Laura Gemini

There has been a growing interest in the study of performing arts audiences over the last three decades. This interest is expressed both at an organizational level, by the increasing presence of audience development and audience engagement initiatives, and within the expanding multidisciplinary field of academic research on theatre audiences, which interweaves economics, cultural marketing, the sociology of culture and audience studies applied to theatrical reception...

Dance is one of the performing arts that has been promoted the transformation of artistic research. In spite of its ritual origin, dance must be seen as an art form within the scope of the twentieth-century spectacle, as a part of leisure time and entertainment, to deal with the market and the public, as well. And it is the viewer’s gaze to come into play in analyzing communicative spectacular event. In fact, far from being the target of the proposed expression, the viewer is the actualizer of the potential meaning of the scenic event, increasingly stressed by abstract forms, less didactic, not subject to linear fruition, from cognitive and emotional challenges which must be more generally considered within contemporary art. On this basis the theater spectators were the subjects of an exploratory research on contemporary dance sponsored by the c_a_p Collective committed to the promotion of contemporary dance in the territory of the province of Rimini. The article aims to focus on the findings of the open request of the questionnaire asking for their point of view on dance both as an art form and a cultural product. The answers allow to identify a typology of attitudes towards dance ranging from the definition of it as an artistic form to the idea of it as a particular area of the relationship between the supply of live performance, the production and fruition strategies. Then, in relation to the goals of the empirical research, the article sides with the viewer and his/her observation. Finally, the paper tries to show how a marketing approach, suitable to contemporary dance, depends on the need to recognize and synchronize with the specific forms of this particular cultural object and its publics.