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Locating the Audience

How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales

Intellect Ltd

Why (and How to) Study Theatre Audiences?

Audiences. This collective noun tends to go hand in hand with a verb, with audiences called to do many things: to engage, to attend, to co-create, to participate. Equally often that call goes the other way, insisting that things be done to audiences: to engage, attract, involve, impact upon them, to get them to participate. Audiences, in short, are never simple. They come laden with values, with preset ideas about who they are, where they come from, what they do or should do and what things are being or should be done to them.

The field of performance studies has only recently begun systematically to reconsider the claims made about audiences, and to ask serious questions about how we can better our understanding of cultural value. Accordingly, one of the key concerns of this book has been to explore the distinctions between 'instrumental' (or 'extrinsic') and 'intrinsic' outcomes: between 'impact' and 'affect'. In this chapter, I explain how the methods adopted by an audience-centred study can fruitfully help to break down such divisions by re-envisioning value as a process rather than an outcome. In doing so, I have investigated how arts research methods are often seen as incapable of gaining useful insights, either by reducing cultural value to a series of measurable attributes or by considering it to be overly expanded: ephemeral, ineffable, and therefore impossible to meaningfully comprehend.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Cultural Value?

Linda Park-Fuller begins her Audiencing the Audience' essay by invoking the diverse ways in which audiences have been considered over the past few decades, concluding that

while contemporary theories and methods have given us vocabularies and frameworks in which to talk about audience, they have also problematized the concept of audience to the point of rendering it chaotic – an apparent abyss into which, as scholars, we tentatively venture.

(2003: 289)

Of course, it is not just scholars who have ventured into the audience realm. With arts organizations increasingly expected to provide aims that are integrated with funding agendas, audiences have been propelled into the spotlight to such a degree that it is difficult to find an 'About Us' page on a theatre company's website that does not discuss intended effects:

Our audiences are at the heart of all we do and we want to challenge, inspire and involve them.

(Royal Shakespeare Company 2013)

The New Vic delivers a programme of international-class work made with local audiences in mind. And, through an extensive community involvement, is helping to make our community a better, safer and more inspiring place to live and work.

(New Vic Theatre 2013)

These two quotations were chosen because of the contrast they present in their deployment of affective and instrumental languages. The question of whether artistic benefits should be considered in intrinsic or extrinsic terms forms the basis of one of the most contentious debates in contemporary western cultural policy (Belfiore and Bennett 2008). This has been historicized by Hye-Kyung Lee, who argues that while such discourses have been monopolized since the nineteenth century by the twin ideals of 'artistic excellence' and 'public accessibility', the former was really the main concern of governance: that while civilizing claims were often used at a rhetorical level, 'actual policy-making was firmly grounded on the view that the arts should be subsidized because of their aesthetic values and funding decisions should be made according to artistic merits rather than social concerns' (2008: 295).

However, it is clear that this has since reversed. In the late 1990s, the Labour government's cultural policy underwent a major shift, with cultural organizations increasingly asked to play the role of social agencies. This spawned what Claire Bishop famously called 'the social turn': a 'surge of artistic interest in collectivity, collaboration, and direct engagement with specific social constituencies' (2006: 179). Cultural organizations have therefore 'become more familiar, in recent years, with the experience of setting their activities against formal objectives, and seeking to justify activity and expenditure against "outcomes"' (Holden 2004: 13).

András Szántó provides an evocative summary of the outcome arguments, stating that this is

art as a means to an end: better test scores, empathetic citizens, innovative workers, and so on. [This] has most successfully been applied to link culture to economic development – as a magnet for white-collar citizens and cultural tourists, and as a healing salve on troubled inner-city neighbourhoods.

(2010: 5)

Szántó attributes the rise in instrumental arguments to a desire to 'uncork' highly competitive pots of funding. This is echoed by Kevin F. McCarthy et al., who explain that while many advocates of the arts 'are uncomfortable with an exclusive reliance on instrumental arguments [they] are also reluctant to emphasize the intrinsic aspects of the arts experience lest such arguments fail to resonate with funders' (2004: 68).

Indeed, the governmental urge to prove economic outcomes has never come through more powerfully. To offer a particularly contentious example, former Culture Secretary Maria Miller used her first keynote speech to counsel arts organizations to 'hammer home the value of culture to our economy, evoking the austerity argument that '[w]hen times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture's economic impact' (BBC 2013: np). Miller later defended this statement, asserting that while the arts have an undeniably significant intrinsic value 'that's not an argument that works in the middle of a spending review. [...] Fine words, it is said, butter no parsnips' (2013: np). Focusing on the quantitative value of the arts, argued Miller, is a way to protect them.

For Holden, though, the social turn is not simply a tactical response to governmental urges to prove economic value. It is also indicative of a much deeper shift, whereby

[t]hose arguing that culture has an intrinsic value, and deserves funding on that account, face media hostility and charges of mystification. They are attacked for being 'elitist' and for neglecting issues of access and accessibility. But they have a further problem: they have lost the vocabulary to make their case. The postmodern questioning of concepts such as beauty, truth, delight, transcendence and the like, coupled with the insight that these ideas are temporally and geographically specific, have made using them in debate an embarrassment at best, contemptible at worst. The use of the word 'culture' itself now begs the immediate response 'whose culture?'. All judgements have become relative, suspect and tainted.

(2004: 23)

Accounts like these often share a common position. Although considering artistic value purely in terms of economic or social outcomes may be pragmatically necessary, in doing this something important is lost. The argument can be broken down into four key stages:

1. The pursuit of intrinsic rewards tends to be the very reason why people participate in cultural events in the first place.

2. Social outcomes are likely to be generated through the experience of intrinsic rewards in abstruse and unexpected ways.

3. Focusing on instrumentalism minimizes the possibility for innovation and risk-taking, which in the end produces greater rewards.

4. Tracing social outcomes back to cultural participation relies on a causal model that in practice is unreliable.

To further unpick this last point; in Szántó's words, the

fly in the ointment [...] is that some of the advertised outcomes have proved elusive. And even if benefits are achieved, the question looms whether there might be simpler ways to deliver the same outcomes. After all, cancer hospitals also produce (taxpaying) jobs and may reduce neighbourhood crime, but no one in their right mind would advocate for them for those reasons.

(2004: 68)

Following this, there is now a strengthening desire to push back against instrumental considerations of artistic value. As Holden says, cultural value 'cannot be adequately expressed in terms of statistics. Audience numbers and gallery visitor profiles give an impoverished picture of how culture enriches us' (2004: 21).

The problem has been that while, on the one hand, extrinsic arguments are increasingly understood to provide a woefully incomplete picture, on the other, relying on professionally implicated cultural commentators to enthuse about intrinsic benefits no longer works either. This leads the arts back into the trap of being seen as elitist, mystifying, out of touch.

So what has been the answer? To refigure audiences themselves as 'advocates'. This returns us to the My Theatre Matters! campaign, introduced in the preface, with Samuel West claiming that in order to survive arts organizations must

listen to your audience. Get every theatre in the country to talk to its public, and get those audiences to shout loud for an excellent, affordable night out. [...] We must trumpet the economic benefits of a thriving theatre and how culture can revitalise a tired city centre. But we must also speak fluent human, and talk of civic pride, of happiness, of the intellectual thrill, the camaraderie – even the tears – that a good night out can give us.

(2013: np)

If those professionally invested in the arts can no longer be trusted to speak about the intrinsic values of culture, we now look to audiences to talk in seemingly more 'authentic' – or at least less 'suspect and tainted' (Holden 2004: 23) – ways about what they get from these experiences. The My Theatre Matters! campaign is just one example of an increasing desire to consider how theatre matters to people and not just what it does to them. Along with this has come the appeal for an expanded approach to understanding audiences and the development of new research methodologies to enable this.

Methodological Limitations

It is worth reflecting here on the changes that have taken place since the 2006 publication of an article by Susan Bennett, in which she argued that

the most significant recent development in the understanding of, and interest in, theatre audiences has happened outside the scholarly domain. Instead, that development has been produced by the theatres themselves, the cities and other places in which the theatres are located, as well as in cultural and other agencies that inform government and other arts policy makers.

(2006: 226)

Bennett went on to suggest that this 'extraordinary new resource' reflected the 'composition, participation, and preferences of the audience' so effectively that there was 'little need or merit' in any academic audience research attempting to do similar work (2006: 226–28). A decade later, however, there is a growing sense that our conception of how value operates, and the methods deployed to understand it, are insufficient.

To this end, the United Kingdom has seen the launch of a number of relevant research projects over the past couple of years, including perhaps most prominently The Warwick Commission's report on the 'Future of Cultural Value' (2015) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) 'Cultural Value Project'. The latter's website emphasized the importance of 'examin[ing] critically the "schism" between the intrinsic and the instrumental' (AHRC 2013: np), adding in a blog post that,

we have reached a point where neither the cultural sector nor the government can any longer pretend to be convinced of the importance of culture from the kinds of evidence generated over the last couple of decades. Not only was the mere rhetoric about its social impact in desperate need of some proper evidence, it also seemed to be agreed that past efforts to measure cultural value – driven by the political imperative of influencing spending reviews – had generated a lot of big numbers that no one found genuinely convincing.

(Cultural Value Project Blog 2013: np)

These 'unconvincing' efforts are mostly those praised by Bennett, produced by arts organizations and cultural agencies. These have been critiqued for a number of methodological limitations.

Firstly, Martin Barker et al. in their study of the final Lord of the Rings film point out that one of the main ways film-makers and policy makers attend to viewers is to 'find out just enough about their audiences to be able to persuade them to buy tickets' (2008: 1). This kind of research is insufficiently able to understand how people find pleasure and meaning in cinema, limited as it is to the purpose of persuasion. The reports produced by and for arts practitioners are often created for a similar purpose – to increase cultural participation – and tend to limit themselves to the collation of demographic details and the development of marketing categories associated with strategies for attracting new audiences. Bennett does touch on this in her comment that '[o]bviously the goal of that work was to provide detailed information to the theatres themselves so that they could better choose and market their products' (2006: 226). However, we are only now beginning to reflect seriously on the epistemological ramifications of this.

Secondly, and relatedly, Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett make a powerful case that much of this research has come out of an 'advocacy agenda, with '[t]he majority of these studies [...] commissioned or conducted in the spirit of advocacy by agencies with an interest in the promotion or advancement of the arts' (2008: 8). Such research often acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy as, by setting out with a particular benefit in mind and then designing methods to prove its operation, researchers either lack the facility to draw out divergent responses or overlook them when they do.

Thirdly, these reports are often predominantly quantitative, interested in gathering information about attendance and passing over the actual experience of participation. Some rely on segmentation research, breaking down the population by arts engagement and creating a number of representative audience figures who can be attracted in certain ways (e.g. Arts Council England 2009). While more recent studies have begun to use qualitative methods (e.g. Walker et al. 2002; Ostrower 2005; Brown and Novak 2007) and increasingly consider how arts participation fits into the wider context of people's cultural lives, for the most part this tradition still tends to focus on demonstrating the outcome ('impact') and rarely explores the ways people have come to a response, or their strength of commitment to it, or what wider orientations they draw on in order to do so.

A Call to Arms

Susan Bennett's book, Theatre Audiences, still widely accepted as a key text, remains useful in its insistence on breaking theatre scholarship away from considering spectatorial responses as 'natural' outcomes of performance intention, and towards an understanding of responses as generated against the ever-changing 'horizon of cultural and ideological expectations' audiences bring with them (1997: 98). This is, indeed, wise counsel. However, as Elizabeth Sakellaridou points out, Bennett's work 'focuses more on culturally specific paratheatrical determinants of audience reception than on actual spectatorial strategies of viewing' (1994: 161), and does not set out to undertake empirical audience study. Therefore, while Bennett offers alternative explanations for certain assumptions about what theatre does to audiences, in other moments in the book she proffers theories that are arguably as abstract as those she critiques. For example, she states that,

compared to the person who encounters theatre as part of a day-to-day cultural experience, the tourist likely sees the theatrical event as much more glamorous. Conversely, however, he or she may not attach as much value to its importance.

(1997: 101)

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Excerpted from Locating the Audience by Kirsty Sedgman. Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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