Audience experience : measuring quality in the performing arts

Traditional measures of quality in the performing arts include critical reviews, awards, attendance data, the reputation of the director, company or lead performers, and attributions of success such as festival participation or sponsorship and grants. However, the recent literature on audience values, quest for authenticity and the personal experience suggests the need for empirical research into the capacity of the audience experience as an appropriate and important measure of quality in the performing arts. The authors use primary research with performing arts audiences to explore notions of quality, audience risk and audience experience to redefine the quality-measurement paradigm.

Empowering audiences to measure quality

This paper addresses four indicators of the audience experience in the performing arts: knowledge, risk, authenticity and collective engagement, and argues that these provide a measure of the audience's experience of the quality of a performance. Qualitative interviews with four performing arts companies
demonstrated a range of strategies for gathering audience feedback. In particular, the paper addresses systems for gathering "deep feedback" by audiences, and argues that these are a means of collecting information about the quality of the audience experience. "Deep feedback" is a critical mechanism by which performing arts organisations can engage in audience development and audiences are empowered to measure quality.

Representing experience : changing audience relationships in contemporary art

By practice and research this exegesis includes the audience in the making of art, by using the responses of others that inhabit the artwork. It also establishes 'not-knowing' as a methodology to examine changing relationships to audience in contemporary visual arts.

Being and becoming : children as audiences

In this article, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow examine the ways in which performing arts companies and arts policy institutions perceive the needs of children as audiences. Historically, children have been promoted as arts audiences. Some of these represent an attempt to fashion the adults of the future – as audiences, citizens of a nation, or members of a specific community. Other rationales focus on the needs or rights of the child, such as educational goals or the provision of an antidote to the perceived corrupting effect of electronic entertainment. Drawing on interviews with performing arts practitioners, the authors explore some of these themes through case studies of three children's theatre companies, identifying the development of policy rationales for the support of practices directed at children which are primarily based on pedagogical principles. The case studies reveal a shift away from educational goals for children's theatre, and identify a new emphasis on the importance of valuing children's aesthetic choices, examining how these trends are enacted within the case-study organizations, and the implications of these trends for company programming. Hilary Glow is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Arts Management Program at Deakin University, Victoria. She has published articles on cultural policy and the audience experience in various journals, and in a monograph on Australian political theatre (2007). Katya Johanson lectures and researches in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She has published on Australian cultural policy and on the relationship between art, politics and national identity. With Glow she is the author of a monograph on Australian indigenous performing arts (2009).

Firsts: performing ways first year teachers experience identity transformation

This thesis reports on research showing the survival discourse of beginning teaching has shifted from sink or swim metaphors to describe surviving transition shock and classroom management concerns to surviving contract employment. Beginning teachers are neither sinking nor swimming in this liminal state. Rather, it is as though they are on a lifeboat where they cannot feel like a ‘real’ teacher until they can operate with certainty.

Interrogating the experiences of beginning teachers, and the transformation of their identity in their first year (1yr) of teaching, the thesis explores research participants’ firsts as epiphanic or revelatory moments of identity transformation. Participants were followed for three years from upon completion of their teacher education, through their first year of teaching, up to the beginning of their third year in the profession. The major finding was that while contemporary understandings of professional identity highlight the transformative nature of the phenomenon,  contract employment had the most impact on these teachers’ identity transformation.

Teachers’ perceptions of their own professional identity affect their efficacy and professional development as well as their ability and willingness to cope with educational change (Beijaard, Verloop & Vermunt 2000). It has been reported by the Australian Education Union (AEU) and in the Victorian media in recent years that up to 50% of beginning teachers are leaving the profession within their first five years. The reasons given for this level of
attrition include workload, pay, and behaviour management, among the top concerns of beginning teachers. These categories have positioned beginning teachers in a survival discourse for many years, yet there is more to beginning teachers’ intentions to leave than their struggles to survive in the classroom. More recently in Victoria what it means to ‘survive’ has shifted to surviving the pervasive contractual nature of beginning teachers’
employment conditions.

This qualitative study seeks to question what remains concealed with regard to beginning teachers’ experiences through an investigation of the differences between and within individuals, allowing categories of description to emerge from the data rather than pre-determining categories of investigation. Data was collected from twelve participants through individual semi-structured interviews and written communication. A theatre-based research approach to representing the participants’ experiences was employed, culminating in a performance titled ‘The First Time’. The processes of scripting, rehearsing, and performing, were utilised to analyse and represent the data to expert audiences. In an aim to uncover questions that have been buried by answers, the research is oriented as a
phenomenographic inquiry. This mode of inquiry seeks to describe, analyse, and understand (Marton 1981) the qualitatively different experiences 1yr teachers undergo in their identity formation and transformation.

The results of this research reveal the destabilising effect of short-term contracts so prevalent in the current context; that status and belonging are central to 1yr teachers’ identity work. Status and belonging are positioned within survival, liminal, and hegemonic discourses; and expressed through artefacts as symbols of belonging. The low status ascribed to contractual work has a clear impact on beginning teachers’ commitment to the profession.

Converging with audiences

The new theories and discourse in the creative industries have revealed a necessary relationship between producer and consumer, which, in the performing arts, is demonstrated by a recognisable change in the relationship between artist or performer and audience. Relationship marketing theory has been challenged by the new arts consumer who is on a quest for self-actualisation where the creative or cultural experience is expected to fulfi l a spiritual need that has very little to do with the traditional marketing plan of an arts company or organisation. 

Building audiences: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts

FOREWORDAs a culturally ambitious nation we are shaped by our cultural engagement and it is an important catalyst for critical discourse. It is vital that audiences and artists discuss their experiences, enabling us as a community to come together through engagement with diverse practice that challenges and entertains. This research has been undertaken in response to the Australia Council’s strategic vision for a nation where there are no borders to accessing Australian arts, and all Australians are able to experience and cherish Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and culture.Building Audiences provides an insight into the nature of existing Australian audiences and the broader public. It reveals how Australians engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts in the public sphere as audiences, highlighting that this engagement is part of a broader national dialogue about their relationship with and towards Indigenous Australia.

Dissolving views, memory and sensory experience: The Cosmopoligraphicon or the ‘World in Many Pictures’ in Melbourne, Australia, in 1855

While magic lanterns and dissolving views were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth century, scholars are only starting to examine in depth their social dimensions. This article seeks to extend our understanding of dissolving views by analysing the audience sensory experience in a specific historical context – gold rush Melbourne in 1855. It argues that while a Melbourne audience admired the technological wonder of the magic lantern and the dissolving views, their sensory experience was informed by the colonial social context. The audiences appear to have delighted in immersing themselves in the dissolving views, both learning about the world and reacquainting themselves with parts of the (old) world they had left behind. This article further argues that dissolving views were more than a visual spectacle: they actively engaged the senses in ways that gave emotional meanings to the dissolving views and linked a Melbourne gold rush audience with the world left behind, yet still accessible remotely through memory and sensory imagination.