Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era

The ruling idea of Arts Talk is a simple one: audience pleasure is deeply tied up with the opportunity to interpret the meaning and value of the arts, and this pleasure is enhanced significantly when interpretation is made social. Conner analyses the robust arts audiences of the past along side contemporary participatory cultures to model a new paradigm for arts appreciation centered on audience-powered conversations, both live and digital. Topics discussed include learning and cognition in arts reception and the form and function of productive talk in the digital era. This book is a valuable resource for arts workers and audiences wishing to explore the environmental, social and psychological conditions that allow us to engage meaningfully with the arts.

Lynne Conner is Chair of the Theatre and Dance Department at Colby College, USA. She is a theatre and dance historian, cultural policy expert, and award-winning playwright and director. Her publications include the books Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater; Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States, 1850-1935; and In the Garden of Live Flowers (co-authored with Attilio Favorini). Her plays and adaptations have been produced in venues across the country, including theatres in Houston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and more. Her play In the Garden of Live Flowers won the 2002 David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre Festival and an honorable mention prize in the 2002 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award contest.