Theatre Audience Surveys: towards a Semiotic Approach

Surveys are used to define an audience in a quantifiable way. Awareness of the typical gender, age, and income of their patrons, along with their rating of a theatre's facilities, help theatre producers to address an audience's needs. However, producers seldom explore the audience response to a specific performance – something that is difficult to quantify. Thus, the audience's interaction with the performance – whether with particular actors, the space configuration, or with fellow spectators – is neglected in favour of such demographics as age, income, and occupation. Christopher Olsen suggests that surveys handed out to audience members might benefit from a more qualitative approach based on semiotic analysis. He asked sixty professional theatres in the USA – ranging from major repertory institutions to small theatres targeting specific audiences – to send examples of recent audience surveys they have conducted. Using the surveys (of which the most extensive is reproduced in full), as a guide, he tabulates the most common questions asked, and offers examples of further survey questions guided by semiotic principles. Chris Olsen is currently an adjunct professor at Montgomery College and Shenandoah University in the Washington, DC, area. Having written his dissertation on the Arts Lab phenomenon in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he is now working on a book about the second wave of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in New York.