This book offers readers an understanding of the theoretical framework for the concept of Arts Talk, provides historical background and a review of current thinking about the interpretive process, and, most importantly, provides ideas and insights into building audience-centered and audience-powered conversations about the arts.

This book explores the concept of audience engagement from a number of complementary perspectives, including cultural value, arts marketing, co-creation and digital engagement. It offers a critical review of the existing literature on audience research and engagement, and provides an overview of established and emerging methodologies deployed to undertake research with audiences. The book focusses on the performing arts, but draws from a rich diversity of academic fields to make the case for a radically interdisciplinary approach to audience research. The book’s underlying thesis is that at the heart of audience research there is a mutual exchange of value wherein audiences ideally play the role of strategic partners in the mission fulfilment of arts organisations. Illustrating how audiences have traditionally been side-lined, homogenised and vilified, it contends that the future paradigm of audience studies should be based on an engagement model, wherein audiences take their rightful place as subjects rather than objects of empirical research.

Drawing on unique multi-arts, multi-city scholarly research, Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts makes a timely and urgent contribution to debates about the place of arts and culture in contemporary society. The authors critically interrogate the challenges of access, diversity, privilege and responsibility in contemporary art. Asking who benefits from, pays for and consumes the arts, the book highlights fresh, forward-thinking audience and organisational attitudes that show the potential of live arts engagement to contribute to engaged citizenship. Complemented by comparative global analysis, the cutting-edge insights in this book are relevant for interdisciplinary researchers across audience studies and beyond. Enhanced by a new framework for the understanding audience engagement, the book is relevant to scholars, policymakers and reflective practitioners across the spectrum of arts and cultural industries management. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license here.

"This chapter focuses on the development of different marketing mix concepts and how they have never aligned appropriately with nonprofit arts organizations. The chapter starts with a discussion of the nonprofit arts, how they came into existence as we know them today, and how the challenges of our market economy affect them"--

This book offers the first broad-based survey of the way artists, audiences and society at large are making use of social media, and how the emergence of social media platforms that allow two-way interaction between these groups has been held up as a ‘game changer’ by many in the theatre industry. The first book to analyse aesthetic, critical, audience development, marketing and assessment uptake of social media in the theatre industry in an integrated fashion, Theatre, Social Media and Meaning Making examines examples from the USA, UK, Europe and Australasia to provide a snapshot of this emerging niche within networked, telematic, immersive and participatory theatre production and reception practices. A vital new resource for the field, this book will appeal to scholars, students, and industry practitioners alike.

This volume is the first book to map a broad range of practices and critically examine the impact of education and outreach programmes in theatres and theatre companies around the globe. This innovative volume looks specifically at the manner in which theatres and theatre companies engage in educational, outreach and community work. An array of global case studies examines a wide range of existing and innovative practices, and scrutinises how this work achieves successful results and delivers impact and outcome on investment. The editors set the scene briefly in terms of the history of education in theatre organisations, and then move on to chart some of the difficulties and challenges associated with this work, as well as looking into the conceptual issues that need to be interrogated so that we may understand the impact of outreach and education work on the communities and audiences it aims to reach. A range of theatre practitioners and academics describe their work, its background, and what the authors understand to be successful outcomes for both the participants and the theatres. Finally, the book offers suggestions for both practitioners and researchers regarding further development in this work.

The Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance. This study considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within appropriate philosophical and socio-cultural discourses. Ultimately, the collection marks the point where audiences have become central and essential not just to the act of performance itself but also to theatre, dance, opera, music and performance studies as academic disciplines. This Companion will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates, as well as to theatre, dance, opera and music practitioners and performing arts organisations and stakeholders involved in educational activities.