Row X guest post by Katya Johanson, Professor of Audience Research at Deakin University, Australia.
This is the fourth in a series on Row X will be featuring short essays written by the co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, a major reference work published in April 2022. The series is introduced here.
The Companion represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance. Spread over four sections and featuring the research and thinking of sixty international contributing authors, the volume considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within current conversations in the field of audience research.
The chapter “Ethics in Audience Research: By the Book or on the Hop?” by Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow is available for free to everyone. Follow this link, then click on “Open access content is available for this title” to access the chapter.
Post your comments and questions to X readers to engage with us about important issues central to audience research.
Shorts: Adventures in Thinking About Audiences
Notice the small things. The rewards are inversely proportional. – Liz Vassey
Some of the most significant disruptors and breakthroughs to our thinking come when researchers take a small part of something large and interrogate just that small part, like Charles Darwin’s explorations with finches to understand evolution. The contribution that Part Four of the Routledge Companion to Audience Research and the Performing Arts makes is to take a small part or a particular angle on audiences and their encounters with arts experiences for interrogation. The small parts discussed in Part Four include particular spaces, perspectives from professional roles, methods of communication and affective responses. Through these interrogations, as well as chapters that take a broader view, Part Four offers interesting new perspectives to the relationship between a production and its audiences that we might otherwise take for granted.
In ‘Thresholds’ (Chapter 45), Stefania Donini discusses the ways that foyers work not just as thresholds between the arts centre and the outdoors, but as everyday social spaces. She sees foyers function as both a lens and a mirror to what goes on inside the centre, highlighting diverse modes of participation and how arts institutions relate to their audiences.
Martin Young’s ‘Labour’ (Chapter 32) provides an insight into his work in theatre lighting, who watches audiences as part of a professional role as they watch a performance. The lighting operator watches a performance in inverse: ‘I relax through tense drama in the knowledge that whatever the characters feel onstage, there will be no shift in lighting until their argument is finished, and during moments of seemingly casual action I sit high in my chair, my fingers hovering nervously over the console in anticipation of the split second cues.’
Maddy Costa’s ‘Dialogue’ (Chapter 30) also writes about what she learns from the audience, this time in post-show discussion groups. Her chapter reveals how theatre serves as a prompt for all sorts of big conversations, such as around mental health, race relations and nationalism. In Chapter 37) Rachel Gomme gives a more intimate insight into how audience members affect the performance in her discussion of her experiences in one-on-one performances. What stands out from Gomme’s account is how poignant and important so many of these encounters are to her in the development of her performance skills. Similar relational encounters and the importance of intimacy to the audience experience are described in Rachel Baynton and Michael Pinchbeck’s ‘Co-creation,’ (Chapter 27) where it becomes clear that what is co-created is so much more than just the performance.
Meanwhile, in Chapter 41 ‘Rehearsal,’ Anja Ali-Haapala examines the different role audience members see themselves playing when they participate in a rehearsal rather than a polished performance. She finds that audiences adopt a more subdued set of responses to rehearsals, seeing themselves as quietly performing interest and supporting the performers.
Other authors in Part Four draw attention to unspoken elements of the relationship between audience and performer. In Chapter 34, Natalie Diddams highlights the role of laughter in bringing an audience together as a collective, and Elena Flys (Chapter 46) describes the role of touch in giving theatre audience members an embodied sense of what happens on stage. Astrid Breel’s ‘Agency’ (Chapter 26) examines the different kinds of agency that audiences enact in relation to an interactive performance, which she typologises as agency in engagement – or choice about how to engage, and narrative agency – or choice in what to contribute to the performance.
However, two of the pieces that are most likely to shift our thinking about audiences are unusually large in their reach, which extends either deeply into the history of performance or deeply into its future. Ella de Burca’s ‘Risk’ (Chapter 43) identifies performances over the six decades from 1950 and the 2000s which truly provoked their audiences in unique and memorable ways. For example, one audience member responded to nakedness in a Carole Schneemann performance ‘Meatjoy’ in 1964 by attempting to strangle the performer. In Argentina in 1968, Graciela Carnevale imprisoned her audience in a gallery. These performances offer a very different relationship between performer and audience to the intimate and compassionate encounters that Gomme and Baynton and Pinchbeck describe.
Finally, Fayen d’Evie (Chatper 39) asks the extraordinary question, how do we perform for the non-human audiences of the future, those species (organic or artificial) that will supersede humankind? What senses might they have that we can appeal with our current abilities? She provides a number of possibilities based on touch and on alternatives to written and spoken communication.
Part Four of the Routledge Companion helps us bring new kinds of curiosity to bear on the important relationship between audiences and performance.
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