Wu Fan, PhD Candidate, University of Leeds, considers the audience experience in cross cultural contexts, leading us to interrogate who and what arts and cultural management activity in cross cultural contexts is for. Presented at Intercultural Relations in Arts and Cultural Management Practice, the fourth seminar of an AHRC funded research network, Brokering Intercultural Exchange: Interrogating the Role of Arts and Cultural Management. The network is based at Queen's University Belfast (PI Victoria Durrer) in partnership with Heilbronn University (Co-I Raphaela Henze). www.managingculture.net
1. Audience Experience in
Cross Cultural Contexts
Fan Wu (Echo)
School of Performance and Cultural Industries
University of Leeds
Supervised by Dr. BenWalmsley
3. Orientalism and Multiculturalism
• Orientalism—E. Said (1978)
• --Western attitude towards Middle East, Asian
society/culture
• Multiculturalim—Inglis (1996)
• --a democratic policy response for coping with cultural
and social diversity in society
Literature Review
4. Intercultural theatre v.s. HIT
•Intercultural theatre
• “universal language of theatre” to “articulate a universal art which transcends
limited nationalism in an attempt to reach the human essence (Brook, 1987)
•Critiques
• “He (Schechner) assumes that a Euro-American perspective on intercultural
exchange is applicable and acceptable to everyone” (Bharucha, 1984, p.225)
• HIT “hegemonic intercultural theatre”: “a specific artistic gene and state of
mind that combines FirstWorld capital and brainpower with theThirdWorld
raw material and labour, andWestern classical texts with Eastern performance
traditions (Lei, 2011, p. 571)
Literature Review
Conclusion: present the cultural productions by the culture itself in the global stage.
5. Theatre Audience
• “scene makers” & “scene watchers”—Richard Schechner
• “co-creators”—Susan Bennett
• Audience study:
• Demographic features of theatre audience: middle class, high-educated, white,
aged, etc. (Baumol and Bowen, 1968; etc.)
• Audience Reception theory (Susan Bennett):
• Theatre goers’ motivations: hedonism, social conformism, personal development
and communal pleasure (Walmsley, 2011; Pitts, 2005; Nicholson and Pearce, 2001;
etc.)
What if the audiences were facing a theatre production from a foreign culture?
Literature Review
6. Western audience in the auditorium of Chinese performance
Sojourner:
Stay or reside temporarily in another culture (Sobre-Denton and Hart, 2008)
Literature Review
7. Sojourn experience
Figure 7.1The UCurve Model of Cross-Cultural Adjustment (Black and Mendenhall 1991, p. 227)
Figure 7.2TheW Curve Model of Cross-culturalAdjustment, based on
Gullahorn and Gullahorn 1963
Literature Review
8. • Who are the audience for the Chinese theatre in the UK?
• How to target them?What are the efficient approach?
• What are the motivations for their attendance?
• What could be the sustainable marketing strategy for
Chinese theatre in different cultural context?
Research Questions
How to market Chinese theatre in
the different cultural context?
9. Action Research
planing
actingobserving
reflecting
“Action research” is “a comparative research on conditions and
effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social
action” and “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of
planning, action and face-finding about the result of the action.”
(Lewin, 1946)
Methodology
10. THREE Chinese theatre pieces
in the UK
Case Study
• Mandarin version Richard III in the ShakespeareGlobe, May, 2015
• Adopted from A Street Car Named Desire,Chinese andAmerican
coproduction Poker Night Blues, in the Summerhall in the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe,August, 2015
• PekingOpera tour in Liverpool and London, November, 2015
11. • Who are the sojourners?
Chinese culture
lovers
Cross cultural
tourists
Chinese
immigrations
Theatre
Lovers
“multi-cultural theatre audience ”—Dan
(Attendee of Peking Opera in Sadler’sWells)
Findings
13. Suggest Marketing Strategy
in Cross-cultural context:
Strategic Colleboration
• Audience strategy
• Audience segmentation (new experience seekers, theatre goers, Chinese
arts lovers, new immigrants)
• Audience engagement and development—building community and engage
young audiences
• Long term cooperating strategy
• Co-branding among the participated institutes
• Integrated marketing communications to the audience
• Share the responsibility and job of long-term audience development
Findings
14. Limitation and Challenging
• Limitation of qualitative research
• Bias from action research
• Power relationship between co-branding?
• During the cooperation, who take the responsibility of
audience development and cross-cultural
communication?
16. Reference
• Books:
• Kotler, P. & Armstrong, G. 2012. Principles of marketing. London: Person Education.
• Pavis, P. (1996). Introduction: Towards a theory of interculturalism in theatre?.The intercultural performance reader, 1-26.
• Tian, M. 2008. The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre (Vol. 1). Hong Kong
University Press.
• Journals:
• Bharucha, R. 1984. A reply to Richard Schechner. Asian Theatre Journal, 1(2), pp.254-260.
• Carlson, M. (1990). Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata and Ariane Mnouchkine’s L’Indiade as Examples of Contemporary Cross-Cultural
Theatre. The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, 2, 49.
• David, Kenneth H. "Culture shock and the development of self-awareness."Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 4.1 (1971): 44-48.
• Fischer-Lichte, E. (1996). Interculturalism in contemporary theatre. The Intercultural Performance Reader, 27-40.
• Grau, A. 1992. Intercultural research in the performing arts. Dance Research, 10(2), pp.3-29.
• Kolar, Tomaz, and Vesna Zabkar. "A consumer-based model of authenticity: An oxymoron or the foundation of cultural heritage
marketing?." Tourism Management 31.5 (2010): 652-664.
• Lei, D. P. 2011. Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson's HIT Productions in Taiwan. Theatre Journal, 63(4), pp.571-586.
• Nicholson, R. E. and D. G. Pearce. 2001. Why Do People Attend Events: A Comparative Analysis of Visitor Motivations at Four South Island
Events. Journal of Travel Research, 39(4), pp.449-460.
• Pitts, S. E. 2005. What Makes an Audience? Investigating the Roles and Experiences of Listeners at a Chamber Music Festival. Music and
Letters, 86(2), pp.257-269.
• Sobre-Denton, M. & Hart, D. 2008. Mind the gap: Application-based analysis of cultural adjustment model. International Journal of
Intercultural Relations. 32, pp. 538-552.
• Walmsley, Ben. "Why people go to the theatre: a qualitative study of audience motivation." Journal of Customer Behaviour 10.4 (2011): 335-
351.
• Three or more authors:
• Swanson, S., Davis, J., Zhao, Y., (2008). “Art for Art’s Sake? An Examination of Motives for Arts Performance Attendance”, in Nonprofit and
Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 37 (2), pp. 300-323.
Notes de l'éditeur
Mei Lanfang in 1935 Mosco (Brecht was transformed by what he saw, and, thanks to the impact of his acting on Brecht's thinking about theatre, Lanfang changed Western theatre.)
COPCC in 2016 London
Qualitative researchers prefer ethnographic prose, historical narrative and
fictionalized “facts”, while quantitative peers tend to draw on mathematical models, statistical tables, and graphs with an impersonal third-person prose.
The world, is “what we think with” rather than “what we think about” (Ingold, 2007)
