Research and Audiences

Venue: Baines Wing SR 1.14

Join us for the latest in in our Centre Research Seminar Series, with speakers Dr Ben Walmsley (School of Performance and Cultural Industries) and Dr Jonathan Gross (Cultural and Creative Industries Exchange)

 

Concert Going in Everyday Life: Institutionally Located Ethnography and the Pleasures of Listening
(Dr Jonathan Gross)

Since its creation in 1895 under the banner of ‘democratising classical music’, the Proms has developed into one of the UK’s most recognisable and contentious cultural institutions: 'The World’s Greatest Classical Music Festival', as it promotes itself, and the site of annual cultural-political controversy.

This paper draws on participant observation conducted over the course of two Proms seasons - speaking with audience members about their musical experiences in situ, within the very particular spaces of the Royal Albert Hall - and a series of semi-structured interviews with sixty Proms goers and seven concert administrators. It outlines the key findings that emerged from this fieldwork, indicating the implications the research has for understanding the pleasures and politics of still and silent listening in the concert hall. The paper will also reflect on the particular methodological approaches developed during the course of the study: suggesting important opportunities that institutionally located ethnography and semi-structured ‘life-history’ interviews offer to researchers wanting to investigate why and how the arts are important to people.

Dr. Jonathan Gross is a Research Associate at the University of Leeds, where he works on the AHRC Cultural Value project, ‘Understanding Cultural Value as a Complex System: Experiencing the Arts and Articulating the City in Leeds’, and on the evaluation of Arts Council England’s Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy programme. He is also a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, working with the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC) and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on the project, ‘Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts’.

'A big part of my life': a qualitative study of the impact of theatre (Dr Ben Walmsley)

Theatre is a complicated pastime, which audiences engage in to satisfy a complex combination of aesthetic, hedonic, emotional, education and spiritual drivers, to name but a few. Theatre is also "people oriented, intangible and perishable" . These inherent complexities perhaps partly explain the persistent lack of insight that we possess into audiences’ engagement with theatre. Pincus rightly claims that quantitative research has failed to provide a true synthesis of motivation; and according to Getz , how people describe their experience of events still remains a mystery.

By presenting the findings of a series of ‘responsive interviews’ conducted with theatre-goers in Melbourne and Leeds, this paper aims to shed some light on how audiences describe their motivations for attending theatre and the impact that it has on their lives.

Ben Walmsley lectures and researches in areas related to arts management, arts marketing, cultural value, audiences and cultural policy in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Prior to this, he worked as an Administration Manager and then Producer at the National Theatre of Scotland, before moving to Leeds Metropolitan University as a Senior Lecturer in Arts and Entertainment Management in 2008. Ben is an Artistic Assessor for Arts Council England, and has published widely on cultural value, arts marketing, arts and entertainment management and cultural policy. He is currently evaluating a national £2m ACE Transforming Arts Fundraising project and recently worked as Co-Investigator on an AHRC funded project to explore cultural value as a complex system through a case study of the LoveArts Festival in Leeds. His latest research project is Respond – a collaborative project with Yorkshire Dance and Breakfast Creatives funded by Nesta, AHRC and ACE to develop, test and evaluate the impact of a responsive online platform designed to broaden and deepen audience engagement with contemporary dance.

Experiencing the arts together: a fresh consideration of Cultural Value

Following their papers, Ben and Jonathan will discuss the findings of a recent AHRC funded project – funded under the AHRC Cultural Value programme – conducted by five researchers at the University of Leeds, who engaged in a process of ‘deep hanging out’ with five participants at Leeds’ LoveArts festival in October 2013. The project’s aim was to produce a rich, polyvocal and complex account of cultural value. Ben and Jonathan will argue that both the methods and purpose of knowing impact significantly on any exploration of cultural experience and explore the apparent paradox that we know, and yet don’t seem to know, the value of the arts.

To register for this seminar, email the Centre at ccsmghinfo@leeds.ac.uk

See here for the full list of seminars in this series.