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The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts. Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2013; pp. 160.
There is a monumental shift occurring in the current artistic marketplace in regards to what audiences are expecting from the live arts performances they attend. Many arts practitioners are desperate just to keep the core audiences they have already built; others look nervously toward revolutionary new ways to generate effective, innovate strategies to measure and market the "fun," "socially relevant," and "educational" elements that make theatre so compelling. Whether or not they are ready and able to commit to change, these organizations have no doubt already been discussing the hows and whys in hushed voices during board meetings or at intermissions of half-filled matinees.
The Audience Experience makes a valiant attempt to address these questions through the new discipline of "audience experience research," a school of thought that combines new and traditional modes of surveying audiences of arts events. Through eleven essays by leading researchers in this emergent field, this book runs the gamut of exploring recent phenomena of digital streaming, cocuration, and convergence marketing, as well as redefining the traditional audience by interviewing samples of children, adults, amateurs, and professionals alike-all in hopes of finding something tangible behind ever-mercurial audience behavior. Having only gained traction during the past twenty years, audience experience research is still effectively in its embryonic stage as far as research fields go....