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Dance Audiences: Answered and Unanswered Questions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Leila Sussmann
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Extract

The study of audiences is rarely at the forefront of dance scholarship. When the social composition of an audience is studied, it is usually market research—material to be used by the development staff of a dance company for audience-building.

Such studies are indeed indispensable for audience-building, but quantitative and qualitative studies of audiences are also indispensable for dance scholars. It is not necessary to argue here that the dance and the audience shape each other.

A superb example of a qualitative audience study, though not of dance audiences, is Joseph Horowitz's Wagner Nights: An American History. In his postlude he writes:

Wagnerism's residual reach, into the early twentieth century, was subtle and complex. One area that deserves study is its relationship to modern dance. Most American Wagnerites were women. Some…were New Women. Wagner addressed buried emotional needs [in these women.] Brünnhilde and Isolde were influences en route to liberation. After 1900, Ruth St. Denis and Isadora, Duncan, …self-created solo dancers, consummated this opportunity.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 54 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1998

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References

NOTES

1. Horowitz, Joseph, Wagner Nights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 336.Google Scholar

2. The first survey was Baumol, W. J. and Bowen, W., The Performing Arts: the economic dilemma (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1965).Google Scholar The authors collected over 30,000 questionnaires from audiences in attendance at performances all over the country. The second survey was based on a large number of self-studies of their audiences by performing arts organizations: Audience Studies of the Performing Arts and Museums: a critical review, National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division Report #9 (1978), by Paul DiMaggio, Michael Useem, and Paula Brown. The 1982 and 1992 surveys are reported in Arts Participation in America, 1982–1992, National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division Report #27 (1993), prepared by Jack Faucett Associates and compiled by Dr. John P. Robinson, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland.

3. An example is a book review in the Los Angeles Times by Perlmutter, Donna (Nov. 17, 1996)Google Scholar, which opens with these words: “For disbelievers who weren't around in the'70s to see it with their own eyes, there was a dance boom—an epic period in American culture when…crowds packed the halls, dancers took on star appeal and audiences cheered them by their first names.”

4. A birth cohort was defined as a group of people born within a five-year interval. The oldest baby boomers were born 1946–50; the youngest were born 1961–65. Demographers regard the boom as having ended in 1965 after which year the birth rate went down. See: Peterson, Richard, Sherkat, Darren E., Balfe, Judith Huggins, and Meyersohn, Rolf, Age and Arts Participation: with a focus on the Baby Boom Cohort, National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division Report #34 (Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press, 1996).Google Scholar

5. See: Sussmann, Leila and Orenstein, Alan, “The Declining Over-Representation of College Graduates in Performing Arts Audiences, 1965–1992,” in the Proceedings of the Society for Theory, Politics and the Arts (Montreal, Canada, October 1996).Google Scholar

6. The terms “attendances” and “audiences” are used synonymously here. “Attendere” refers to the number of different people who went to a performance of an art in the past year. Since many attenders go to more than one performance in a year, the number of “attendances” is larger than the number of attenders. The NEA surveys reported the number of attenders at each art, but they also asked each attender how often they had gone to performances of each art in the past twelve months. In the tables presented here, the attenders have been multiplied by their number of attendances at ballet. That makes the data from the NEA surveys equivalent to the two earlier surveys, which sampled audiences, i.e., attendances.

7. Confidence in audience questionnaire research rests on the fact that the results, in general, are consistent with each other and consistent with the NEA surveys in which members of the sample were interviewed personally.

8. See: Sussmann, Leila, “Recruitment Patterns: Their Impact on Ballet and Modern Dance.” Dance Research Journal 22/1 (Spring 1990): 21–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Dick Netzer, “A Report on an NEA Study of Choreographers in Four American Cities.” Paper delivered at the conference of the Society for Theory, Politics and the Arts, October 1993.

10. The story of this experience was told to the author by Harold Horowitz, formerly Director of the Research Division of the NEA, in a personal conversation.

11. For details, see: Sussmann, Leila, “Anatomy of the Dance Company Boom, 1958–1980.” Dance Research Journal 16/2 (Fall 1984): 23–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. See: Sussmann, Leila, “Colleges and Companies: early modern dance in America,” in Outsider Art: negotiating boundaries in contemporary culture, edited by Zolberg, Vera and Cherbo, Joni (New York and London: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar

13. This study was done for Boston Dance Umbrella by Leila Sussmann.

14. The market research and also their subscribers' list were made available to the author by the Boston Ballet.

15. A sample which is random in the technical sense (every member of the population has an equal probability of falling into the sample) is representative of the population within a calculable margin of error. Audience questionnaire studies do not have random samples. Their advantage is that they locate large numbers of attenders cheaply. If only 3.3% of the adult population attends opera, it will take a very large sample of the adult population to locate a few hundred opera attenders. The NEA added its arts attendance questions to the Bureau of the Census Current Population Surveys, which are conducted annually. These surveys have large, representative samples (12,000 plus). They are cost-effective because they supply information on many different topics.

16. “Statistically significant” means that the difference found in the sample would probably be found in the population if we had interviewed them all. The probability is calculable. “Statistical significance” has nothing to do with substantive importance. A statistically significant finding can be trivial or important substantively.

17. They are statistically significant at the .05 level or better. The .05 level means that only 5% of all possible random samples that could be drawn from this population would not show this difference; 95% of samples would show it. Therefore, we infer that the difference holds for the population as a whole. The .01 level would mean that only 1% of all random samples would not show the difference. Small samples have a larger margin of error than large samples; i.e., it takes a bigger difference to reach statistical significance in a small than in a large sample. Significance tests do not apply to non-random samples.

18. “Assister a” means “to attend” in French but it is a more active verb.