I just came out of a glorious weekend of thoughtful conversation among my program alumni, students, and guests, on the subject of the “active audience.” Our two keynote provocateurs, Lynne Conner and Alan Brown, pushed us all to rethink how we think about audience experiences. And the many students and arts practitioners in the room took up the challenge with anecdotes, insights, and strategies to do so.
I’ll try to convey elements of the event this week in my weblog. I’d love to begin, as the conference did, with the perspective of Lynne Conner.
Lynne is a theater professor, playwright, and consultant based in Pittsburgh. She lives with one foot in the world of academic rigor, theory, and perspective, and the other in the practitioner world, where budgets, organizational culture, and entrenched “best practices” push back against change. Over the past years, she has been working as a lead advisor to the Heinz Endowments’ Arts Experience Initiative, encouraging several Pittsburgh arts institutions to engage audiences in a different way.
While many are complaining that today’s audiences don’t behave as they used to — they won’t sit still for long periods, they’re resistant to the sacred spaces of quiet museums and concert halls — Lynne’s study of history suggests quite another thing. In fact, she says, the quiet, receiving audience is a fairly recent blip in history. Says she:
Up through the end of the nineteenth century, western audiences of all economic classes and from a wide variety of places were expected to be active participants before, during and after an arts event. Few conceived of the arts event as existing independently of its audience — not the artists nor the producers nor the audiences themselves. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence in the historical record to suggest that it was quite the opposite; the audience’s presence was understood to be fundamental to the very definition of the arts event itself.
From ancient Athens to nineteenth-century America, audiences were expected to be highly interactive in defining the meaning and value of a cultural experience. In Athens, the entire citizenry (well, the men anyway) would take part in multi-day competitions to select the best tragedy of the year. In early theaters, audience members could move their seats around the chamber, talk amongst themselves, and interact with the actors or musicians on stage. In early American museums, citizens from all economic strata would wander ecclectic collections with picnic baskets to spend the day.
According to Conner, the passive, respectful, and quiet audience was not a historical ideal, but a construction of late nineteenth-century social and technology trends. Electric lighting shifted the audience into the dark for the first time in theater spaces, and emphasized the action on-stage. And America’s social elite were seeking to define themselves against the lower classes by emphasizing the pure and perfect aspects of “high” art. Sophisticated audiences don’t interrupt the artist’s work with talk or movement or expressed opinion. They receive it as instruction, as gospel even.
So, how is this recent trend in behavior shifting back again to a historical norm? Stay tuned this week for more…
Your post reminded me of an discussion I once attended featuring the classical guitarist Robert Bluestone.
He studied guitar in Mexico City under the Argentine classical guitarist Manuel Lopez Ramos. Bluestone argued that the separation between artist/performer and the audience is much more palpable in the United States and Europe than in Latin America and other non-industrialized areas of the world.
If he is right, it would be interesting to find out why.
For those interested in further scholarship on this topic, I can suggest a wonderful text, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, by James H Johnson.
Mitch Christensen was curious about what I think about all this. The arts have always been part of the fabric of people’s everyday lives throughout the world. There were ‘groundlings’ at the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s time. Prof. Conner, cited above, takes a narrow view of how this all works based on western culture. She’s not correct in her assesment of when and why the relationship changed between performers and audiences. There were many more complicated factors and perhaps she refers to them elsewhere. My concern involves us as high grammarians of the present and future tenses in the arts and to that end I would state the following:
In the twenty first century presenters (and artists) will succeed and thrive in their communities by being able to make the case to all constituent groups about the value of the arts. That means that four things must be done: Understanding who is in the community on a deeper and more authentic level; Learning the language of each group and being able to justify why the arts are important on their terms in their language; Making time and energy organizationally to build bridges in the community.
Here’s what needs to be done:
Owning your power and the power of the arts
Bringing that power to the table with your board and the community
Getting your board energized
Being a mission driven organization
Understanding that value is the new mantra for the 21st century
Building long term strategic alliances around shared values and visions
Learning your community not just as ticket buyers
Having a clear sense of who you serve and how they define value
Always appealing on the basis of children
Embracing the idea of creativity in the 21st century
Getting involved in the political process