The Value of Amateur, Subsidised and Commercial Theatre for Tyneside's Audiences

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This project aims draw a complete and systematic picture of the theatrical life of the city of Newcastle and the surrounding Tyneside region from the perspectives of the audience members who experience it. It will aim to encompass every piece of theatre that takes place in the area during the six-month period of study-professional, amateur and commercial. The project will collect data on who is attending which sort of theatre, what motivates spectators to attend, what experiences they have while there, and in what ways these experiences and values are different for amateur, commercial and subsidized theatre. The project uses a tested combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media analysis to address these questions. While a number of theatre scholars have written about extraordinary performances and audience experiences, it is far more challenging to collect complete data on the more typical examples of theatergoing which, while not traditionally attracting as much scholarly interest, are the daily bread keeping the theatre afloat as an art form and an industry.By including a wide variety of theatrical forms and focusing on audience's experiences, this project will help contribute to a much more nuanced and useful understanding of the role that theatre can play in contemporary British society. The findings will be useful to theatre makers who wish to better serve their audiences, but they will also assist in advocacy for increased financial support for the arts and, in particular, to show how the function of subsided, professional theatre is not one that can be replaced by its amateur or commercial counterparts . The project will work with the Empty Space, a key collaborative hub in Newcastle, and former Arts Council England North East executive director Mark Robinson of the think tank Mission Models Money to ensure that the results of our investigation are made available in an accessible, clear and useful way to the Tyneside theatre community, policymakers and the general public.This project draws its methods from the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP), a group of theatre sociologists from seven European countries. STEP has developed methods and metrics to collect this data on theatre and audience experience, and has refined and tested them in a number of smaller European cities. Thus far, comprehensive data has been gathered on Groningen, the Netherlands; Aarhus, Denmark; Berne, Switzerland; Maribor, Slovenia; Tartu, Estonia; and Debrecen, Hungary. Both the Principal Investigator and the lead Research Assistant have experience working with STEP and its methods, which are based primarily on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Dutch theatre scholar Hans van Maanen. STEP has been devising, testing, and refining its theory and methods since 2005. Common techniques and measures will facilitate comparisons both between different sorts of theatre within Tyneside, and between Tyneside and its continental cousins. Such a comparison will clarify what is distinctive about British theatre culture-not just in terms of its aesthetics, but in terms of the function it serves for its audience and the larger society around it.