Modern Audience Research Articles

Auspicious As You Like It: A Mirror of Family Ethics in a Nested Structure

"Auspicious As You Like It" is a New Year's Eve movie directed by Dapeng in 2021. Before this film, audiences still had the impression of Dapeng's works as comedies like "Pancake Man" and "Sewing Machine Band", but "Auspicious As You Like It" has completely overturned modern audiences' perception of his directorial works. The main reason why this literary film has left a deep impression on many people is that it uses a large number of nested narrative structures, combining drama and documentary, and cleverly exploiting the duality between real and fictional images, combining truth and fiction. This narrative structure and artistic form enriches the way of domestic film art creation at this stage and provides valuable experience for China's current film art creation.

Private photos and Holocaust testimony: A complex relationship

ABSTRACT This article explores the legibility of photos taken by Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Many museums have collected private photos from survivors, and use them to illustrate Holocaust testimony. But photos and testimonies are not always neatly aligned; private photos can also confound audience expectations. We focus on four case studies, comprising photos taken in Poland, Germany, and the UK, and interviewed survivors about their significance. Testimonies and personal photos, we conclude, reveal different but complementary aspects of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, and, if read together, can enrich the way in which modern audiences engage with this difficult history.

Combatting the Literary Canon through Performance

Combatting the Literary Canon through Performance Ophelia’s Last Word(s) reexamines the literary canon by combatting the trope of “fair and fragile” women.​ Written for Dr. Varadharajan’s English 421 course on adapting Shakespeare, this presentation/performance explores the role of women in Hamlet to offer a new voice to the archetypal shadow maiden, Ophelia. Among many concerns, the rap questions why audiences contemplate Hamlet’s madness but presume Ophelia’s to be authentic. We reinforce harmful gender representations when viewing Shakespeare’s women with a traditional and canonical lens. Examining women as codependent on male figures, emotional, and inept is a lens that perpetuates this standard for modern audiences. Adaptation provides an opportunity to reenvision these women and their fate. Using evidence and information omitted from the text, I offer an alternative ending for Ophelia where she could preserve and fight the problematic representation of fairness and fragility. Adaptation is a valuable way to approach inquiry-based learning because it provides the opportunity to reenvision and reinvent canonical norms that sabotage contemporary efforts at inclusion and equality. The canon is widely accepted and taught in the English discipline but primarily speaks to and from white males. It is intimidating to challenge but also crucial. Therefore, inquiry-based learning like this performance is a spirited attempt to challenge and change the way we learn about Shakespeare. We cannot examine women, representation, and inclusion issues until we reexamine the way women appear in canonical English works. Adaptation is key.

The Last Christmas (La Última Navidad)

The Last Christmas (La Última Navidad)

A Library of One's Own

A Library of One's Own

Mass Diffusion of Modern Digital Technologies as the Main Driver of Change in Sports-Spectating Audiences.

The rapid uptake of digital technologies is constantly transforming the modern culture of sports spectating; however, relatively little is known about the impact of digitalization on the changing face of global sports-consuming audiences, particularly from a qualitative perspective. In this article, the relationship between modern mass digital technologies (i.e., mobile applications and big data) and audiences of sports spectators is described and explained by taking a customer-centric approach to grounded theory using a literature review and in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews (N = 12) with sports marketing, management, and technology professionals. The qualitative approach permits the gathering of in-depth insights into a problem, generates new concepts through data synthesis and analysis, and captures changing attitudes within the sports industry. Moreover, the qualitative approach to research is not bound by the limitations of quantitative methods and focuses on the primary questions of “how” and “why” digital technology’s mass deployment and diffusion have transformed content consumption in the sports industry. The analysis first systematizes and codes the collected data. Second, all the materials are iteratively read and the key points are outlined. Using the iterative analysis, the theoretical and empirical insights and findings are synthesized in order to achieve the results. Finally, dimensions of the transformation of sports spectators’ consumption are identified and explained. The research implications highlight “how” and “why” modern digital technologies have changed the sports-consuming audience by making it more inclusive in terms of age, gender, demographics, social and health status. These findings are useful for sport managers to better understand their audiences and processes in an ever-changing global society.

The Absentee Author and the Plane of Understanding in Six Characters in Search of an Author

The study explores how the characters in Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of An Author expose the limiting and conventional frames of understanding that fetter the imaginations of both theatrical actors and their audience. In general, when watching a play on a stage, conventional theatre-goers are usually rigid conformists who seek the validation of preconceived notions nurtured by their subjective planes of understanding. When such notions are challenged by modern dramatists like Pirandello, who dissolve the division between theatrical action and the audience, the audience feels displaced from their secure planes of understanding. Pirandello’s metatheatre evokes a poignant conscious response from his audience who had to become participants in stage action due to the authorial absence. Subsequently, rather than rejecting a play that shifts their secure coordinates of existence, the audience must construct meaning based on their varied versions of understanding. In a self-reflective stance induced by the play, the modern audience realizes that identities, meanings, and representations are not absolute. Hence, the aforementioned realization highlights the limitation of conventional frames of understanding, which not only hinders the performance of actors but also limits the understanding of the play itself.
 Keywords: actors; author; characters; understanding; reality; theatre

The Holy Book Which Is a Book

Abstract For more than two centuries, publishers and critics have tried to design an English Bible that would be easy to hold and a delight to read. This essay tracks various attempts to design such a bible, beginning with early nineteenth-century printings that sought to declutter the bible page and to break the thick book into multiple volumes, before turning to early calls to revise the Authorized Version (a.k.a. the King James Version) so that it would be easier for modern audiences to comprehend. The latter half of the essay examines two recent efforts to reform the English Bible physically and textually, Adam Lewis Greene’s Bibliotheca (2016) and Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (2018), arguing that each makes important strides toward producing the long-awaited “readable Bible.”

Actualizing national folklore in graphics and comics in Kazakhstan

The article deals with one of the significant problems of contemporary culture – the ratio of global and local on the example of mastering of national folklore in the works of graphic artists of Kazakhstan. The authors trace changes in visual interpretation of Kazakh folklore in the context of development of the visual art of Kazakhstan in different socio-historical conditions. The main issue for researchers is the actualization of folklore in the modern Kazakh graphic art and comics, which reflects common identification strategies, as folklore provides an opportunity to represent ethno-cultural identity, and simultaneously, through turning to folklore motifs, artists try to learn new art forms and reach innovative formal and conceptual solutions, meaningful in the global context. The recognized problem is largely brought up to date by the popularity of comics with modern audiences. The features of motifs depicting rituals, holidays, ritual scenes, which, according to researchers, are associated with the expansion of the influence of the traditional culture of the Kazakh people, the appeal of graphic artists to national codes, moral imperatives of the nation, as well as their active propaganda, are studied. It is revealed that the appeal to folklore, the use of its figurative-semantic system leads to the fact that in easel graphics and comics not related to the illustration of folklore, the folklore understanding of the hero as a fighter against chaos and instability of the world is used, performing the therapeutic function of adaptation to modern reality.In this article the attention is given not only to Kazakh graphic art, but also to the achievements of the global graphic art, which allows revealing the potential of global art trends for innovations on a regional scale.

New Theatre-Fans: Empirical Research Experience

Global changes and challenges of the 21st century have significantly changed both the conditions for the social functioning of art and its audience. This has shifted the focus of contemporary research interests from creating a socio-cultural portrait of the viewer to the area of comprehending new forms of cultural consumption, the origins and drivers of cultural activity. These aspects of the socio-cultural dynamics of the theater audiences are discussed in this paper, which continues the publication of the results of a large-scale sociological study of the audience of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. Our interest is primarily due to the historically formed special perception of this theater by the public, which distinguishes the Moscow Art Theater from other theaters of the country. Basing on the empirical data of sociological polls of two types — in the theater auditorium and on the Internet — and using the methods of mathematical statistics, we identify those features that most characterize the modern theater audience and reflect fundamentally new trends in its cultural activity. We note the stratification of the theater audience on completely new qualitative grounds and the establishment of a new cultural phenomenon at the forefront of theatrical life — the online theater-fan. To answer the question about the existence of a certain “generic peculiarity” of the Moscow Art Theater audience, which in previous years embodied the legendary Moscow Art Theater tradition, we tried to identify the latent features of the audience that are not reducible to the traditional quantitative measurements of spectator activity. The findings of the study are unexpected. In some ways they disappoint, but at the same time they explain a lot in the current trends of cultural consumption. They supplement the theoretical landscape with empirical data on the qualitative and behavioral characteristics of the modern theater audience and its cultural activity, which is steadily drifting into the online space. Theoretically comprehending the results obtained we fit them into the broad context of international studies of cultural life. So, behind the particular features of specific audience groups, we can catch the manifestations of global cultural processes that determine the current sociodynamics of the audience of art.

Suspending Disbelief: (Un)civil Conflict in Ginés Pérez de Hita's Guerras civiles de Granada (primera parte)

To overcome continual disputes over Ginés Pérez de Hita's unknowable intentions, this article adopts the complicated and conflicted perspective of his broad readership in early modern Spain. This point of view understood Guerras civiles de Granada I through a horizon of expectations established by practices perceived in verisimilar historias (histories/stories) and theories gleaned from prescriptive works. To better understand these expectations, the first half of this article examines how apocryphal and authentic historias reveal frictions between early modern conceptions of the epic and historiography with respect to facticity and verisimilitude. The second half of this article considers how Guerras civiles de Granada I's entertaining verisimilitude enabled an early modern audience to suspend disbelief and contemplate how intolerant malsines perpetuated cycles of (un)civil conflict in early modern Spain by falsely accusing others of betraying the kingdom's customs, religion, and royal family.

Mapping the Path to Ecological Reparation: An Ecopsychological Reading of theEpic of Gilgameshand Its Implications for the Study of Religion

AbstractBy offering a reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh as a psychological map of the process by which one journeys from ecological wrongdoing, through eco-guilt, to reparation, this article makes a case for the value of ecopsychology, a branch of psychology, to religious studies scholars working on projects related to ecology or nature-human relationships. The article focuses on the relationship between Gilgamesh’s deforestation of the Cedars of Lebanon and the eco-guilt that emerges as a direct consequence of his actions, a guilt that Gilgamesh must reconcile before he can make reparations. Reading Gilgamesh’s journey through the lens of ecopsychology highlights the importance of eco-guilt in his transition from an ego-driven king to one “wise in everything” and enhances the impact of this classic story on a modern audience for whom ecological wrongdoing and the need for reparation are at the center of a world-wide debate regarding our planet’s future.

APPROACHES TOWARDS ELUCIDATING EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO MUSIC THEATRE

As a result of recent publications in the field of music theatre there has been a resurgence of interest in this highly misunderstood art form. This paper discusses the methodology and results from an online survey which investigated emotional responses to orchestration1 and instrumental aesthetics in contemporary music theatre. This report summarises the current literature, demonstrates gaps in the field, and suggests how further research may benefit the development of new music theatre. The research tests the hypothesis that music theatre is accidentally alienating to non-familiar audiences because of its complex musical language and perceived associations with opera and the ever-popular Broadway/West End musical. Since the 1960s, music theatre has been used to express artistic experimentalism in music performance. This paper aims to elucidate the connections between the instrumental and orchestration choices made by music theatre composers and the effects they have on a modern audience to identify key indexes which may indicate the art form’s failure to capture audience imaginations or to engage audiences emotionally. This research indicates that audiences generally have a good perception of instrumentation in music theatre. There is also evidence to support the hypothesis that there is a connection between lack of aesthetic appreciation (the admiration of beauty in art) and negative emotional response. However there remains a gap in our understanding of the abstract nature of music theatre, which some audience members struggle to comprehend or engage with emotionally.

The Extreme Wish in Greek Literature

Abstract In a topos found in a range of Greek texts spanning the archaic period to the sixth century AD, a speaker links the attainment of a cherished goal to a declared desire for death. This sequence of ideas is often dismissed as formulaic or rhetorical; I argue that the topos is more varied and meaningful than such characterizations suggest. Its rationale, grounded in the archaic concept of alternation of fortune, is spelled out for a modern audience in Solon’s speech to Croesus at the opening of Herodotus’ Histories.

International journalist on TV: the evolution of the profession from the program "International Panorama" by V. Zorin to the "International Review" by E. Primakov

This work is devoted to the study of the evolution of the profession of an international journalist on television, the study of common and distinctive aspects of the work of international observers. The subject of the research in the article is the informational and analytical television programs "International Panorama" by V. Zorin and "International Review" by E. Primakov. For the research, the author considers the following materials: releases of the program "International Review" on the channel "Russia 24" in the period from 2015-2021; recordings of the program "International Panorama" 1982-1984 on the channel "Soviet Television". The research method includes a comparative analysis of creative techniques in the work of a modern international journalist and an international observer of the Soviet school. The main objective of the study was to identify the retained and acquired (new) skills and abilities in building international programs, to detect trends in the evolution of the profession, to identify positive and negative features of the transformation of an international journalist. Such a study is being conducted for the first time, which explains its novelty and significance. During the analysis, the following conclusions were made: the processes of modification in the profession of an international journalist are inevitable. With the development of information technology, there is widespread access to information, respectively, interest in the resources of the Internet platform is growing every day. The methods of work of journalists are changing, who need to adapt to the requirements of a modern audience, prepare content that is interesting to most viewers. Programs with entertainment content have the highest ratings, therefore, in order to retain the audience, the hosts of international political programs are forced to submit complex analytical information through the focus of entertainment genres. As a result, there is a daily modification of journalistic genres, transformation and loss of classical techniques in work, a departure from the Soviet school of international journalism. However, despite the changes in the International Review program, Yevgeny Primakov holds the bar for high–quality international analytics - the content of his releases has not become entertaining, all the experts of the program are highly qualified specialists in their field.

What COVID has Taught us about Dental Hygiene: A Novel Hypothesis for a Modern Audience

What COVID has Taught us about Dental Hygiene: A Novel Hypothesis for a Modern Audience

Representing Shylock: The Performance History of Shakespeare’s Jew as an Indicator and Instigator of Cultural Change

Since its earliest performances, The Merchant of Venice garnered attention for its depiction of Shylock, the greedy Jewish moneylender who takes the protagonist of the play to court, demanding a pound of flesh. Over the centuries, depictions of this character have varied as much as the critical and popular reception to him. In the hands of each actor who newly embodies the character, Shylock can take the shape of a grotesque antisemitic caricature or a sympathetic anti-hero speaking truth to power. While Shylock began as a comic villain whose defeat allows the comedic resolution, almost all modern directors, actors, and audiences are forced to reckon with the cruel antisemitism voiced by the play’s protagonists. In tracing the performance history of this character from the turn of the 17th century, to the Third Reich, to his most recent incarnations, this research resists reducing Shylock to any single interpretation. Instead, this essay argues that Shylock serves as a reflection of the place and time in which he is performed, both an indicator of cultural attitudes and a potential instigator of cultural action towards oppression, justice, and representation of those deemed outsiders.

MAIN PECULIARITIES OF CREATING ARTISTIC MEDIA CONTENT IN THE DIGITAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE FOR JOURNALISTS

The article is devoted to the problem of creating artistic analytical content in digital media. During the rapid revolutionary development of digital media resources , the need for consumption and production of high-quality content on artistic issues is constantly growing. Update and discussion of the problem how to create quality art materials in digital media are necessary in understanding the professional qualities that an art journalist should possess. The functions and tasks of an art journalist, preparation for the creation of video and digital art content in conditions of fragmented and clustered perception of information by the modern audience are defined.

The Most Dazzling Girl in Berlin by Kip Wilson

Reviewed by: The Most Dazzling Girl in Berlin by Kip Wilson Natalie Berglind Wilson, Kip The Most Dazzling Girl in Berlin. Versify/HarperCollins, 2022 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780358448907 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780358447764 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 7-12 Eighteen-year-old Hilde is searching for a job and a place to stay after ageing out of her orphanage in 1932 Berlin. Refuge comes through an unusual avenue: a gay cabaret called Café Lila, where Hilde starts a waitressing job, and Rosa, one of its waitresses who allows Hilde to stay in her home. With the tension of pending election outcomes, Hilde juggles the pressures of keeping her new job (which also requires her to sing onstage), her blossoming romantic feelings for Rosa, and the fear of losing everything again. This poignant verse novel packs its punches, allowing readers to feel the emotional highs and lows of the girl's journey as she clings to a fraying thread of hope through impossibly hard times. Much like in Wilson's White Rose (BCCB 3/19), the historical setting is exquisitely done, weaving in references to popular culture of the period and providing well-researched insights into the relative freedoms queer people experienced during the Weimar Republic. Hilde is impressively relatable to a modern audience despite her differing life circumstances, and queer teens may glean comfort in her Café Lila found family—but everyone could stand to gain from Hilde's resilience against the odds in an uncertain world. An author's note covers liberties taken with the text as well as factual inspirations, and selected sources and a glossary are included. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

PROJECT “COMMUNICATION CAMPAIGN OF THE LNAA GALLERY”: PROMOTION OF THE ACTIVITY OF YOUTH ART SPACE IN THE 2020 REALITIES

The article deals with the specifics of the artistic structure of modern pop vocal performance in the dimension of art synthesis. The combination of tendencies to theatricalization and bringing the technical aspect of performance to virtuosity are singled out as the leading features of the relevant artistic practice. The author highlights the need for mobility, entertainment and competitiveness as prerequisites for the successful implementation of vocal performance in the modern context. The independence of each performance and the dynamics of repertoire change are analyzed as necessary elements of the artistic composition of this genre. Conciseness, thematic invention, and sharpened grotesqueness of stage image are also regarded as necessary tools to convey the artistic message of the performer and director to the modern audience. The lack of a mandatory methodological model for staging a scenic performance is revealed as a prerequisite for emphasizing the individuality of every artist.