Audience Experience in an Anti-expert Age: A Survey of Theatre Audience Research

Abstract

Researchers who seek to capture and analyse audiences’ responses are facing a dilemma. In a political climate beleaguered by efforts to delegitimize expertise, what are the implications for a research tradition that seeks to understand cultural value from a range of diverse perspectives? In light of visibility generated by the 2009 publication of Helen Freshwater's Theatre & Audience and the subsequent launch in January 2017 of the international Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA), the time seems ripe for a detailed critical overview of the audience studies discipline as it has been applied to theatre. In providing that survey, this article contends that the early decades of the new millennium have seen research into arts participation becoming trapped between two colliding agendas. Whereas on the one hand there is a growing pressure to celebrate cultural engagement in all its contradictory forms, there has on the other hand been a simultaneous imperative within the arts to push back against the encroaching de-hierarchization of cultural value beyond critical and scholarly perspectives. By revealing the potentials for and limitations of the field, this article queries how future audience research projects might productively investigate audience experience without diminishing the legitimacy of expert knowledge.