Audiences are not what they used to be. Munching crisps or snapping selfies, chatting loudly or charging phones onstage – bad behaviour in theatre is apparently on the rise. And lately some spectators have begun to fight back... The Reasonable Audience explores the recent trend of ‘theatre etiquette’: an audience-led crusade to bring ‘manners and respect’ back to the auditorium. This comes at a time when, around the world, arts institutions are working to balance the traditional pleasures of receptive quietness with the need to foster more inclusive experiences. Through investigating the rhetorics of morality underpinning both sides of the argument, this book examines how models of 'good' and 'bad' spectatorship are constructed and legitimised. Is theatre etiquette actually snobbish? Are audiences really more selfish? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘reasonable’ within public space?Using theatre etiquette to explore wider issues of social participation, cultural exclusion, and the politics of identity, Kirsty Sedgman asks what it means to police the behaviour of others.

Explores the interplay between law and religion in the area of hate speech, whether religion is the target or source.

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 book responds to recent debates on cultural participation and the relevance of music composed today with the first large-scale audience experience study on contemporary classical music. Through analysing how existing audience members experience live contemporary classical music, this book seeks to make data-informed contributions to future discussions on audience diversity and accessibility. The author takes a multidimensional view of audience experience, looking at how sociodemographic factors and the frames of social context and concert format shape aesthetic responses and experiences in the concert hall. The book presents quantitative and qualitative audience data collected at twelve concerts in ten different European countries, analysing general trends alongside case studies. It also offers the first large-scale comparisons between the concert experiences and tastes of contemporary classical and classical music audiences. Contemporary classical music is critically discussed as a ‘high art subculture’ rife with contradictions and conflicts around its cultural value. This book sheds light on how audiences negotiate the tensions between experimentalism and accessibility that currently define this genre. It provides insights relevant to academics from audience research in the performing arts and from musicology, as well as to institutions, practitioners and artists.

This book presents a wide range of new audience studies research in the performing arts to provide a diversity of perspectives from scholarship, policy, management and practice. It explores the insights different methodologies, carried out with different kinds of audiences, can contribute both to our immediate understanding of audiences and to the future development of audience research. The book showcases research across the myriad fields that contribute to audience scholarship, highlighting the ability of audience research to engage thinkers and practitioners, from across often falsely divided art forms and academic fields. Together in one volume, these different methodologies explore the potential complementarity of evolving approaches to audience research and provide an in-depth opportunity for investigating innovative methods. Focusing on the need to understand audiences in a deeper and richer way, this volume offers a crucible of thinking and re-thinking about how society understands the impact of arts and culture on audiences. Audience Data and Research: Perspectives from Cultural Policy, Arts Management and Practice serves as a catalyst to stimulate new critical debate on the potential of empirical audience research to provide fresh insights into questions of audience enrichment and cultural value. It will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of audience studies, media and cultural studies, performance arts research, arts management, and cultural policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Trends.

This book brings together, for the first time, twenty-two chapters on arts marketing and audience development. Edited and curated to be accessible to both academics and those working in the cultural sector, the book provides an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the traditions, philosophies and approaches which underpin our ideas about increasing audiences for the arts. Covering a range of topics and international perspectives, it tells the story of how arts marketing and audience development came to be such an important management practice in the cultural sector. This edited volume discusses the relationship of audience development to arts management and cultural policy and outlines the foundational arguments which have led to contemporary debates around everyday creativity and cultural democracy. By providing vital insights from both the theory and practice of arts marketing and audience development, the book will serve as an excellent reference work for researchers. Simultaneously, this book will also be an invaluable read for those working in cultural leadership and arts management roles. The chapters in this book were originally published in various Routledge journals.