2011-03-17

A US study of the intrinsic impact of live theatre on audiences

Spanning 18 theatre companies in 6 cities across the country, this work will ultimately, as always, come back to the Bay Area, providing our companies and individual artists with a new set of tools, developed over the next 18 months, to measure and understand the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and social impact of your work on the people who watch it.

The real challenge to the American theatre, and all the arts, is not a financial emergency but a crisis of relevance. As a field, we have become very good at measuring "things financial;" any theatre knows how to count heads in the house and dollars in the box office till. Studies are regularly conducted by major funders and service organizations to assess the aggregate financial well-being of the sector. Advocacy groups commission research to extrapolate the mega-economic impact of the arts on communities and the nation as a whole.

But financial data tells only a fraction of the story. A theatre company may be financially sound, but is it really moving and exciting its audience? Is it connecting to its audience in a fundamental (i.e., intrinsic) way? And can that connection be deepened? How can artistic staff understand the impact of their programming decisions, and what, if anything, can they do about it? We have come to see that the theatre field lacks a generally accepted and widely used metric or outcome rubric for what matters most: the intrinsic value of the theatre experience.

The Intrinsic Impact project, commissioned from WolfBrown by Theatre Bay Area, is generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grants, the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, the California Theatre Network via the California Arts Commission, Theatre Development Fund, A.R.T./New York, Arts Midwest, the LA Stage Alliance, the Helen Hayes Awards and the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia.

As of March 10, over 17,000 surveys had been taken home by patrons, and over 7,000 had been returned. Thats a response rate of 41%.

In an Podcast episode, David Dombrosky talks with Clayton Lord from Theatre Bay Area about their work on "Audience Feedback 2.0"

The study seeks to establish:

A web-based interface to eventually allow any company to do their own impact study at minimal expense
A data set that will be useful for artists, administrators, advocates, funders and audience members
A series of national conversations designed to tackle how best to talk about the arts in a way that isnt economic

More information: http://www.technologyinthearts.org and http://www.theatrebayarea.org/programs/intrinsicimpact.jsp

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