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Intellect Books - Kirsty Sedgman

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166 pages

English

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How do audiences experience live performances? What is gained when a national theater is born? These questions and more are the subject of Locating the Audience—the first in-depth study of how people form relationships with a new theater company. Investigating the inaugural season of National Theatre Wales, Kirsty Sedgman explores how different people felt about the way their communities were engaged and their places “performed” by the theater’s productions. Mapping the complex interplay between audience experience and identity, the book presents a significant contribution to our contemporary project of defining cultural value. Rather than understanding value as an end point—“impact”—Sedgman makes the provocative claim that cultural value can better be understood as a process. By talking to audiences and capturing pleasures and disappointments, Locating the Audience shows the meaning-making process in action.

Chapter 1

Why (and How to) Study Theatre Audiences?

Chapter 2

Dancing into a Minefield: The Launch of National Theatre Wales

Chapter 3

‘Local’ Theatre for ‘Local’ People: Framing Audience Response

Chapter 4

For Mountain, Sand & Sea

Chapter 5

The Persians

Chapter 6

‘Do You Think the Audience Will Get It?’

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 février 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783205738
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,4400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Jane Seymour
Production manager: Jessica Mitchell
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-571-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-572-1
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-573-8
Printed and bound by Short Run Press, UK
Contents
Foreword by John E. McGrath
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Why (and How to) Study Theatre Audiences?
Chapter 2: Dancing into a Minefield: The Launch of National Theatre Wales
Chapter 3: ‘Local’ Theatre for ‘Local’ People: Framing Audience Response
Chapter 4: For Mountain, Sand & Sea
Chapter 5: The Persians
Chapter 6: ‘Do You Think the Audience Will Get It?’
Bibliography
Appendix 1: National Theatre Wales’ First-Year Productions
Appendix 2: Methodological Appendix
Appendix 3: Post-Show Questionnaire
Index
Foreword
John E. McGrath (Founding Artistic Director, National Theatre Wales)
I have to admit that I was initially sceptical of this project. When Kirsty Sedgman first approached National Theatre Wales about her plan to engage with and analyse our launch year of activity – the Theatre Map of Wales – it seemed that she was planning on using potentially the worst possible combination of market research and cultural theorising. While both are legitimate activities in their own right, the kind of calibrated responses to artistic activity that the ‘post-show questionnaire’ has come to emblematize – such as rating things on a scale of poor to excellent – is more an indicator of ‘customer satisfaction’ than artistic experience; whereas the conclusions of the cultural theorist are sometimes driven as much by the academic viewpoint of the writer as by the art work itself.
Yet, as Kirsty indicates in the vibrant conclusion to this book, we did have something very much in common: the conviction that the audience matters. Not only as an arbiter of our success or failure, and certainly not just as a financial ‘box office target’, but as an essential part of the live event, and as the lasting community within which the work grows and develops.
My caution about Kirsty’s research came out of that conviction. By and large, each person coming to see a production will get to see it only once: they will be in that unique and fragile imagined world for just a few hours. The introduction of an external element – the questionnaire – at the delicate moment of the performance’s conclusion could feel like a bucket of judgemental cold water thrown on a flickering creative fire. Moreover, while I find cultural theory invigorating and challenging, a theorising that made claims to truth based on such audience surveys could, I felt, be hiding its subjectivity behind a pretence of having somehow got inside the audience’s heads.
And yet I agreed wholeheartedly with her basic premise: audiences matter, they are our reason for being there, we should get to know them better. Perhaps her techniques would be more productive than I could predict. I think in the end I gave the go ahead for Kirsty’s research on the basis that she ‘made herself useful and didn’t get in the way’!
What really won me over in the end, however, was how she went about her work. Not only at the two productions she covers in detail here, but at a range of other shows and events, Kirsty became a quiet, supportive presence in National Theatre Wales’ first year of activity. Helping audiences out, assisting our Front of House and Production teams, becoming part of the determined, ever-improvising crew of differently-skilled folk who were somehow managing to open a new production once a month, every month, for a year, across the landscape of Wales. Kirsty’s face became a reassuring part of the picture, her patience and attention to detail a significant ingredient in the mix of talents and good will on which the whole project depended. And she reached audiences in a way quite different to the rest of us – encouraging them to reflect, to be confident in their reactions, to be complex.
I realised, talking to her in odd moments along the journey, that her project would involve neither a grand academic theorising, nor a schematic analysis of responses, but a gentle, generous teasing out of audience members’ diverse responses to the work, and a patient attempt to draw (always provisional) conclusions as to what they might have felt about, and how they might have been affected by, our efforts.
And that’s what we see in this book – thoughtfulness, perseverance, imagination – exploring what attendance at a moment of theatre can mean to an audience. Kirsty’s interactions with audience members remind me of how a good director works with actors – nudging and teasing towards insight. And perhaps the most important quality Kirsty brings is her massive respect for all audience members. As she reminds us, there is no wrong audience, no audience that ‘just didn’t get it’; instead there are many different audiences, with differing histories, expectations and responses. And by listening to them carefully, respectfully, we all grow.
You won’t get a real overview of National Theatre Wales, or even of its first year of work, in this book. Kirsty chose her two main examples wisely, as the results indicate, discovering a range of differing responses to the differing artistic approaches. Inevitably, though, in making selections, things get omitted. National Theatre Wales’ launch year involved thirteen productions each made in a very different way in very different places, and while the examples of For Mountain Sand and Sea and The Persians are exciting in their contrasts – particularly in their relationships to place and text – they are also two works by practitioners from a similar background of intellectually-informed, cross-disciplinary site-specific work in Wales. Very different approaches during the year included playwright Gary Owen’s response to his hometown Bridgend (site of a media panic around teenage suicides a few years previously), a collaboration with circus company NoFit State, the first UK commission from leading German innovators Rimini Protokoll (working with a choir in Aberystwyth) and a community-led project in Cardiff’s Butetown ( The Soul Exchange) which has led to a collaboration with the city’s Somali population that continues to this day. Equally, while Kirsty gives an overview of National Theatre Wales’ TEAM, Assembly and Digital Community projects in that first year, the importance and centrality of this work would justify equal coverage with the productions in a balanced view of the year. And the project in which so much of this came together – the thirteenth and final production of our Theatre Map of Wales, The Passion in Port Talbot, which was of sufficient complexity and reach to justify its own book – wasn’t part of her research at all.
But that’s not the point. Because in many ways, in its very specificity, Kirsty’s admirable book, Locating the Audience , is the best possible expression of what we were aiming for when we launched National Theatre Wales with a year of deliberately very different projects all across the land. Our goal wasn’t an overview, a sense that if you saw everything you would know what National Theatre Wales was, or even what theatre in Wales was or should be. Rather, we were aiming for a series of ‘located’ theatrical moments – specific to place, time and artistic practice – a series that implied many more to come: other approaches, other places, other subjects, other audiences. And so, to create a full overview would be to mis-describe the project, to imply completion, exhaustiveness. Better instead to do what Mike Pearson, Marc Rees, Kirsty Sedgman and so many others engaged in that epic adventure did: dig down in the place you have landed, talk to people, listen, respond, propose, imagine. Be aware that there’s more going on than you can be part of, but make what you are engaged with matter because of the care and thought with which you make it.
Locating the Audience is in the end, like much of National Theatre Wales’ work, an expression of the time and place in which it happened, and an expression of the maker’s engagement with that place, those people. It is partial, opinionated and provisional. It is also passionate, creative, thorough, thoughtful and, at its best, inspiring.
Preface
‘If you close theatres you become the Taliban!’ So opens an indignant post by Miriam Margoyles. ‘How dare Councils think that people don’t need the arts. Theatre is as important as public lavatories, as critical as roads and schools’ (2013: np). Another, by Tamsin Greig, reads, ‘theatres are good for communities artistically, socially, imaginatively, and financially. Their impact is deemed unquantifiable, yet is in fact priceless’ (2013: np). Meanwhile, Simon Callow says, ‘It is tragic that for the sake of trifling sums, our theatres are closing or being forced into life-threatening economies. Once closed, a theatre rarely re-opens, and the community it serves is immeasurably impoverished’ (2013: np).
These quotations were all taken from the My Theatre Matters! campaign, launched in March 2013 to turn people into crusaders for the performing arts. Spearheaded by The Stage magazine in collaboration with the Theatrical Management Association and Equity, the campaign website asks visitors to post a photograph of themselves alongside an anecdote about their local live-arts venue. Here,