This Week’s Insights: Let’s be skeptical of those “audience behavior” studies… why theatre needs an audience to be theatre… Beware the tech backlash as an audience theme… Why romance writers are killing it with audiences…
- Music Is The Universal Language (Or Not): We see a lot of stories about research on arts matters here at ArtsJournal. The headlines are often eye-catching, claiming this benefit or that from participating in the arts. Look more carefully, however, and you often find that the studies have so few participants that the results are dubious. Case in point: a recent study from Harvard claims that music can be classed universally – that is that even people from different cultures can recognize intended effects for music. But the sample size was small – 250 participants from each of three countries – hardly a big enough to draw big conclusions. And if you delve a little deeper, there is real skepticism from experts, who point out how important context is. Point is: data about perceptions and audience behavior should be taken with a questioning eye.
- A Play By Any Other Format: One of the hot trends right now is taking performances out of their traditional contexts or formats. I’ve heard about several initiatives lately to re-imagine how audiences consume theatre, including performing them by reading rather than staging. This can liberate the viewers’ imaginations. On the other hand: Play readings are, frankly, disappointing. “They’re like walking by a food truck and hearing your stomach rumble, but just when you get your wallet out the truck drives off. … It’s just people sitting there in chairs, sometimes walking up to an ugly music stand to read, and sometimes (woo-hoo!) sporadically engaging another actor at another stand. This is not inherently dramatically interesting.
- Speaking Of Which, Theatre Without An Audience? Well, that isn’t really theatre at all, writes Lyn Gardner. “A movie is unchanged by an audience’s presence and will continue to run in an empty auditorium. But the theatre requires a human presence in the auditorium, because it is only fully alive when it meets its audience. It is only in that moment that it bursts fully into life. … Without our presence, our engagement and our creativity the theatre dies, however talented the actors and however hard they work on stage.”
- TechLash (Ooh, Scary!): One of the building themes in this still brief year is a building backlash towards the tech industry. Facebook and fake news. Smartphones and the deleterious effect they have on our attention spans. Google and its intrusion on privacy. But there’s always been skepticism of technology. It changes the ways we do things (but not human nature). Because we’re changed by it, we question and re-question its impact and value. But let’s not go overboard. “The smartphone is today’s emblem of whether one believes in progress or decline. It is a powerful tool, and any such tool has the capacity to do harm as well as great good. Finding balance has never been a human strong suit, but it has never been more needed.”
- Who’s Doing Well In The Gig Economy? Romance Writers: And why? They’ve done a great job at understanding their audiences. And while other genres are struggling, romance has boomed, and the number of writers making a living from the form has gone up. Why? “You might speculate that romance writers succeed because smut sells. But that doesn’t explain why romance writers are faring better than their peers with digital sales. Instead, three surprising practices set romance writers up for success: They welcome newcomers, they share competitive information, and they ask advice from newbies.”
“Point is: data about perceptions and audience behavior should be taken with a questioning eye.”
There’s a much deeper and more complex problem revealed in sentences like the above. It’s the idea of approaching art with an overemphasis on marketing data, perceptions, and audience behavior. Doesn’t history illustrate that the greatest periods of artistic achievement were when artists were realizing new visions without an excessive concern about their reception? When we are obligated to obsessively calculate how our work will be received, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong.
In its simplest form, it boils down to questions of integrity. Do we like to talk to people who are constantly calculating the effect of their words to manipulate us? Or do we prefer people who speak candidly from their hearts – like people who do not let calculated goals affect their honesty? Both kinds of people obviously want their words to have an effect, and yet one group speaks with the goal of manipulation, and the other from a sense of compassion that creates human togetherness.
It’s the difference between Andrew Lloyd Weber and Giuseppe Verdi, but we already know who will draw the bigger crowd.
Did Bartok change his tune so that he wouldn’t be chased from country to country by Nazi regimes? Did Mahler try to create a more sober, Brahmsian sort of symphonic thought because of the contempt his true voice created in fin de siècle Vienna? No, they ignored the data, the perceptions, and audience behavior and remained true to themselves.
Perhaps this is something for Americans to consider in regard to their new-found application of market fundamentalism to arts administration. Indeed, finding a balance isn’t humanity’s best suit, but history always rubs off the sharp edges. One way or another, even Americans will learn that art can’t be centered around market fundamentalism. As article number 2 above notes, the audience counts, but only when the relationship artists and the public is open, candid, and honest.