Bursting out of our bubble

The urge to surround ourselves with people who confirm our view of the world is nothing new. It’s tribal, evolutionary. But social media has made it even more simple to become the curators of our own friendly universes. This is one of the lessons I learned from the general election earlier this year: how thoroughly over the years I’ve honed my online world down to people who think like me. Other than occasional, vertiginous glimpses into the boiling hell of Daily Mail comments, and nitpicking quarrels aside, most of my time is spent fundamentally agreeing with people. This makes it all too easy to ignore divergent voices, to dismiss the people I disagree with as loner weirdos, rather than taking them seriously as representatives of a much deeper trench. The voices we hear, in the main, tend to be the echoes of our own.

We risk falling into a trap …the ‘virtuous circle’, with positive responses gleefully amplified while disappointments are implicitly discouraged

That is the lesson I learned from the election. But it also applies to the arts. I work in the field of audience research, which in its broadest sense means talking to people about what they get out of things like theatre, sculpture, poetry, dance. But it also includes what keeps others away, which is a really important question and, right now, an especially timely one. A new survey exploring UK arts diversity has been making the rounds recently, part of a collaborative research project headed by Dave O’Brien at Goldsmith’s (University of London). This comes on the heels of debates about why people from less affluent homes and Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities are significantly less likely to participate in ‘high’ cultural events. In my own research and that of others, there is frequently found to be a real sense for some people that these forms of culture are ‘not for us’. Some illuminating examples can be read in a recent special issue on Theatre Audiences by Participations, which asks (among other things) whose voices are encouraged and whose are silenced by the cultural operations of power.

In a recent feature in AP Victoria Johnson encouraged us to reposition audience development as an ongoing conversation. I will now use her excellent advice as the basis for confronting one of the central problems facing the cultural industries. This is the temptation to prioritise certain kinds of voices, while ignoring or ‘disconfirming’ others. More and more we are asked to ‘prove the impact’ of our work by hiring evaluators, measuring wellbeing increases on quantitative scales, capturing and disseminating participant praise. And while there’s nothing wrong with this per se (I am an arts evaluator myself and enthusiastically pro-research), we need to think carefully about the questions we ask, both in terms of how we ask them, and who we ask. Otherwise we risk falling into a trap that Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow call the ‘virtuous circle’, with positive responses gleefully amplified while disappointments are implicitly discouraged. After all, as the term ‘conversation’ suggests, widening arts access means more than simply getting new bums on old seats. It’s about showing audiences that their thoughts, feelings, opinions and responses actually matter. It’s about really listening to what different people have to say.

Before you shelve this advice as stating the obvious, ask yourself this: Have you ever taken part in (or overheard) a discussion about a piece of negative feedback? I’ve watched audiences and professional critics being dismissed as people who didn’t get it, attending with inappropriate expectations and drawing on incompatible systems of judgment. On one occasion, a theatre-maker took to social media to express disappointment at an ambivalent online review, leading one commentator to offer the comforting advice that these amateur critics are often not even artists themselves. The implication is that some people should be disqualified from leaving feedback or that their opinions can’t be taken seriously.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with reassuring your fellow practitioners. On the contrary, a supportive community of like-minded people can offer important encouragement at particularly disheartening times. Nor do I suggest that audience reactions should, like market research, necessarily be used to guide the shape of the work (although collaborative processes can often produce really interesting results). What I am concerned with, though, is how the pervasive image of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ audiences can trickle down into the outlook of potential participants. In my work on theatre audiences I found that, in speaking about their experiences, less ‘culturally confident’ people frequently dismissed their own views, suggesting that as non-experts they weren’t allowed to judge.

So what’s to be done? Lynne Connor in her book ‘Audience engagement and the role of arts talk in the digital era’ addresses this question brilliantly, explaining how strategies like arts clubs (akin to book clubs) and facilitated discussions can encourage people to talk more confidently about their experiences. The rise of ‘talkback’ sessions offers an especially valuable tool, discussed at length by Caroline Heim in her book ‘Audience as performer’. These are post-show events where the balance of knowledge is reversed, with audiences encouraged to share interpretations without being overridden by artists’ ‘correct’ explanations. For researchers the challenge is to find new ways of mapping the complex processes different people go through in relating to, understanding, and finding meaning in the arts.

To dismiss divergent responses is to resign ourselves to living in an echo chamber, affirming our collective brilliance while condemning anyone who fails to appreciate us. Instead, we need to come up with new, shrewder ways of bringing these people into our bubble. If we are to have a chance of survival, we have to listen to others rather than simply agreeing among ourselves.

Kirsty Sedgman is a consultant researcher and arts evaluator.
www.kirstysedgman.com

Kirsty has recently written a book about audience development at the National Theatre Wales.