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A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of Cultural Policy and Management, 2016 / Without an audience, theatre is meaningless; however, getting that audience to the theatre can be challenging; especially for small scale independent theatre organisations that often don’t have access to the necessary skills and budgets. This research report considers the potential place of Facebook in audience development. It investigates whether Facebook, as a social networking platform, can function as an effective tool to help small scale independent theatre organisations to broaden, deepen and/or diversify audiences. Additionally, it explores audience motivations, key drivers and barriers, and how they influence theatre attendance especially in a South African context. The research report follows a mixed method approach which includes in-depth interviews, focus group discussions as well as an online (Facebook) survey to try and find ways to curb the issue of declining audiences. It concludes that audience development requires a thorough understanding of audience needs, drivers, trends and barriers as well as commitment from the entire organisation and sector; that developing audiences is about building on-going and mutually beneficial relationships between audiences and organisations, and that appropriate monitoring and evaluation systems need to be put in place. The report also concludes that Facebook can be effective in helping organisations to reach new audience segments, providing a platform for communication between organisations and their audiences, and for marketing; but proposes that Facebook should be included as one aspect of the holistic audience development plan. / MT2017

Student Number : 0302215H - PhD thesis - School of Language and Literature Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This study explores the meaning of contemporary Kenyan popular music by undertaking literary interpretations of song lyrics and musical styles. In making these interpretations, the fabric of popular song is shown to be a network of referents and associations with texts situated both within and outside of the song-texts. As polyphonic discourse, these vast range of textual and paratextual referents opens up various points of engagement between artiste, songtext and audience and in the process, the surplus meanings generated by both the poetry of the text and the referents embedded within it account for the significance of popular songs as concrete articulations that mediate the realities of modern Kenya. Through the six chapters that make up the core of the study we see the mini-dramas that are played out in the material conditions within which the songs are produced; in the iconographies that are generated by artistes' stage names and album titles; in the strategies of memory work that connect present-day realities to old cultural practices; in the soundtracks of urban spaces and in those of domesticated global cultural trends and finally, in the mediation of the antinomies surrounding the metanarrative of the nation and the realization of political transition. I conclude by suggesting that Kenyan popular music demonstrates how contemporary postcolonial texts inform one another, opening up a dialogue between texts and also between local events, experiences and knowledges. Equally important, the study defines contemporary Kenyan culture by working out the sources of the images and idioms built up in this music and accepting the complexities of postcolonial existence as a site of fluid interaction between various cultural practices and competing modernities.

This PhD explores questions of cinematic affect and its relationship to mimetic experience. Through an examination of cinematic materiality, it argues that film must be inscribed across the sensorium if it is to arouse affective experience for the spectator. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the thesis argues that cinematic affect can most productively be understood in film as a process of mimetic innervation. The thesis is comprised of seven published essays and an overarching chapter. The introductory chapter, ‘A Paradigm Shift in Film Studies’, situates the published essays in the context of recent debates about embodied spectatorship and affect, arguing the need for a revision of key paradigms of film theory. The first series of essays argues the centrality of embodied affect to cinema spectatorship, and proposes a nexus between mimetic visuality, affect and mise-en- scène, linking the analysis of mise-en-scène to Kracauer’s discussions of cinematic materiality. The essays extend this nexus to rethink genre through the lens of affective mimetic experience, arguing that both genre and visual style work mimetically. The arguments are explored through studies of the work of Mizoguchi Kenji, Theodorus Angelopoulos and Lee Myung-Se. The second series examines spectatorship in documentary cinema, raising questions about historiography, embodied knowledge, inter-cultural dialogue, and the affective elements of cultural specificity. The essays interrogate the universalist claims of conventional documentary form, and its assumptions of a disembodied spectator. They contest the assumed opposition in documentary theory between affect and signification and draw affect and mimetic experience into the core conceptualisation of documentary film. The studies explore an Australian television documentary series, an Indonesian political docudrama and three hybrid documentaries—two Indian and one French. Through these studies, the thesis argues that affective embodied mimetic experience is at the core of cinema spectatorship. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

What is unique to the experience of cinema that has ensured its ongoing popularity across generations of filmgoers? As both a theoretical construct and a real world practice, cinematic experience is necessarily implicated in systems of social and cultural stratification, and thus subject to the drive for symbolic distinction amongst classes. As such, practical logics grounded in specific cultural arbitraries hinder illumination of the complexities of film going, perpetuating epistemological errors based in social ignorance and therefore denying a new understanding of cinematic experience in its embodied state. By uncovering the key theoretical and methodological fallacies informing scholastic knowledge production within the discipline of film studies, the sociological program of Pierre Bourdieu allows for the systematic mapping of cinematic experience as an economy of exchange � an economy engaging specialised categories of patron recognition and appreciation in order to offer an experience of recognised social value. Whilst subject to a range of both theoretical and methodological criticisms, ultimately the deficiencies of Bourdieu�s program are outweighed by the benefits of reflexive sociology in developing the autonomy of the field of film studies, allowing for future film study fully cognizant of the mechanisms of symbolic violence and thus academic knowledge production more attentive to the destructive logic of the open market.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

In recent years, the Taiwan¡¦s TV talk shows about the political topic have a bias in favour of party. In Taiwan, there are two property of party, one is called Blue property of party, the other is called Green property of party. In order to get more audience rating, theTV stations make the program by the means of antagonism. In this background, it becomes more important that audience how to response the genus of TV program. In order to investigate the phenomenon, we use two main directions. One way is stimulus response, it assumes the audience is influnced by TV progarm. In this way, we apply the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion. The other way is audience¡¦s subjectivity, it assumes that audience can reflex what TV program want to talk to them. In this way, we apply the political philosopher-Hannah Arendt¡¦s doctrine. We found that audience¡¦s emotion be influenced by TV talk show, and no matter what party identification they belong to, most emotions are negative. But, when the TV talk show has a bias in favour of party which is the same with their party identification, they have moer higher positive emotion than which is no the same. And when the TV talk show has a bias in favour of party which is not the same with their party identification, they have moer higher positive emotion than which is no the same. But we can¡¦t justify the the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion. No mater what party indentification they are and no matter what TV talk show of property of party they watch, we can¡¦t found obvious subjectivity of audience. It¡¦s a crisis of public sphere.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Open access. Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-361). Print copy also available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Helen Burke, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 2, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.