The people have had enough of experts. Or so said the British politician Michael Gove, a prominent pro-Leave campaigner during the 2016 referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union.Footnote 1 The notoriety that Gove's statement quickly achieved nationwide against the backdrop of the ultimately successful Leave campaign suggests that it crystallized a distinct phenomenon: one that may not have originated in 2016, but that came into sharper focus during that eventful year. This was a debate about the nature and status of expertise. Highly politicized in a way that seemed to have little to do with the actual practice of expertise, the ‘anti-expert’ debate has had wide-ranging ramifications: including, as this article argues, for how we research the experiences of theatre audiences. More specifically, this article considers how arts and culture scholars should value the knowledge and engagements of the publics they study.
Several explanations have been proposed for the emergence of the anti-expert debate at the current time. In the United States, political scientist Tom Nichols has drawn out a critical tension in the consequences of new media technologies.Footnote 2 On one hand the globalized reach of hypercommunication affords a range of positive social impacts, not least of which is the democratization of access to information and expansion of public participation in political discourse. On the other hand this potential for a more educated citizenry has been endangered by the removal of traditional gatekeepers – such as news editors and fact-checkers – from the arena of debate. In the domain of the public understanding of science, Stefaan Blancke and colleagues have specifically located the anti-expert position in ‘distrust of authority’, with anti-science movements tending to thrive ‘on a common longing for a democratization of expertise (“this is your opinion, but mine is valuable too, even though you're a so-called ‘expert’”)’.Footnote 3 The resulting position relies not only on an invalidation of knowledge, but also on a rejection of the professional and specialized ways in which knowledge has traditionally been gathered, assessed and disseminated. A third explanation is more directly ideological. Tapping into a complex concatenation of globalization, elitism, racism, nationalism, inequality and powerlessness, both the UK ‘Brexit’ referendum and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign in the US were criticized for deliberately hijacking the anti-expert sentiments described above: framing arguments as appeals to emotion rather than evidence, flattering supporters by praising the ‘authenticity’ of their views, and denouncing ‘facts’ – and their purveyors – as essentially elitist.Footnote 4 Rather than a genuine shift to empowering people as experts, the increasingly visible movements toward ‘populism’ have relied on the portrayal of power as shared and diffuse whilst simultaneously occluding its locus. In other words, these populist campaigns and their political aftermaths have been driven not so much by the erasure of hierarchies and experts as by their delegitimization.
While there is room for circumspection when considering these developments with reference to arts scholarship, for the cultural studies researcher interested in understanding audience experience it is possible to see in the wider anti-expert landscape an ethical quandary. Namely: when constructing models of ‘cultural value’, to whom should we be listening? This article takes as its starting point the perspective of audience studies, a discipline that emerged in the 1930s, but which has only recently begun to consolidate its presence within theatre and performance studies. Using methods that are most commonly associated with the social sciences to gather and analyse a range of spectatorial reactions, this field has historically sought to explore the ways audiences find meaning, value, pleasure, frustration and disappointment in their cultural encounters. One broad outcome of such attention is to widen apprehensions of aesthetic value beyond ‘expert’ viewpoints. The increased visibility of anti-expert movements therefore raises an interesting challenge, calling attention to the status and practice of audience scholars and demanding a nuanced consideration of how such research actually works. The major object of this article is to explore the opportunities and challenges of studying theatrical experiences using audience studies frameworks, and to address concerns that this approach might contribute to a wider rejection of the knowledge systems of those who have dedicated years, decades or entire careers to studying the arts.Footnote 5
In confronting this possibility, audience research must be considered within the context of a series of concerted – often highly politicized – attempts to step away from deficit models of engagement and to recognize alternative forms of participation. For example, Eleonora Belfiore's persuasive 2009 article ‘On Bullshit in Cultural Policy Practice and Research’ explains that while the impact of the arts had been ‘one of the defining themes of cultural policy in Britain and beyond over the past 10–15 years’, until recently such discourses tended to rely on professionally implicated commentators to ascertain the ‘intrinsic value’ of cultural experiences.Footnote 6 Where audiences’ responses have been considered, Belfiore argues, this was usually via the adoption of ‘impact’ and/or ‘advocacy’ approaches: either by focusing on demographic segmentation of audiences as a means of developing better methods of attraction, or by designing qualitative studies that set out to prove the taken-for-granted benefits of arts activity.Footnote 7 In order to fill this gap, a set of research commissions and participatory projects have sought recently to place centre stage the myriad knowledges and understandings of diverse audience members. Three major examples of this move can be seen in the UK. In 2012, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned a seventy-studies-strong Cultural Value Project that was probably the first major coordinated British initiative to explore ideas of artistic impact, by investigating how individuals engaged with a series of arts projects, institutions and events.Footnote 8 This was followed shortly afterwards by the AHRC's £1.5 million Understanding Everyday Participation study, which specifically set out to counter deficit models of arts inclusion, this time by researching the meanings people invest in their everyday activities. Contemporaneously, the launch in 2014 of the Fun Palaces campaign generated a powerful international movement working to challenge the concept of ‘professional’ creativity by adopting Joan Littlewood's utopian 1960s manifesto that ‘everyone [is] an artist and everyone a scientist’, providing support for independent community arts and science events.Footnote 9
The inclusion of non-professional makers within the cultural ecology is hardly new.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, whether producing art or responding to it, these contemporary initiatives signal the inauguration of more concerted institutional and governmental efforts to take seriously alternative apprehensions of creative experience. This raises the question, if the so-called ‘death of expertise’ has come about via systematic manoeuvres to invalidate the very means by which we gain knowledge, is it possible that the cultural movements described here might contribute in a similar way to devaluing the legitimacy of expert routes into aesthetic value?
Within an arts context, the use of this word – ‘expert’ – is not unproblematic. I wish to avoid suggesting that those who attend theatre from what we might call highly invested positions – whether as critics, academics, practitioners, cultural industry professionals or simply long-term arts advocates – are something other than ‘audiences’, and moreover that this group is homogeneous and will therefore respond alike. This is, of course, not the case. Within the arts, models of cultural value have always been drawn from a range of complex and interlinked sets of disciplinary, specialist, scholarly, critical and/or professionalized systems of knowledge.Footnote 11 However, as Paul J. Sylvia summarizes, recent developments in arts research have collectively identified operational distinctions between the emotional, physical and cognitive responses of ‘experts’ – those whose knowledge has been gained variously ‘through training, formal study, and experience’ – and those of ‘novices’, who, ‘in contrast, generally lack such knowledge and hence apply . . . personal experiences when judging art’. Without denying the fact that ‘individual experts surely vary in their preferences’, I follow Sylvia in defining experts as a group as being those who tend to ‘share art-specific conceptual knowledge of periods, theories, styles, techniques, and criticism’.Footnote 12
Having attempted the rough delineation above, it must also be acknowledged that this article is by no means the first to identify a bias within theatre towards expert-inflected articulations of experience. In her 2009 book Theatre & Audience, Helen Freshwater argues that by preferring to listen to those with a ‘professional stake in the theatre’ over those she terms ‘“ordinary” audience members’, performance studies has tended to rely on an ability to make claims about ‘theatre's unique influence and impact on audiences’: assumptions of affect that are not always shared by those from alternative backgrounds.Footnote 13 The challenge is to investigate these alternative positions and evaluations, first, without elevating ‘novice’ or ‘ordinary’ viewpoints over critically informed discourses simply by default, and second, without disregarding the ideological ramifications of audience research itself, which in some ways cannot avoid positioning the scholar as the expert of others’ experiences. By addressing these concerns, I intend to consider the limitations of audience research, asking what this approach can and cannot enable us to know about the theatrical experience, and thereby to counter suspicions (as articulated by one of my own cultural industry collaborators) that such work produces simply ‘an indicator of “customer satisfaction” rather than a deep and complex investigation of artistic experience’.Footnote 14
Finally, by detailing the ways audience research has historically sought to conceptualize experience as multifaceted, active, evolving and complex, I demonstrate how future projects might productively investigate theatrical value without diminishing the legitimacy of critically informed expertise.
A brief history of audience studies
In her 2014 article ‘What UK Spectators Know’, Janelle Reinelt offers three potential explanations for what Helen Freshwater has called the ‘curious – and . . . telling – omission’ in performance scholarship of ‘the theories and analytic approaches generated by cultural studies’.Footnote 15 The first is a possible ‘contempt or fear of audiences on the part of artists (and, by association, scholars)’.Footnote 16 The second is a methodological lacuna within the discipline, which has not traditionally offered training in those analytical methods that study the interplay between qualitative and quantitative data (often called ‘quali-quantitative’ or ‘qualiquant’ research), instead tending to direct ethnographic enquiries towards ‘insider knowledge of artistic organizations, rehearsal processes, or other research problems more related to production than reception’.Footnote 17 The third explanation offered by Reinelt ‘is that this kind of research can seem too close to the “market research” or ratings games that are at the heart of commercial ventures within consumer-based capitalism’.Footnote 18
Reinelt's explanations resonate in the present, but they also help to historicize some current attitudes to audience research within theatre and performance studies. This becomes apparent if we trace the varying emphases placed on the three factors as they have manifested in audience research over time.
Questions of attitudes towards audiences, as well as media and methodology, can be traced back to a series of moral panics about the rise of new media forms in the 1930s, when the earliest audience research grew out of a desire to understand the workings and effects of propaganda. Driven in Frank Biocca's account by fear of ‘the Orwellian spectre’ of ‘mass society’ and the passivity-inducing effects of powerful new cinematic and televisual entertainments, scholars from the Frankfurt school saw this mythical mass audience as ‘grey, uniform, anomic, faceless, gullible, and defenseless against the power of the propagandist’.Footnote 19 This is one of the reasons why audience studies as a defined approach has largely been confined to television and cinema: because the earliest systematic research – the ‘effects’ tradition – was developed in response to social concerns about emerging media forms from which audiences were felt to be under threat.Footnote 20
A second wave of audience research, developed in the US, was coined the ‘uses and gratifications’ (U & G) approach by those researchers responsible for its popularization in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 21 Rather than believing audiences to be passive recipients of media messages, U & G credited viewers with playing an active role in the creation of meaning, though this approach was predominantly concerned with understanding audiences’ needs in order to better sell them things, so its epistemological applications were very limited.Footnote 22 U & G's refocusing of attention on viewer activity took on a more critical inflection with the third iteration of audience research: the British cultural studies movement, spearheaded by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Rather than analysing media texts in order to pinpoint their effects, the CCCS insisted, in Raymond Williams's words, that ‘culture is ordinary’, inextricably woven into the fabric of everyday life.Footnote 23 This research worked to uncover how, as John Fiske put it, ‘the distribution of power in society is paralleled by the distribution of meanings in texts’.Footnote 24 Where initial CCCS research by authors such as David Morley, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson and Richard Hoggart focused on the uses of media by men, and chiefly those embedded in spectacular male youth subcultures, later feminist authors like Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, Janice Radway and Ien Ang considered how media usage was integrated into the daily lives of women.Footnote 25 Both iterations have been summarized by David Sholle as the combined foundation of a ‘reading-for-resistance’ approach, in which audiences were studied for the extent of their resistance to imposed preferred meanings.Footnote 26
While the first wave of audience studies asked what culture does to audiences, and the following iterations asked what audiences do with culture, audience research has more recently arrived at a third position, by asking how culture matters to audiences. It is this question that has begun to underpin the hitherto fairly disparate pockets of research on theatre audience response. To offer a very brief survey of this activity it is necessary to look back to the 1980s, when academics in Northern Europe began conducting research around a working group on reception hosted by the International Federation for Theatre Research. An influential early iteration, Willmar Sauter's Theatre Talks method, began to investigate how audience members made sense of performance events through inter-spectatorial discussions: inviting a group of people to attend a series of plays and then encouraging ongoing conversations after each event.Footnote 27 The Theatre Talks approach continues to play an ongoing, if relatively tangential, part in European theatre studies to date.Footnote 28 Within the UK, too, John Tulloch and (with exceptional consistency) Matthew Reason have both produced foundational studies that extended Sauter et al.’s enquiry into audiences’ sense-making processes, with lesser-cited interventions including one-off papers by Susan Kippax and Martin Barker.Footnote 29 Another UK author who deserves note is Ben Walmsley, whose trajectory to theatre audiences via a tradition of arts management and cultural industry research has been paralleled by a small contingent of Australasian researchers including Katya Johanson, Hilary Glow, Jennifer Radbourne and Caroline Heim.Footnote 30 However, until recently these initiatives have seemed somewhat fragmented and isolated, taking place on the fringes of different disciplines and lacking a central base.
As such, January 2017 saw the launch of a new initiative: the ‘international Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts’ (iNARPA). Co-organized by Walmsley at the University of Leeds (UK) and Johanson at Deakin University (Australia), the advent of iNARPA is notable for what it consolidates. While Freshwater's much-cited Theatre & Audience (2009) was at least partly a reflection of fermenting impatience at the tendency to make ‘strong assertions about theatre's unique influence and impact upon audiences’, it also provided a focal point from which alternative momentum has since been built.Footnote 31 Following its publication there have been three separate special issues of journals on theatrical spectatorship. In 2010, the Australian journal About Performance published a special issue on Audiencing: The Work of the Spectator in Live Performance; in 2015 I co-edited with Matthew Reason a special issue on Theatre Audiences for the international audience research journal Participations; in 2016, the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English produced an issue called Theatre and Spectatorship featuring contributions to a conference held in Barcelona the previous year. Of these, it is notable that only the Participations special issue was significantly concerned with quali-quantitative research. However, this collection can be read together with a range of additional endeavours. One of the projects that received AHRC Cultural Value funding was a major study undertaken by the British Theatre Consortium, the findings of which have been detailed in articles by Reinelt and Chris Megson, and by Julie Wilkinson.Footnote 32 In addition, the past few years have seen the publication of a collection called The Audience Experience (2014) edited by Radbourne, Johnson and Glow; an important intercultural project investigating audiences’ responses to the Globe's worldwide touring production of Hamlet; a generous grant from the British Academy to support my own three-year study of audience engagements with regional theatre; and a burgeoning series of publications by early-career researchers such as Jan Wozniak, Evelyn O'Malley, Maria Barrett and Rose Biggin.Footnote 33
Taken together, these confirm what Matthew Reason and I suggested in our introduction to the Participations special issue: that it might be time to stop bemoaning the absence of theatre audience research. Instead, the time seems right to consider the strengths and limitations of this approach, and to point to its potential future directions as an emergent discipline. One limitation that is worth flagging up immediately is that theatre audience research has to date taken place primarily in English-speaking and/or Western contexts. In fact, with those writing from critically informed perspectives still likely to experience an ‘ease of cultural consumption’ that people from marginalized social and racial backgrounds often find harder to access, audience research has the potential to produce necessary interventions in a cultural narrative that remains predominantly Western-centric, white-dominated and class-privileged.Footnote 34 A notable recent example that departs from this pattern is Awo Mana Asiedu's article ‘The Money Was Real Money’, on audiences’ responses to the Roverman festival of plays at the Ghana National Theatre.Footnote 35 Asiedu compellingly demonstrates one outcome of audience research as being an exploration of how communities negotiate their interpretations of plays by drawing on localized understandings. This work therefore has the potential to shed fresh light on the interplay between aesthetic and sociocultural value systems in a range of contexts. As the introduction explained, this project demands critical investigation of the relationship between audience experience and diverse routes into knowledge.
Experience and expertise
Writing about critical frameworks for immersive theatre analysis, Adam Alston suggests that while audience research has
much to offer to our understanding of audience engagement in a range of settings, the position of an audience member who approaches immersive theatre ‘from the inside’ as an opinionated theorist can still be – and perhaps ought to be – harnessed as a critical position, even if it is not an objective position (which would seem a difficult ambition to achieve).Footnote 36
From its ‘insider’ position, the critical, scholarly or knowledgeable viewpoint – the ‘opinionated theorist’, as Alston puts it – is able to produce particular kinds of knowledge. This has been further detailed by Susan Melrose, who has written evocatively about how ‘expert spectators’ translate their ‘performance expertise and mastery’ into words. For Melrose, despite the limitations of language, these audience members have access to certain ‘knowledge-conventions and discursive productivity’ that help them to make sense of their intuitions and experiences in particular ways.Footnote 37 Moreover, as Melrose's work reminds us, a performance's affective register is as much a site of knowledge as its intellectual dimension: something that Jill Dolan has focused on to describe the expert spectator as an ‘ongoing’ spectator, ‘attuned to the vocabulary of the theatrical moment’.Footnote 38
Audience research has the potential to ask how access to varying knowledge systems inflects what different individuals are able to do with an event, and how such diverse understandings might complement – rather than muffle – these expert positions. This approach accepts that all articulations of aesthetic response are subjective, drawing on sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, understandings.Footnote 39 This description further evokes Jacques Rancière's thought experiment in The Emancipated Spectator, whose argument for an overarching dehierarchization of expertise within the creative process has been extraordinarily influential in theatre studies.Footnote 40 Building from his earlier work The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière's framework calls for an assumption of equality: a levelling of intelligence in which the knowledge of the ‘ignoramus’ should be valued as highly as that of the expert.Footnote 41 Rather than ‘some passive condition that we should transform into activity’, audiencing for Rancière is always already a position of emancipation, with each spectator constructing their own interpretation by ‘composing her own poem with the element of the poem before her’, by ‘refashioning [the performance] in her own way’.Footnote 42
It is this interpretive spectatorial refashioning – this act of composition in action – that audience research seeks to capture, by drawing out discursive (as well as extra-discursive) information on a range of aspects: ‘sensuous’, ‘aesthetic’, ‘emotional’, ‘imaginative’.Footnote 43 The methodological challenge is to encourage people to go beyond simple valuations (‘It was good’; ‘I liked it’; ‘It wasn't for me’), by encouraging them to speak about what it did to them in the moment, as well as what they have done with the experience since. For this reason, although the traditional triad of interviews, questionnaires and focus groups remains in common use, those researching arts audiences have also been active in the development of creative and participatory methodologies, in which respondents are positioned as co-creators of knowledge rather than subjects of analysis.Footnote 44 For example, Uwe Gröschel uses ‘walking fieldwork’ to take audiences back around the site of a previous promenade performance.Footnote 45 Reason has developed methods ranging from drawing and painting workshops to a tool that asks audiences ‘where in their body’ a dance experience took place.Footnote 46 Lisa Baxter and colleagues have written about the use of ‘metaphor elicitation’ in drawing out how people feel about cultural institutions, presenting participants with a series of images and asking them to choose those that best speak to their experiences.Footnote 47
The debate over such approaches can be fraught. In a recent Guardian article, Fun Palaces founder Stella Duffy amplified the recommendations of a King's College London report on cultural democracy, advocating the need to broaden definitions of artistic excellence beyond the funded mainstream.Footnote 48 Within Fun Palaces this aim has been achieved by starting from a point of respect for the varying forms of knowledge, values and engagements that its participants (as instigators and producers rather than audiences) bring to the table. In response to Duffy's article, a blog of reactions from artists and scholars collated by musicologist Ian Pace evokes a shared concern that the endgame of this Rancièrian process is not the utopian elevation of democratic grass-roots creativity but the delegitimizing of ‘education, specialisation, depth, command of material detail, dexterity, high levels of understanding and attainment and more challenging cultural substance’: one in which artistic ‘cronyism’ has been replaced by a new form of elitism made up ‘of the rigorously and equally de-skilled . . . untainted by previous apparently bankrupt expert knowledge’.Footnote 49 The shared concern here seems to be about the potential for instrumentalization: the idea that broadening models of cultural value might be used to guide funding decisions, either privileging community-led projects over professional artists or transforming the arts into an arena for ‘consumer-based capitalism’,Footnote 50 and force institutions to target work at an imagined lowest-common-denominator audience.Footnote 51 In such a way, it is feared that paying attention to audiences’ responses might lead to an affirmation of anti-expert thinking, and potentially even pose a danger to artistic integrity itself.
It is for this reason that it is so important for audience researchers to analyse discourse in context. This is the epistemological heart of the approach, and means asking very specific kinds of questions. For example, what might it mean to spontaneously leave a public comment on an online video of a once-live performance? During a one-on-one interview, how does an audience member navigate their reactions against the perceived status of the researcher? How do focus group participants use rhetorical manoeuvres to reach shared understandings (or emphatic dissent), and what hierarchical negotiations does this joint activity involve? Instead of claiming to be ‘representative’ of the audience ‘as a whole’, or elevating non-expert judgements over critically informed models, this approach reframes audience expertise as a sense-making process rather than a definitive valuation: as an emotive, cognitive, kinaesthetic act of negotiation that takes place in the time and space of a particular post-performance reflection.
This distinguishes the quali-quantitative tradition from projects that employ psycho-physiological methods to measure audiences’ reactions to performances, an approach asserted quite forcefully by some of its advocates. In their 2006 book Performance and Cognition, Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart offer the provocation, ‘Why should we turn to cognitive studies for epistemological justification? Isn't this framework just as good as any other as a road to truth? We argue that it is better’.Footnote 52 It is my contention that these divisions are now standing in the way of developing a more nuanced understanding of theatrical experience. From critical analysis to ‘big-data’ quantitative surveys, and from arts marketing research to neuro-aesthetics, each approach is able to capture a particular kind of knowledge: each has its own strengths; each brings with it particular limitations. However, whereas the cognitive sciences are uniquely placed to produce information about what physically occurs within people's bodies and brains while a performance is under way, in isolation such approaches are unable to capture what people do with these experiences. Asking how they integrate these theatrical encounters, and the thoughts and sensations they generate, into their everyday lives, requires greater attention to equivocation. It involves watching out for hesitations, confidence, certainties and uncertainties of expression. This is about listening not just to what people say but to how they say it. How do they come to their words, and how easily? Where does language stumble or fail? Where do respondents use gestures and grimaces? Where do they come up with unique turns of phrase, or fall back on tried-and-tested metaphors? Of course, this research is in itself an interpretive act: an act of interpreting an act of interpretation, and so the strength of any claims – and my own status as ‘expert’ – must be critically considered. Nonetheless, such attention can open valuable opportunities for considering how audience members take up subject positions in relation to an experience, and then how they assert this position taking by drawing on varying ideas about home, place, heritage, nation; senses of individual and community identity; as well as wider aesthetic value systems and knowledges. The object of study here is not meaning but the pathways that bring people to those meanings; not ‘value’ itself, but the manoeuvres by which we navigate our ways to a particular value judgement. This is why Reason has argued persuasively that the act of remembering should be understood as an experience in its own right, ‘connected but different’ to our in-the-moment response: because audience research is less about understanding experience per se than it is about understanding how people understand their own experiences.Footnote 53 The following section considers what this means in practice.
Understanding audience response in practice
This article has described the scholarly discipline of audience studies as providing a blueprint for resisting the reduction of value to an end point (‘impact’, ‘benefit’, ‘outcome’, ‘result’), instead refiguring value as a process: by capturing evidence of the manoeuvres different people go through in making sense of performance encounters. In this section, I offer some brief examples of how such attention has actually worked in previous studies, and of the results it has begun to yield.
In 2010–11, I captured around eight hundred questionnaire responses and conducted over forty interviews to investigate audience motivations for attending the National Theatre Wales's launch-year shows and the ways different people reacted to them.Footnote 54 The majority of responses captured were for two very different kinds of encounter, although both were broadly structured around located performance frameworks. For Mountain, Sand & Sea took the form of a walking tour of a Welsh seaside town (Barmouth) interspersed with vignettes presented using physical theatre, and The Persians was a modern adaptation of Aeschylus’ ancient Greek play staged on Sennybridge military range in the Brecon Beacons. The tenor of responses for each production varied markedly. For example, audiences for The Persians were far more likely to describe themselves as theatre lovers, while For Mountain, Sand & Sea tended to attract those who wanted to see local history played out on a national stage; and whereas The Persians was praised for not being locally focused or ‘inward looking’, this was precisely what many audience members expected from For Mountain, Sand & Sea.
However, rather than offering the anticipated heritage-style re-enactment, For Mountain, Sand & Sea took the town's stories and used them as ‘creative inspiration’ for a ludic immersive encounter, in which audiences were invited to construct for themselves an imagined Barmouth from performed fragments. This research allowed me to ask what happens when people who do not consider themselves theatre-goers encounter art that may be considered ‘difficult’: abstract rather than representational, rhizomatic rather than linear. And with certain respondents expressing surprise and disappointment that the ‘relevance’ of scenes to Barmouth had been deliberately underexplained, this is where the focus on language became valuable. In certain interviews I identified a circling kind of rhetoric, which brought people with significant local knowledge to the brink of criticizing For Mountain, Sand & Sea and back again:
You see, we know all these little bits but nothing came out in . . . That's why it's sad that their underpinning knowledge wasn't . . . Perhaps they didn't want to portray that, perhaps they were trying to portray something else, the theatre, I don't know.Footnote 55
Paying attention to the ellipses – the ‘false starts’ – in the above quotation led to the conclusion that where local knowledge conflicts with professional theatrical expertise, it frequently loses the battle. Finding this ‘legitimacy loop’ indicated that people who do not consider themselves ‘theatre experts’ often work to disconfirm their own responses. They fail to complete their emergent criticisms of the event itself, and suggest instead that they may be the ‘wrong sort of person’ to judge.Footnote 56 So while many people undeniably resist engaging in art on its own terms, rejecting artworks out of hand as deliberately obtuse, snobbish and self-satisfied, it seems that others fail to find an entry route into an experience despite concerted efforts to engage. Audiences do not necessarily have to be ‘experts’ in order to respond to art, and art does not need to be understood in order to be meaningful, yet people do need to feel able to grasp how they are meant to be orienting themselves (physically, cognitively, emotionally) towards an experience in order to gain value. Far from being unable or unwilling to do the work that this demands, oftentimes audiences simply do not understand what kind of input or receptivity is required.Footnote 57
Instead of elevating evidence of disappointment and confusion from ‘novice’ audiences over either the responses of knowledgeable attendees or the intentions of practitioners, the outcome of this research was a situated understanding of the processes by which different people worked (and in this case struggled) to make sense of their experiences. To return to those concerns about instrumentalization: it is therefore not the research approach itself that necessarily poses a danger but how its findings might be used. In this project, subsequent discussions with National Theatre Wales focused less on the relative validity of expectations and responses – or on using this knowledge to guide future decisions about what kind of work to support – and more on how audiences might next time be better prepared for a playful, creative encounter with location rather than an informative history of place.Footnote 58 Taking the place/performance investigation further, my current British Academy-funded project is asking how audiences have engaged with the concept of ‘regional’ theatre over time. Focusing on audience relationships with a particular theatre building – Bristol Old Vic, formerly the Theatre Royal, which in 2016 celebrated its 250th anniversary as the oldest continuously working theatre in the English-speaking world – this project is exploring tensions between regional and centralized ideas of artistic ‘standards’. To be more specific: tracking the trajectory of value from archival records into a new study of contemporary regional audiences has identified long-running differences between the ways the theatre's London-based managerial bodies (the originating Old Vic, and their funders in the 1940s, the then-newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain) understood the theatre's value, and how local people themselves have responded to its work. From old letters to newspaper clippings to contemporary interviews and questionnaire responses, this project explores the ways different individuals talked about the theatre over its history whilst considering the limitations and lacunae of a combined historiographical/empirical approach. Whereas the centralized model tended to privilege formal experimentation, new plays and ‘high-quality’ drama, audiences themselves were understood to want ‘down-to-earth’ productions: a preference which in turn caused difficulties for the managerial team, whose vision for the Bristol company was to ‘inspire and carry forward the work of the Old Vic, and make it worthy of the golden blessing of the Arts Council of Great Britain’.Footnote 59 For the London personnel, giving local audiences what they supposedly wanted was perceived to result in unworthy cultural offerings. This led to a policy of ‘tactful adventurousness’, as the theatre's director John Moody wrote in 1958; for while ‘Bristol has a certain reputation for being adventurous, we have to do it very tactfully as our public is nothing like a London Art Theatre’, and so any artistic innovations needed to be carefully introduced.Footnote 60
Adding a further depth of understanding to the legitimation process identified in the National Theatre Wales Project, finding that Bristol Old Vic's history is threaded through with such divisive understandings of ‘standards’ demonstrates how the expertise of theatre practitioners has been wielded to solidify a particular model of theatrical value, with regional audiences making use of alternative understandings in order to resist centralized cultural impositions. Rather than positioning varying commentators along a scale of ‘more’ or ‘less’ expert, this research approach as a whole thereby seeks to understand what happens when opinions on theatrical value either converge or collide.Footnote 61 The final section follows these ideas through to a conclusion.
Conclusion
Writing about the rise and fall of theatre blogging, the UK-based theatre critic Matt Trueman considers the value of debate and disagreement within live-performance criticism. Without the multiplicity of perspectives that are made visible when critics start ‘piling into the same shows and tackling the same subjects’, he argues, the discourse about theatre risks seeming ‘flatter’, less energetic. The key is the perceived ability of these authors to apply what Trueman calls a ‘critical lens’: what the scholars quoted in this article have variously referred to as ‘insider’ (Alston), ‘ongoing’ (Dolan) or ‘expert’ (Melrose) perspectives, often coming from those with a ‘professional stake’ (Freshwater) in theatre and/or in possession of the necessary cultural codes.Footnote 62 While theatre critics might disagree in their conclusions, and despite often working in opposition to a system of traditional mainstream arts criticism, Trueman's analysis suggests that these are voices that deserve to be taken seriously: they are capable of driving the conversation, enriching the theatrical landscape, moving the art form forward.Footnote 63 Meanwhile, as demonstrated recently by the (somewhat vitriolic) reactions to Stella Duffy's previously cited article on cultural democracy, there has been identified within the cultural industries an assumption that listening to ‘ordinary’ audiences may risk diminishing theatre, holding it back.Footnote 64
However, this article has described the history of scholarly audience research as being rooted in a consistent narrative of resistance to seeing audiences as consumers or ‘receivers’ of meaning. Instead, the audience studies field has been determinedly studying how people from different subject positions and social locations actively make sense of things by drawing on varying ‘cultural reference points, political beliefs, sexual preferences, personal histories, and immediate preoccupations’.Footnote 65 In other words, this long-running discipline has been defined by decades of attempts to uncover not the essential nature of cultural value, but rather the varying ways our assessments are bound up in our subject positions and systems of knowledge.
This approach is not to deny the importance of expert positions in constructing aesthetic valuations or productively critiquing performative potential. Nor does it mean assessing cultural value as the middle-ground average of a range of people's ratings. Nor does it necessarily precipitate advocacy of ‘“giving [audiences] what they want” and all the crass populist pandering that the phrase implies’.Footnote 66 Sometimes the outcome of such research can simply be to prompt important conversations about how an event might be framed: how to encourage audiences to experience theatre from inside a place of cultural confidence, how to help them feel they have understood what a performance is asking of them (in terms of quality of attention rather than prescribed meanings), how to encourage them to think deeply about these experiences and to make sense of them in meaningful ways. Indeed, the need to understand diverse value systems has never been more acute. Rather than listening only to people whose judgements constitute ‘valid’ critique, theatre studies might make future use of audience research approaches to investigate more deeply how people come to differing viewpoints: how they invest in them, and how they themselves imbue them with a sense of validity. This is why the study of value as a process is important: because it refocuses attention on the pathways that bring people to alternative understandings of the same event. In theatre, as in politics, listening does not mean legitimizing. When conducting theatre audience research we do not have to agree with audiences, and we do not necessarily need to act on the things we hear. However, this article does propose the need to pay attention to a diversity of experience, if only because then we might be better placed to consider how performance can actively resist the erosion of expertise within our social spheres.
