Watching the Watchers: Gauging Audience Response
by Jason Grote
Discuss! To comment on this entry, click here.
While I can't speak to the specifics of the study in question, I generally think that surveys measuring audience response are a bad idea. I care very deeply about what my audience thinks or feels, but I don't feel that surveys are the best way to assess this, and so don't use them. If the theater wants them, I consent, but I don't read them. This is not because I am a snob who is disinterested in what my audience thinks - on the contrary, I care very much - but because I think our contemporary culture has a weird fetish for quantifying everything, and something so delicate and ineffable as the relationship between artist and viewer can't even really be expressed verbally, let alone numerically. I am, in many cases, a believer in
the wisdom of crowds and a fan of most open-source projects, but theater isn't computer programming or the collective hive-mind of Wikipedia. I find it much more instructive, actually, to watch an audience watch my work (as was easy to do at the Denver Center's in-the-round Space Theater in 2007), a technique recommended by the filmmaker Francois Truffaut, among others. Collectively, an audience is very intelligent, but not necessarily in a way that individual members can articulate - often I can better tell whether or not a play is working by observing body language. When are people laughing, crying, shifting, on the edge of their seats, dozing off, walking out?
And who are they specifically, and when do I want or not want them to be doing each of these? This tells me much more than most of the feedback I get at "talk-backs," which is usually more about giving the audience a greater sense of involvement (a perfectly laudable goal in itself) than about soliciting "notes." Indeed, I am often very eager to interact with my audience, and make myself very easy to contact via email, Blogger, MySpace, and Facebook. But this is not because I intend to use feedback to make changes to my work, but because increasingly, people see their relationships with artists as interactive (I have often corresponded with my favorite novelists and rock musicians myself), and because I deliberately set out to write plays that foster arguments and conversations. I am very happy when these discussions take place, but I see them as parallel to the artistic experience, not part of it.
With all due respect to Mr. Yoshitomi and Mr. Brown, with whose methods I am not at all familiar, I feel that "Measuring the Intrinsic Impact" of any work of art is an idea with potentially disastrous results for the creative process generally. To be fair, I am not in a position to judge their study - only the underlying impulse, which I have encountered in many resource-strapped arts institutions who seek to use private-sector methods to improve their lots. This approach disregards the many flaws in corporate culture. For some time, the film industry has used audience surveys in preliminary screenings in an attempt to predict audience response, and to take the uncertainty out of what is a famously volatile marketplace. While I can't cite any precise data on the failure or success of these methods, and of course can't speak to their similarity to the study in question, I have heard anecdote after anecdote about its failure as both an aesthetic and a profit-making strategy. Frequently, test audiences will have an initial negative response to a fine movie, and producers will demand changes that water it down and make it even less appealing to audiences. Alternately, many recent screenwriters and filmmakers (The Wedding Crashers' Steve Faber and John Fisher and Hostel's Eli Roth, to cite two examples) have stated publicly in interviews that they received negative audience evaluations, fought to preserve their respective artistic visions, and went on to have great success at the box office in spite of the initial test audience reaction.
Of course producers and presenters would like to be able to predict and manage audience and critical response to what they put on out, as arts presenting is a notoriously stressful and erratic business, but I don't think this can be done without severely compromising the integrity of the art. Risk is, in most cases, the entire point. Of course, arts presenters could probably predict, with some degree of accuracy, the acts or exhibits that would be most popular, but this would, in all likelihood, lead to a steep decline in "difficult" but ultimately rewarding works of art, and the rise of gimmick-driven art, and ultimately of arts institutions as weak imitators of the multiplex, the mall, the computer, and the television set - a competition which they would, most likely, lose. Why would I go to the trouble of going to a theater or museum if I won't be offered an experience that is fundamentally different from what I can get at home, on TV or on the internet, often for significantly less money? Even assuming that the questions being asked related to being "moved" or "affected" by the work (as opposed to the simple thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs of Hollywood test surveys), this is still a flattening and oversimplification of something that is, when it works, impossible to articulate in any coherent way.
The best art polarizes as much as it unites. Most art that seeks to please everyone is doomed to failure, mediocrity or, at best, a sort of temporary popularity. This is not to say that genre art can never be good - I'm a fan of The Wire, Philip K. Dick, sketch comedy, comic books and pop music as much as I am of, say, Lawrence Shainberg's novel Crust, the poetry of John Ashbery, opera, or performance art, and often the two categories are not mutually exclusive (note the references to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman on the TV show Lost, an incident that caused the postmodern novel to sell more in the last year or so than it did in the entire 20th Century). What I object to is the attempt to domesticate and commodify a process that tends to sour at its very contact with such concepts.
It is also worth mentioning that even the most educated among us are rarely able to articulate why we like or don't like a work or art. Highly specialized languages have developed around criticism and dramaturgy, not because these are pursuits exclusively practiced by elites (though they sometimes are), but because it's so difficult to put these thoughts and feelings into words. I would also point out that the objectives of a work of art are often counter to what most of us have come to expect in a consumer society. That is, our society is built around the imperative to enjoy, and the merits of a thing, any thing, are often judged on how well it fulfills that imperative.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoyment per se - I like having a good time as much as anyone. However, in order for a work of art to be successful, it needs to pull as well as push - often, the goal is to anger, disturb, or even to deliberately bore or tax the audience, viewer, or listener in pursuit of some larger goal. The obvious response to this is the one we have heard throughout the history of modern art - "it's pretentious bullshit," "my kid could paint that," etc. And yes, that is often the case. However, even work that enlightens or entertains often needs to mystify, or to defer pleasure, in order to be successful. Of course what we say we want is the thrill, the laugh, the cheer, the beautiful sound or object, but most often those moments need to be surrounded by something else, or the experience is meaningless - art as a series of positive stimuli that zaps our animal brains in a pleasing way, but offers little else.
As an audience member (or viewer, or listener, or whatever) I like to work at it, and I want to make my audiences work too. I was often told that my play 1001, which opened in Denver to critical and commercial success and positive audience response, should never have made it past the barrage of arts administrators who should have tried to get me to tame it, simplify it, dumb it down and make it more like a typical American play - that is, a mildly comic love story with some digestible, moderately liberal political themes. Indeed, some people did try to get me to do this (to his great credit, the Denver Center's artistic director Kent Thompson was not one of them), but I simply refused, and I have never once regretted my decision.
The monologist Mike Daisey has a recent show titled How Theater Failed America. One of the factors he blames is the increased institutionalization and bureaucratization of not-for-profit theater. He's got a point. Imitating Hollywood has done little to make theater more relevant or central to the culture at large. Perhaps theater's centrality, like that of literature, is a product of a bygone era, when people still believed in the concept of the commons, and it can never be regained. I choose to believe that this is not the case, but even if it was, theater would do better to adjust to its new place in the scheme of things and try to make great work for the people who love it (and use smart marketing to make it easier for others to discover it). Imitating Hollywood even more than we do now (without, I should note, paying the talent anywhere near Hollywood levels) would surely be disastrous. I can't speak for other playwrights, but the ability to control my own work is one of the very few things that keeps me writing plays. Having to tailor my work in order to score more highly on an abstracted, numerical expression of audience response would probably drive me out of the theater for good.
To hear more from Jason Grote, visit his blog.
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs", visit the website.
Discuss! To comment on this entry, click here.
NPAC session description, "Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs": What really happens when the lights go down and the curtain rises? Most arts groups do a great job of tracking attendance and revenues, but these are poor indicators of impact. Aside from the buzz in the lobby, is it possible to define - and even measure - how audiences are transformed? If you had this information, what would you do with it? Results of a groundbreaking new study commissioned by the Major University Presenters consortium in the U.S. suggests that intrinsic impacts can, in fact, be assessed using a simple questionnaire. Alan Brown, who directed the study, will discuss the results of the research, which involved pre- and post-performance surveys at 19 performances by a wide range of music, theater and dance artists...
While I can't speak to the specifics of the study in question, I generally think that surveys measuring audience response are a bad idea. I care very deeply about what my audience thinks or feels, but I don't feel that surveys are the best way to assess this, and so don't use them. If the theater wants them, I consent, but I don't read them. This is not because I am a snob who is disinterested in what my audience thinks - on the contrary, I care very much - but because I think our contemporary culture has a weird fetish for quantifying everything, and something so delicate and ineffable as the relationship between artist and viewer can't even really be expressed verbally, let alone numerically. I am, in many cases, a believer in
the wisdom of crowds and a fan of most open-source projects, but theater isn't computer programming or the collective hive-mind of Wikipedia. I find it much more instructive, actually, to watch an audience watch my work (as was easy to do at the Denver Center's in-the-round Space Theater in 2007), a technique recommended by the filmmaker Francois Truffaut, among others. Collectively, an audience is very intelligent, but not necessarily in a way that individual members can articulate - often I can better tell whether or not a play is working by observing body language. When are people laughing, crying, shifting, on the edge of their seats, dozing off, walking out?
And who are they specifically, and when do I want or not want them to be doing each of these? This tells me much more than most of the feedback I get at "talk-backs," which is usually more about giving the audience a greater sense of involvement (a perfectly laudable goal in itself) than about soliciting "notes." Indeed, I am often very eager to interact with my audience, and make myself very easy to contact via email, Blogger, MySpace, and Facebook. But this is not because I intend to use feedback to make changes to my work, but because increasingly, people see their relationships with artists as interactive (I have often corresponded with my favorite novelists and rock musicians myself), and because I deliberately set out to write plays that foster arguments and conversations. I am very happy when these discussions take place, but I see them as parallel to the artistic experience, not part of it.
With all due respect to Mr. Yoshitomi and Mr. Brown, with whose methods I am not at all familiar, I feel that "Measuring the Intrinsic Impact" of any work of art is an idea with potentially disastrous results for the creative process generally. To be fair, I am not in a position to judge their study - only the underlying impulse, which I have encountered in many resource-strapped arts institutions who seek to use private-sector methods to improve their lots. This approach disregards the many flaws in corporate culture. For some time, the film industry has used audience surveys in preliminary screenings in an attempt to predict audience response, and to take the uncertainty out of what is a famously volatile marketplace. While I can't cite any precise data on the failure or success of these methods, and of course can't speak to their similarity to the study in question, I have heard anecdote after anecdote about its failure as both an aesthetic and a profit-making strategy. Frequently, test audiences will have an initial negative response to a fine movie, and producers will demand changes that water it down and make it even less appealing to audiences. Alternately, many recent screenwriters and filmmakers (The Wedding Crashers' Steve Faber and John Fisher and Hostel's Eli Roth, to cite two examples) have stated publicly in interviews that they received negative audience evaluations, fought to preserve their respective artistic visions, and went on to have great success at the box office in spite of the initial test audience reaction.
Of course producers and presenters would like to be able to predict and manage audience and critical response to what they put on out, as arts presenting is a notoriously stressful and erratic business, but I don't think this can be done without severely compromising the integrity of the art. Risk is, in most cases, the entire point. Of course, arts presenters could probably predict, with some degree of accuracy, the acts or exhibits that would be most popular, but this would, in all likelihood, lead to a steep decline in "difficult" but ultimately rewarding works of art, and the rise of gimmick-driven art, and ultimately of arts institutions as weak imitators of the multiplex, the mall, the computer, and the television set - a competition which they would, most likely, lose. Why would I go to the trouble of going to a theater or museum if I won't be offered an experience that is fundamentally different from what I can get at home, on TV or on the internet, often for significantly less money? Even assuming that the questions being asked related to being "moved" or "affected" by the work (as opposed to the simple thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs of Hollywood test surveys), this is still a flattening and oversimplification of something that is, when it works, impossible to articulate in any coherent way.
The best art polarizes as much as it unites. Most art that seeks to please everyone is doomed to failure, mediocrity or, at best, a sort of temporary popularity. This is not to say that genre art can never be good - I'm a fan of The Wire, Philip K. Dick, sketch comedy, comic books and pop music as much as I am of, say, Lawrence Shainberg's novel Crust, the poetry of John Ashbery, opera, or performance art, and often the two categories are not mutually exclusive (note the references to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman on the TV show Lost, an incident that caused the postmodern novel to sell more in the last year or so than it did in the entire 20th Century). What I object to is the attempt to domesticate and commodify a process that tends to sour at its very contact with such concepts.
It is also worth mentioning that even the most educated among us are rarely able to articulate why we like or don't like a work or art. Highly specialized languages have developed around criticism and dramaturgy, not because these are pursuits exclusively practiced by elites (though they sometimes are), but because it's so difficult to put these thoughts and feelings into words. I would also point out that the objectives of a work of art are often counter to what most of us have come to expect in a consumer society. That is, our society is built around the imperative to enjoy, and the merits of a thing, any thing, are often judged on how well it fulfills that imperative.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoyment per se - I like having a good time as much as anyone. However, in order for a work of art to be successful, it needs to pull as well as push - often, the goal is to anger, disturb, or even to deliberately bore or tax the audience, viewer, or listener in pursuit of some larger goal. The obvious response to this is the one we have heard throughout the history of modern art - "it's pretentious bullshit," "my kid could paint that," etc. And yes, that is often the case. However, even work that enlightens or entertains often needs to mystify, or to defer pleasure, in order to be successful. Of course what we say we want is the thrill, the laugh, the cheer, the beautiful sound or object, but most often those moments need to be surrounded by something else, or the experience is meaningless - art as a series of positive stimuli that zaps our animal brains in a pleasing way, but offers little else.
As an audience member (or viewer, or listener, or whatever) I like to work at it, and I want to make my audiences work too. I was often told that my play 1001, which opened in Denver to critical and commercial success and positive audience response, should never have made it past the barrage of arts administrators who should have tried to get me to tame it, simplify it, dumb it down and make it more like a typical American play - that is, a mildly comic love story with some digestible, moderately liberal political themes. Indeed, some people did try to get me to do this (to his great credit, the Denver Center's artistic director Kent Thompson was not one of them), but I simply refused, and I have never once regretted my decision.
The monologist Mike Daisey has a recent show titled How Theater Failed America. One of the factors he blames is the increased institutionalization and bureaucratization of not-for-profit theater. He's got a point. Imitating Hollywood has done little to make theater more relevant or central to the culture at large. Perhaps theater's centrality, like that of literature, is a product of a bygone era, when people still believed in the concept of the commons, and it can never be regained. I choose to believe that this is not the case, but even if it was, theater would do better to adjust to its new place in the scheme of things and try to make great work for the people who love it (and use smart marketing to make it easier for others to discover it). Imitating Hollywood even more than we do now (without, I should note, paying the talent anywhere near Hollywood levels) would surely be disastrous. I can't speak for other playwrights, but the ability to control my own work is one of the very few things that keeps me writing plays. Having to tailor my work in order to score more highly on an abstracted, numerical expression of audience response would probably drive me out of the theater for good.
To hear more from Jason Grote, visit his blog.
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs", visit the website.
About
Be sure to check in all week for continuous blogging from NPAC. Attendees from across art forms and job functions report on their conference experiences. Comments from the convention and beyond are welcome!
Reporting from NPAC:
Amanda Ameer - web manager, NPAC
Sarah Baird - media and public relations executive, Boosey & Hawkes
Joseph Clifford - outreach and education manager, Dartmouth College Hopkins Center for the Arts
Lawrence Edelson - producing artistic director, American Lyric Theater
James Egelhofer - artist manager, IMG Artists
Ruth Eglsaer - program consultant, Free Night of Theater NYC
Jaime Green - literary associate, MCC Theatre
James Holt - membership and marketing associate, League of American Orchestras
Michelle Mierz - executive director, LA Contemporary Dance Company
Mark Pemberton - director, Association of British Orchestras
Mister MOJO - star, MOJO & The Bayou Gypsies
Sydney Skybetter - artistic director, Skybetter and Associates
Mark Valdez - national coordinator, The Network of Ensemble Theaters
Amy Vashaw - audience & program development director, Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State
Scott Walters - professor, University of North Carolina at Asheville
Zack Winokur - student, The Juilliard School
Megan Young - artistic services manager, OPERA America
Please note: the entries posted by the attendees above represent their personal impressions, not the viewpoints of the organizations they work for.
About this blog From April 1 through June 9, 2008, weekly entries will be posted here by some of the performing arts community's top bloggers. This 10-week intensive blog will serve as a unique forum for digital debate and brainstorming, and both the entries and comments will be archived for use at the live NPAC sessions in June. New entries will be posted every Monday morning. Please note: the views expressed in this blog represent those of the independent contributors and participants, not the National Performing Arts Convention.
NPAC - the National Performing Arts Convention - will take place in Denver, Colorado on June 10-14, 2008. "Taking Action Together," NPAC will lay the foundation for future cross-disciplinary collaborations, cooperative programs and effective advocacy. Formed by 30 distinct performing arts service organizations demonstrating a new maturity and uniting as one a sector, NPAC is dedicated to enriching national life and strengthening performing arts communities across the country. Click here to register, and we'll see you in Denver!
The Authors Jaime Green, Nico Muhly, Kristin Sloan, Jason Grote, Jeffrey Kahane, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Greg Sandow, Hilary Hahn, Tim Mangan, Paul Hodgins, Richard Chang and Andrew Taylor!
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