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Deconstructing Audiences’ Experiences

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Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts

Part of the book series: New Directions in Cultural Policy Research ((NDCPR))

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Abstract

This chapter grapples with some of the most fundamental questions of audiencing: What is going on when audiences engage or are engaged with performance? How important is the live element of audiences’ experiences? What kinds of experiences do audiences have when they engage with the performing arts? Which elements and phenomena characterise and differentiate these experiences from other kinds of experiences? Can audiences’ experiences be truly restorative or even transformative? The chapter offers a theoretical discussion of the nature of performing arts experiences before moving on to explore the relative agency that audiences have in engaging with performance. It then explores the phenomenology of audiency, including the roles that empathy, immersion, arousal, catharsis, intersubjectivity, and embodied and enactive spectatorship play in shaping audiences’ experiences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the neuroscientific and biometric techniques that led to these particular findings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School Performance Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

    Ben Walmsley

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  1. Ben Walmsley
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Correspondence to Ben Walmsley .

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Walmsley, B. (2019). Deconstructing Audiences’ Experiences. In: Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts. New Directions in Cultural Policy Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26653-0_3

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