Knowing and Measuring the Audience Experience

Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson

The Toronto-based company Mammalian Diving Reflex produces performances in collaboration with children and young people. One of the company's most successful and frequently performed works is Haircuts by Children. The production involves a group of local children aged between 10 and 12 who are trained in basic hairdressing skills by a professional stylist. Working in a rented hair salon, the participants offer free haircuts to members of the public. The idea that children should be allowed to cut the hair of adults is part of the vision of the company to consider children and young people as creative participants; people whose aesthetic choices can and should be trusted. The artistic director Darryl O'Donnell notes that he had expected the outcome to be anarchic 'with hair flying all over the place but, in reality, with kids taking the responsibility so seriously, the mood in the salon becomes almost sombre. The kids focus total attention on the task at hand' (O'Donnell 2007). Another unanticipated outcome of the event is that an intimacy develops between the young haircutters and their adult clients, with small quiet conversations taking place between them. 'It is the idea of a stranger handing over trust to a child' (O'Donnell 2007).

Haircuts by Children is a performance work that is interested in engagement. The conventionally understood line between performer and audience is blurred, and in this performance 'space' a new kind of engaged interaction occurs. Here, all participants simultaneously both produce and respond to an aesthetic experience that is taking place all around them. It is a profound performance 'happening'; it is intense, intimate, risky, absorbing, authentic (the haircuts are actually happening), and an experience that is shared by all who are present. So thorough is audience engagement in Haircuts by Children that the audience and the art offering have become one.

While Haircuts by Children might be seen as unconventional, it encapsulates some of the new thinking around audience engagement. It might be seen to be an extreme example, more in line with Ben Cameron's argument that 'many in today's arts reformation question the necessity of professional artists in a creative artistic experience' (quoted in Wallace Foundation 2012: 3). Mammalian Diving Reflex have made a connection between performance and audience enfranchisement and while not all performing arts organizations are dedicated to the same goal, the performing arts sector is changing. Performing arts audiences are seeking more engaged forms of participation and arts organizations are developing ways to broaden, deepen and diversify their audiences (Wallace Foundation 2012).

Audience engagement and artistic vibrancy

Although slow to become the subject of academic study, audience engagement is a leading research concern of contemporary arts industry and funding bodies such as the Australia Council (2010, 2011a, 2011b), the Arts Council of England (2010/2011), the Urban Institute (Walker & Sherwood 2003), the Wallace Foundation (2012), the New Economic Foundation (2010) and the RAND Corporation (McCarthy et al. 2004). The research reports commissioned or produced by these organizations are largely motivated by two complementary contentions: first, that building audiences is the key to the survival and well-being of the arts sector; and second, that many contemporary audiences want to be more thoroughly engaged in an arts experience than is conventionally supposed. The aim of these reports is to identify the factors that contribute to audience engagement and/or to identify strategies to build it by, in the words of Wallace Foundation (2012), 'broadening, deepening and diversifying' the audience experience. For these organizations, and the many arts organizations that use their findings, audience engagement is a fundamental concern.

There is a growing argument that audience engagement actually contributes to or is an important element of the institution's innovation and, in the Australia Council's words 'artistic vibrancy'. In their 2010 National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) report, Hasan Bakhshi and David Throsby argue that 'audience reach' is one of the four core elements of artistic innovation. According to Bakhshi and Throsby, innovation in 'audience reach' results from the strategies that institutions and companies use to broaden their audience, deepen their audience and diversify their audience (2010: 4).

Bakhshi and Throsby found that innovation in the delivery of exhibitions and productions allowed both the Tate Gallery and the UK National Theatre to attract broader and more diverse audiences. They focused particularly on the use of online technology in delivery. For example, they found that in the case of the Tate, online exhibitions attracted a greater proportion of ethnically diverse visitors, of younger visitors and of lower income visitors than do exhibitions in the Gallery's physical space. The Tate and the National Theatre could argue that increasing their audience reach is an indication of their innovation, even if the total number of visitors is not increased.

In terms of audience 'deepening', Bakhshi and Throsby found that innovative delivery to visitors and audiences often increased the depth of their experience, and certainly did not detract from the depth of experience that was cultivated through conventional delivery. Here, their focus was very much on online exhibitions (in the case of the Tate) or synchronous televised performances (in the case of the National Theatre).

In contrast, organizational efforts to simply focus on the extent of demand or financial return may discourage innovation, as the UK's New Economic Foundation (NEF) report found:

The kinds of measurement that are currently prevalent in the theatre sector do not seem to encourage work that is concordant with the actual artistic...