International Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA)

Despite the vital role that audiences play across the globe in supporting and giving meaning to the performing arts, audience research remains sporadic; limited by methodological insecurity; and compromised by claims of positive bias. There is currently no international research network dedicated to audience research in the arts. This new network will address this gap and bring together leading scholars in the emerging field of Audience Studies with audiences, artists, arts workers, funders and strategic agencies to explore and debate issues related to the value and impact of audience engagement in the performing arts and to emerging methods of capturing this impact. As the next generation of arts audiences matures and drivers such as audience development, big data, co-creation, participation, digital engagement and live streaming continue to impact on the arts, audience behaviour and expectations are changing. This network will trace the impact of these drivers on the audience experience and explore the implications for artists, arts organisations and policymakers.

As audience research is a global phenomenon, and because Audience Studies currently lacks any kind of scholarly home, this will be an international network comprising a series of events in Leeds and in Melbourne. The UK and Australia share the common benefit of having small clusters of academics working in the area of audience research in the performing arts, and over the course of this initial two-year network plan, these scholars will be joined by practitioners and audiences, as well as by senior US scholars and practitioners working in the field.

The network will initially commit to organising four key events between January 2017 and December 2018:

1. A half-day scoping workshop held at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (University of Leeds) designed to flush out the key issues and challenges facing audience research in the performing arts regarding methods and questions of cultural value.

2. A one-day symposium at the University of Leeds designed to bring audience stakeholder groups into dialogue through short research and provocation papers. The symposium will be themed around emerging quantitative and qualitative audience research methods and their potential complementarity.

3. A one-day colloquium held at the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia - designed to cross-fertilise thinking in preparation for a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal on emerging methods of audience research. The event will be themed around ways of capturing and 'knowing' the value and impact of the performing arts.

4. A round-table event summarising recurrent themes and ideas and planning for the ongoing development of the network as well as finalising dissemination activities and research outputs.

These events will be supported by a dedicated webpage and blog, which will encourage and facilitate participant engagement and debate between the face-to-face events.

Although this network will focus predominantly on the performing arts, it will draw in scholars and practitioners from related fields and artforms. The rationale for this is that even within the marginal field of Audience Studies, scholars and practitioners are too often fractured into artform silos and fail therefore to cross-fertilise ideas and exchange emerging methods and knowledge. As the arts sector grapples to locate its role and position in a new social, political, cultural and technological environment within an 'experience economy', now is the ideal time to refocus attention on issues and phenomena of audience engagement and spectatorship and to harness the potential of inter-disciplinary thinking. This is also a fitting time to review and question the legacy of the arts marketing approach, which has arguably facilitated the gradual commodification and devaluation of the arts witnessed since the neoliberal politics of the 1980s.

The School of Performance and Cultural Industries is internationally recognized for its world leading research impact and for its innovative and productive partnerships with arts and cultural organisations. It is appropriate, then, that questions of impact lie at the very heart of this proposed new network. By generating open lines of dialogue with audience representatives, artists, designers, directors and arts organisations, and with their surrounding communities of interest, the network will explore and interrogate the complex relationships between audience research and the impact of the arts and culture on society. Artists and arts organisations are likely to benefit from this network by sharing their concerns regarding audience engagement and by learning from their peers and from academic researchers which engagement strategies have proven most effective in practice, and which have failed and why. They will also benefit from taking a more research-led approach to capturing the artistic, social and educational value of their activities and thus gain insights into evaluating their activities in a more robust and meaningful way. A thirst for a more qualitative approach to arts evaluation was apparent in discussions with the University of Leeds' cultural partners in the recent AHRC Cultural Value project, and ongoing conversations between the University and these organisations will feed into the scoping event proposed at the start of this network development. In Australia, the Deakin University team has worked closely with a range of high-level arts and cultural partners, including the state-government arts-funding agency, Creative Victoria, the Fringe Festival and state-government health promotion agency, VIcHealth, to co-design audience research projects around qualitative methodologies that identify arts impact. The network will engage strategically with these partnership networks to ensure that the impact and knowledge exchange facilitated in the UK is replicated in and extended to Australia too.

The development of this network is supported by Arts Council England (ACE) for whom excellent audience research and engagement are core strategic objectives. ACE will provide not only a national overview of arts organisations' approaches to audience research and engagement but also the vital perspective of a major arts funder. ACE has also agreed to provide us with access to the National Policy and Research Team (see letter of support) so the network will be well-placed to influence conversations about national arts policy development in this area. The PI is an Artistic Assessor for ACE and therefore strategically placed to contribute to cultural policy development in the genre of theatre. Other professional bodies such as the Arts Marketing Association (AMA) and strategic agencies such as The Audience Agency (TAA) will also benefit from networking with expert academics, who will question and develop organisational models and help the organisations take a more reflexive approach to their audience consultancy and dissemination activities. For example, TAA has developed a new audience segmentation model based on its Big Data analysis of arts engagement in England. But this has raised as many questions as it has answered, and TAA is keen to partner with HEIs to probe the findings of this large quantitative data set through more sensitive qualitative methods (see letter of support).

A core aim of this network is to raise the profile of audience research, development and engagement within the academy, across the arts sector and beyond. The ultimate impacts of the network are therefore likely to be manifest in the continued emergence of Audience Studies as an academic field in its own right and in a more audience-centred approach to the strategic management of arts and cultural organisations, for example through a closer and more nuanced understanding of the benefits and challenges of participatory and co-creative practice.