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

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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.