Challenges of cultural industry knowledge exchange in live performance audience research

ABSTRACT

With live performance audience research frequently relying on cultural organisations to facilitate access to their audiences, this article addresses the issues involved in evidencing spectators’ responses via discursive methodologies. Recalling a series of empirical projects conducted over the past ten years with a range of theatre practitioners, it examines the conflicts involved in carrying out scholarly studies of audience reception against cultural organisations’ pressures to produce their own ongoing audience evaluations. Examining key concerns about audience research raised by creative practitioners in varying theatrical contexts, from site-specific to building-based work, it addresses the difficulties of understanding live performance reception and aesthetic experience via impact frameworks. It begins by situating these three operations in the context of Knowledge Exchange (KE) between academics within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and those in the creative industry sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience research
• cultural value
• knowledge exchange
• impact
• theatre
• live performance

Note on the contributor

Kirsty Sedgman is a Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Bristol. She specialises in theatre audience research, exploring topics including experience, community, fandom, and response. Her work has been published by a variety of journals and edited books, as well as in two monographs: Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (2016, Intellect) and The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience (2018, Palgrave). Kirsty is currently engaged in a three-year British Academy postdoctoral research fellowship investigating regional theatre audience engagement through time. www.kirstysedgman.com, @kirstysedgman

ORCID

Kirsty Sedgman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5694-376X

Notes

1 Following Oakes, Townley, and Cooper (1998) we might consider this a Bourdieusian form of symbolic violence, excluding some knowledges and ways of valuing an organisation in favour of others.

2 See Sedgman, 2017 for a contemporary survey of the emergent field of theatre audience research.

3 There is not the space in this paper to launch a full-scale defence of the epistemological value of the “quali-quant” post-show questionnaire format, as differentiated from feedback forms designed for the purpose of impact evaluation. For those interested, a detailed reflection on the kinds of broad, patternable, scholarly knowledge this method can produce is provided in Sedgman, 2016.

4 Contrary to alternative approaches (such as neuroaesthetic cognitive science, or quantitative box office analysis), which all come with their own distinct considerations, my work follows in the footsteps of foundational Audience Studies scholars based in media and cultural studies fields in investigating the complex relationship between audience experience and audience talk (Sedgman, in press).

5 For a compelling description of some theatre-makers’ worries about the power of language to destroy what it seeks to describe see Reason, who argues that

rather than thinking that research that takes place after the event allows us access to only a pale, wasted and distorted reflection of a “true” experience, perhaps we should be thinking of post-performance reception processes as a connected but different experience in its own right. (2010a, p. 26)

6 This situation is by no means unusual: ethnographers working as “participant-observers/observer-participants” are frequently required to navigate considerable difficulties securing and retaining organisational access. As Brian Moeran explains, “[e]ven when this has been achieved, and as a researcher you have gotten one foot in the corporate door, the kind of access you are permitted may well prove problematic” (2009, p. 140).

7 In Sedgman, 2018 I analyse the historical campaigns to remove disruptions from all forms of aesthetic experiences, situating e.g. Fried’s “intimacy of observation” and Wagner’s “new listening” within the imagined societal benefits of focused audience attention and the concept of “flow” (pp. 23–42).

8 See also Hawkins and Ryan’s (2013) finding that “vibes” play a significant role in festivals’ success.

9 Of course, this is specifically an issue for research incorporating survey methods; big numbers are less important for purely qualitative projects, although here the lack of official access still places extra pressures on participant recruitment.