Audience Experience Research Articles

Pilgrimage to a Memory Hole: Towards an Affective Study of Fan Tourism in Asia via Angkor Wat and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love

This paper extends existing conversations on ”fan tourism” in East and Southeast Asia from the focus on economic advantages and impacts of blockbuster movies to the making of a ritualized space and affective experiences of audiences identified as fans/cinephiles. Using the case study of fan pilgrimage to Angkor Wat featured in the final sequence of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), the paper draws attention to the formation of iconic and cinephilic location through various textual engagements. The paper explores the way ritualized moments featured in these writings relate to a tradition in cinephilia, which favours moments when things gain agency in the film. Drawing on contribution of works in fan studies, the paper further points to the way in which fans turn the iconic space and cinephilic moments into their own “places of the imagination” (Reijnders, 2011, 8) through re-enactment. The paper concludes by reflecting on the total experience of pilgrimage as a meaningful journey by discussing fans/cinephiles’ own ethical and social reflections.

Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof

Reviewed by: Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof Caroline Heim EXPERIENCING LIVENESS IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES. Edited by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof. Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series. New York: Routledge, 2016; pp. 304. Scholars of performance studies have long framed “liveness” through the terms of the debate between Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander. Dispelling many myths, the central aim of Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance is to reconsider and reconceptualize this debate by moving away from a discussion of liveness per se and toward the performers’ and audiences’ experience of the live. Rather than focusing on or even addressing the well-worn debate between Phelan’s ephemeral and Auslander’s reproducible liveness, the book considers the liveness experience through the audience’s interaction with the performance. This subtle, yet reaching change in purview makes all the difference. Documentation of the “particular kinds” (7) of audience experience of liveness is long overdue. The majority of contributors manage to capture this and take some bold steps into this challenging frontier, while a few exceptions stay within the safe confines of philosophical musings. Interdisciplinary in orientation, this book discusses current [End Page 125] critical discourses across the art forms of theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts. The book consists of two parts: “Audiencing” and “Materialising.” Each contains a series of essays and shorts, which include analyses of immersive theatre, performance art, nonhuman audiences, archival performance, music improvisations, performance installations, and electronic music. Part 1, “Audiencing,” contains an array of exceptional essays on the liveness experience for the audience. Reason and Lindelof borrow the media studies term audiencing to explore the affects, effects, and practices of liveness on and for the audience. The essays in this first part reach toward the transformative power of liveness, proposing innovative ways to move forward in audience research or experience. If it is audiences who open up the world to larger meanings and augment the art event, then we need to be valuing audiences as co-creators. The chapters achieve this by exploring how the experience of the ephemeral event can be extended through vehicles such as the memorial experience, social media, creating artworks, or composing poems, with a large emphasis on mediatised audiences. Refreshingly, some of the chapters include empirical research, and some, as Reason has argued for in previous work, “ask the audience” about their experiences, perhaps not of describing “liveness” as such, but of their own meaning-making and affective responses to productions or artworks. Martin Barker discusses “high-value” experience moments that result in cultural transformation, proferring that entertainment can be transformative when texts “come alive” for their audiences. Also focusing on transformation, Katja Hilevaara explores how our memories of performances are a valid part of critique, a provocative discourse in this “post-truth” age. A much more optimistic reading of liveness than Phelan’s “disappearance,” Hilevaara’s expansive concept of the memorial experience raises multiple questions about the role, construction, and subjective experience of memory. Lucy Bennett explores the social-media audiencing of spectators at live music events as experienced by wider audiences. Also considering music, Stephanie Pitts considers educational avenues and online solutions to boost audiences as a solution to the steady decline in live classical music attendance. She includes an overdue recommendation that classical music program notes and other extraneous public discourses move away from specialized “knowledge-rich” writing to more accessible information for audiences. Paddy Scannell considers the phenomenological aspects of liveness by introducing an interesting concept of care structures of events: the behind-the-scenes labor, love, and investment that work toward productions. Problematizing the “affect” turn in performance studies, Reason suggests that affect could be an avenue for exploring the ineffable in dance performance. Based on his original experiments with different audience responses to productions, he suggests a “vocabulary of the gut” (89). Reason’s chapter introduces many new concepts that deserve a book of their own. Part 2, “Materialising,” follows more of a philosophical direction in exploring the ontological aspects of the live event. The chapters and shorts in this part contain recurring motifs of time and of the audience...

Staging The Frozen Deep as Practice-led Research: "Illusion can only be perfected through the feelings."

Staging The Frozen Deep as Practice-led Research:"Illusion can only be perfected through the feelings."1 Joanna Hofer-Robinson (bio) Rapturous tributes to performances of The Frozen Deep by Wilke Collins in 1857 may be hard to understand when we read the drama today; indeed, they even provoked skepticism at the time. Writing in the Examiner in 1857, for example, a reviewer worried that audiences familiar with the sentimental language and stock characters of melodrama, but "who have not seen and judged" Collins's play for themselves, "may not unreasonably suspect us of exaggerated eulogy," when he recorded "the silent tribute of irrepressible tears" recently observed at a private production ("Tavistock House Theatricals" 38). This article suggests that we likewise receive only a partial impression of the play's effect when reading the script in isolation. Emotion is writ large in melodrama and direct verbal articulation is only one device through which nineteenth-century actors communicated heightened feelings. Practitioners also utilized a combination of gesture, music and staging to create affective action and arouse sympathy.2 Such effects are now lost because, like many Victorian melodramas, the play is rarely performed. However, in response to a recent research production of The Frozen Deep, viewers reacted warmly, noting surprise at the play's "emotional intensity" and "emotional power." Although the dialog is stagy and overblown by current standards, the drama retains the potential to communicate and elicit emotion when words are contextualized in performance. A practice-led methodology that decenters Dickens's involvement and [End Page 329] ignores questions about collaborative authorship, biography, and managerial methods has several advantages.3 First, it enables us to conduct a "theatrical close reading" (Whipday and Cox Jensen 292) which illuminates interactions between the ensemble of players, and dialog and movement, that are not accessible when reading the playscript alone. Attention to the cooperation required for any performance by an ensemble of players, musicians and auxiliary personnel also helps us understand the play's emotional effects and intensity. I make this claim based on a research production James Phillips and I co-directed in October 2016, when we staged selected scenes from The Frozen Deep at the annual Dickens Day conference held in Senate House Library, London.4 Drawing on this production, I explore how nineteenth-century performance techniques (including attitudes, realization and tableaux) shape the actor-audience dynamic and the emotional impact of the play. Practice-led research, I should explain, uses "creative performance as a method of inquiry" (Kershaw qtd in Fleishman 28) to examine what can be gathered from "specialised embodied knowledge" (Walton 123).5 The methodology is particularly apt for enquiries led by scholar-practitioners (Peters), theater historians (Bush-Bailey), and musicologists (Hibberd and Nielsen), as each expert investigates bodies of work that are activated by the "experiential and tacit knowledge" of performers (Symonds 212). It is also appropriate to studies of Dickensian dramaturgy.6 The findings presented here are the outcome of a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice which echoes the characteristic intertheatricality of Victorian theatrical cultures [End Page 330] (Robinson, Cox Jensen and Whipday 163).7 Our production would have been impossible without the contributions and advice of musicologists, theater historians, site managers and performers. In addition, by taking advantage of an audience broadly familiar with the play, we were able to position delegates as "co-researcher[s]", rather than "test subject[s]" when we examined their reactions and written responses to post-show questionnaires (Walton 132). Naturally, I do not claim that contemporary audience reaction can be mapped on to those of the original spectators. Affective responses are ephemeral and cannot be empirically measured, particularly at a historical distance. Instead, analysis of actor and audience experiences contribute to a theatrical close reading by offering multiple perspectives on the production. Accordingly, I use the term "practice-led research"–as opposed to "practice-as-research" or "practice-based-research"–to describe "the process of staging Dickens's play[s] as a mode of exploration, rather than as a means of testing a pre-existing hypothesis" (Robinson, Cox Jensen and Whipday 162). My emphasis, therefore, is not on "what is intended but what is learnt" (Symonds 222; italics in original). Practice...

The Figure of Stigma in Shakespeare’s Drama

This essay theorizes a tradition in William Shakespeare’s drama involving some of his greatest and most captivating characters, including, among others, Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Shylock the Jew, Edmund the Bastard, Falstaff, Thersites, and Caliban. While they have been called “strangers,” “outsiders,” and “others,” the notion of stigma best describes how these characters fit into Shakespeare’s dramatic vision. As such this essay combines the sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma with the literary historian Erich Auerbach’s account of “figural realism” to establish a vocabulary to explain how Shakespeare applies, rearranges, avoids, and dismantles what the essay calls the “figure of stigma.” In the figure of stigma an abnormal body evoking both pity and fear splits into the opposed dramatic elements of villainy and irony, the former an element of tragedy and the latter of comedy. Then the figure is reconstituted at the end of the play in the hybrid plot of tragicomedy, in which the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious punished on a stage that mingles clowns and kings. Like Shakespeare’s problem plays, however, the resolution of the figure of stigma is riddled with lingering questions, resulting in an awkward or unstable aesthetic experience for audiences

The audience experience of immersion through intersubjective embodiment in Sensuous Geographies (2003)

Abstract This article analyses an immersive interactive installation Sensuous Geographies (2003), created by choreographer Sarah Rubidge in collaboration with composer Alistair MacDonald. It applies phenomenological philosophies to critical interpretations of audience participants’ embodied experience. Rubidge employs choreographic sensibilities in designing a performative human–computer interface where the participants create their own sonic signature through physical behaviours while interacting with each other. The digital sound emerges as the ‘dys-appearing body’, as philosopher Drew Leder terms it, because it becomes part of their doubled embodiment but is perceptible due to its otherness. Moreover, the emergent sound embodies the participant’s subjectivity, which develops out of inter-subjectivity, since it is not transparent for the participant him/herself but generated through the intertwinement of the self and others. The self-perception of the corporeal body is heightened through digital imagery, costumes, facial veils and tactile materials, which provide the participant with a more intuitive and embodying experience of the sonic environment.

Designing Multimedia-based Presentation in Academic Speaking Classroom

Educational technology is substantially aimed at assisting the teaching and learning process especially in material delivery that can be done using Powerpoint Presentation. Particularly, the integration of text-based material and a variety of media promote the likelihood that the audience experiences the effective information processing. Therefore, multimedia-based presentation that is accompanied by verbal explanation must be designed as effective as possible in order to foster the audience’s understanding. The current research was aimed at investigating the strategies employed by the students in designing multimedia-based presentation in Academic Speaking classroom. This qualitative research was carried out using case study approach to obtain the in-depth information. The data were collected through observation, document analysis, and interview. The results show that the students strategies in designing multimedia-based presentation are mainly to foster the audience’s thinking process. Those strategies are using heading to lead to thesis, using bullet list to create sequential delivery, and using the additional element to engage the audience. To make the slide gets into the logical manner, a transitional device is also required. This research will contribute to the teaching and learning process that uses presentation as the method of material delivery. The teacher and the student are expected to know the strategies to design an effective presentation that can promote the audience’s way to process the information.
 Keyword: academic speaking, educational technology, information processing, material delivery, multimedia-based presentation

“Can These Bones Live?” A Performance Criticism Study of Ezekiel 37:1–14

We live in a time when a paradigm shift is occurring from the study of the Bible as a series of texts read in silence by readers, to the study of the Bible as a set of compositions performed for audiences. Biblical performance criticism is the emerging paradigm. It begins by recognising the essential nature of the biblical tradition as oral events, where transformative meaning is created in the interplay of story, storyteller, telling, and audience. Experiential exegesis is a proposed new methodology for the study of particular compositions as performance literature. This approach to biblical study enables the re-creation of a meaningful resemblance of the original performance experience for a contemporary audience. In this article, the processes of experiential exegesis are applied to the story of the Dry Bones, recorded in Ezekiel 37:1-14. The study of the Dry Bones as a story performed for audiences reveals that the interaction between the storyteller and the audience occasions a transformation of despair into hope. Experiences of telling the story to a church congregation and to incarcerated women confirm the viability of performance criticism study to interpret biblical tradition such that, in the words of Walter Wink: "the past becomes alive and illumines our present with new possibilities for personal and social transformation."

‘Blest’ or ‘t’othered’: Alternative Graveyards in Bleak House, Reynolds, and Walker

This article proposes an alternative reading of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–3), by attempting to recreate the reading experience of the first audience of this now well-studied novel. A comparison is made between key scenes in Bleak House and similar scenes in the first volume of George William Macarthur Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844), to demonstrate the differing literary styles of these two popular writers. The article draws on contemporary non-fiction, including George Alfred Walker's Gatherings from Grave Yards (1839) and several news articles, as well as more recent scholarship on Dickens to place the representations of graveyards in the novels of Reynolds and Dickens within the larger discussion of the necessity of sanitary reform in London at the time. The article argues that a proper consideration of this context enriches our understanding of the thematic structure of Bleak House.

Exploring the motivations for building new digital musical instruments

Over the past four decades, the number, diversity and complexity of digital musical instruments (DMIs) has increased rapidly. There are very few constraints on DMI design as such systems can be easily reconfigured, offering near limitless flexibility for music-making. Given that new acoustic musical instruments have in many cases been created in response to the limitations of available technologies, what motivates the development of new DMIs? We conducted an interview study with ten designers of new DMIs, in order to explore (a) the motivations electronic musicians may have for wanting to build their own instruments; and (b) the extent to which these motivations relate to the context in which the artist works and performs (academic vs club settings). We found that four categories of motivation were mentioned most often: M1 – wanting to bring greater embodiment to the activity of performing and producing electronic music; M2 – wanting to improve audience experiences of DMI performances; M3 – wanting to develop new sounds, and M4 – wanting to build responsive systems for improvisation. There were also some detectable trends in motivation according to the context in which the artists work and perform. Our results offer the first systematically gathered insights into the motivations for new DMI design. It appears that the challenges of controlling digital sound synthesis drive the development of new DMIs, rather than the shortcomings of any one particular design or existing technology.

Beethoven's Leonore in Berlin around 1900: On Contextual Factors of Music Performances as Source Material for Past Emotional Practices

The last decades have seen a steady increase of historians and historical musicologists whose research focuses on concert audiences and music performances. While previous research on music predominantly dealt with the analysis of works, their ‘great’ composers, and musical styles, now musical events and their audiences have more and more come into consideration. Scholars have tried, for instance, to explain how the ascending bourgeoisie influenced various parameters of concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They have examined changing behavioural patterns of the audience (Müller 2015, Johnson 1994) and a ‘transformation of taste’ (Weber 2000). Most of the studies, however, do not really attempt to explain what role the emotional impact of music itself played. How did audiences experience different musical styles in different contexts? This article approaches this rather difficult question by applying a comparative methodology. The starting point is the observation that the performance contexts of ‘classical’ music were far from being homogeneous. By examining four performances of Ludwig van Beethoven's Leonora Overture No. 3 in highly different social contexts in Berlin from 1895–1907 — ranging from gala concerts of working class choirs, to open air military concerts, to performances in bourgeois circles — this article attempts to illustrate how the analysis of concert contexts can serve as a means to better understand the emotional experiences of concert audiences.

Not a cape, but a life preserver

Interactive sea level rise viewers (ISLRVs) are an increasingly popular risk communication technology designed to help users visualize the effects of water inundation on their region so as to facilitate more prudent decision-making. Designed by and for a variety of stakeholders, these viewers generally have as their goal affording users a more "localized" experience with climate change and sea level rise data, allowing users to explore as specific as street-level the effects of rising waters in coastal regions. While the rise of these tools mirrors the trend in risk communication scholarship towards more localized messaging, there is still more work to be done in terms of providing a more localized user experience for a broader public audience. This article presents the results of a user experience study conducted with 12 residents of a coastal region, the results of which formulate an attempt to develop more insight into techniques for designer localization. The article concludes with concrete recommendations for scholars and practitioners concerned with designing more effective interactive risk communication technologies that respond to the public need for localized information for decision-making.

Visual arts marketing in East Asia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it reviews the background to, and development of the special issue call for papers on the topic of “Visual arts marketing in East Asia”; second, it introduces the four papers and commentary in the issue; and third, it considers some of the key areas with a rich potential for future directions of research.Design/methodology/approachThe papers in this special issue comprise of both qualitative (e.g. interviews, observation, case studies) and quantitative (surveys) as well as conceptual issues for policy and artists. Moreover, the articles are interdisciplinary, drawing from art history, cultural studies, philosophy and international relations as well as marketing.FindingsFindings and insights relate to topics such as the structure of the visual arts markets of East Asia, political influences on these arts markets, alternative spaces such as art festivals, ambiance and audience experience in museums and new media initiatives.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors believe that all of the papers have implications for future thinking, research, scholarship and practice in the area of arts marketing, particularly for scholars, cultural institutions and artists working in Asia.Originality/valueAs far as the editors are aware, this is the first ever journal special issue on arts marketing in East Asia. In particular, the authors offer some new ideas in thinking about visual arts marketing in Asia as part of this editorial essay, particularly in considering the difficulties for both artists, arts organisations and academics in creating from the “periphery”.

How Sports Entertain: Enjoyable and Meaningful Experiences for Sports Audiences

This study explores how sports media entertains audiences. A survey found that sports media provides both enjoyable experiences and meaningful experiences for audiences. In doing so, this study illuminates how and why sports media entertains audiences. Watching sports can be understood as a hedonic media experience that is fun and pleasurable, but this study shows that sports media consumption can also be a deeper, meaningful experience that gives insight into the human condition. This shows that even for an audience member who is not enjoying an event, they still might be deriving meaning from the event. Further, this study examines how sports media might generate these experiences as the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, the dimensions of self-determination theory and affective state of audience members, are explored. The dimensions of self-determination theory were instrumental in predicting audience enjoyment while affect was instrumental in predicting meaningful experiences for audiences. Overall, this study provides information relevant in understanding how and why people consume sports media-which should be of interest to practitioners and scholars alike.

Shylock in the Cinema

Abstract This article discusses different responses to Michael Radford’s 2004 screen rendition of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It examines selected newspaper reviews, as well as academic papers that critique the filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, taking into account its representation of Shakespeare’s Jew. The article interrogates to what extent the medium – theatre or cinema – affects the way the audience experiences the work, especially when dealing with an issue as complex as antisemitism. In this manner, Radford’s attempt to historicize the events in Merchant is viewed as a form of attenuating the antisemitic elements in the play.

Shylock in the Cinema

This article discusses different responses to Michael Radford’s 2004 screen rendition of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It examines selected newspaper reviews, as well as academic papers that critique the filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, taking into account its representation of Shakespeare’s Jew. The article interrogates to what extent the medium – theatre or cinema – affects the way the audience experiences the work, especially when dealing with an issue as complex as antisemitism. In this manner, Radford’s attempt to historicize the events in Merchant is viewed as a form of attenuating the antisemitic elements in the play.

Human-exhibition interaction (HEI) in designing exhibitions: A systematic literature review

This paper presents a theoretical framework in which fundamental exhibition factors were defined, communicative relationship between humans and exhibitions was presented, and a systematic literature review was conducted through a tool-supported method. There have been 59 exhibition design factors (EDFs), 18 audience experience factors (AEFs), and 14 behavior data (BD) that were explored, and a framework of HEI (human-exhibition interaction) was described. Quantitative analysis and exploratory method were refined using analytic software such as NVivo and EndNote, and total 1467 documents were extracted from EDFs while 270 focusing on AEFs and 162 on BD. The structured review addresses the issue lacking a clear introduction to the term HEI in prior literature. It describes the dynamic HEI framework for designing exhibitions at both concept and application level, which connects humans and exhibitions with EDFs, AEFs, and BD. These results have implications for introduction, development, and execution of exhibition design and management.

Ludic form and contemporary performance arts

ABSTRACTFour performance artists who have used computer games in their work were interviewed for their reflections on aspects of that process, including the decision to make use of games; difficulties and challenges entailed by that choice, and aesthetic values realized in implementing it. Their reflections are related to foundational questions of computer game studies, especially the question of what computer gameness consists in. The main argument draws on Adorno’s writing on theatre, specifically his suggestion that audience participation might carry utopian potential. The idea of ‘ludic form’ is put forward as an attempt to grasp positive fulfilments of this in contemporary performance, especially the performance of space. The aesthetics of ludic form turn on use of a succession of mild shocks to stimulate and guide the audience through that process, rather than creation of an immersive or ‘gamified’ audience experience.

Body Performance Analysis in Interactive Art Based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Views

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a famous phenomenologist of the twentieth century. Being influenced by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty paid attention to sensory perception and the body topic by rejecting empirical and rational philosophical theories. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is around the subject that perception is a physical phenomenon, not a mental event. New artistic media provide an opportunity for audience engagement and experience, and since the experience is always body dependent, body is considered an integral part of the modern media. The purpose of this research is to understand the interaction of audience regarding interactive art effects, relying on Merleau-Ponty's views. The main research question: What are the commonalities of Merleau-Ponty's body performance theory in the process of perceiving artwork and interactive art elements? This research is fundamental in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytic in terms of nature with an adaptive approach and library research is used for information collecting. The research results showed that comparing Merleau-Ponty's views and the interactive art elements, there are commonalities such as sensory perception, audience acting, globalism (Gestalt), interconnectedness and pre-reflective perception. Based on these common features, the new art media, including interactive art, can be analyzed.

Audience engagement with community music performances: Emotional contagion in audiences of a ‘pro-am’ orchestra in suburban Sydney

Research into audience engagement in the arts is a growing area of interest because of the need to build audiences and to provide convincing evidence of the value of arts programs to funding bodies. In addition, the way in which music works so as to touch the listener is of ongoing interest to music psychologists and is increasingly being considered in the context of live listening situations. This paper considers the phenomenon of emotional contagion, or the transference of emotion between audience members, and how this contributes to the audience experience. Audience members ( N = 105) were surveyed at three concerts by a ‘pro-am’ orchestra – an orchestra made up of both professionals and amateurs – about their response to the concerts and factors that influenced that response. It was found that emotional contagion can enhance the emotional response of audience members at concerts, and that this is mediated by the sense of social bonding participants have with other people present. Social bonding is also associated with attendance at enhancement events such as pre-concert talks.

Creating a Speech Choir: The Bounty of Authentic Audience Experience for Students

Creating a Speech Choir: The Bounty of Authentic Audience Experience for Students