the behalf of audience studies in the performing arts; it represents a perplexing and counter-intuitive conundrum, considering that the actual audience is āmore complex and interestingā than the ideal audience that has long received the attention of scholars (Johanson 2013, p. 170). The net result of this deficient research context is that over the past few decades, and indeed centuries, theoretical scholars have conspired to: make general assumptions about audiences; speak on their behalf; assume a simplistic homogeneity of reception and response; and construct reductive notions of ābadā or āidealā audiences (Sedgman 2016, p. 17). In short, audience research has not historically been very audience-fri...
