24 september · 11h00 · Foyer

Master Class: “Listening to the Audiences”

Presented by Ingrid Handeland and Niels Righolt.

When you ask someone from inside of a typical western cultural institution in crisis to imagine their existing and potential audiences, they sometimes picture them as a huge and grey mass of strangers with few and all too familiar faces in the front. For many audience developers like us, the ultimate audience idyll is a large audience sharing magical moments at a great concert or festival. But to be honest; how often does that happen inside arts institutions? And is it even recognized as the ultimate goal by artists and heads of arts institutions in general to create big-format shared experiences?

Nordic cultural policy focuses on democratization of culture and the ideal cultural institution should function as an important common ground for shared experiences. They are asked by the government to do audience research and to work on audience development. And this is one of the main reasons why they become members of audiences Norway. We specialize in audience insight and strategies for audience development.

When heads of institutions are gathered to talk about audience development they soon start imagining personas with the faces of typical policy-audiences, ie; people with immigration-background, disabled people, older people with physical or mental barriers to participation, or even schoolchildren and youth; stereotypes that echoes the way politicians and bureaucrats thinks around audience development from a societal angle. Audience engagement – I would argue – is something different.

Audience engagement for the arts has to do with the understanding of cultural habits, tastes and preferences, unevenly distributed among people who appear as belonging to the same segment based on age, skin colour and clothing. In this part of the program you are invited to share the way you imagine your audiences, and together we will explore how we can work to get behind the stereotypes by listening and understanding what makes audiences respond, grow and come back for more.