Looking through Čiurlionis' window: audience development and audience engagement at Lithuanian cultural centres: a case study of M. K. Čiurlionis House in Vilnius

Abstract

Cultural institutions cannot exist without their audiences. However, external processes, including shrinking access to arts education, decreasing funding for culture and digitalisation of our societies, among others, have negatively impacted cultural participation statistics around the world. Therefore, in order to thrive in the current cultural landscape, institutions must take their audiences into consideration, in fact, even adapt an audience-centric outlook. In addition, cultural institutions, especially public ones, hold a level of responsibility towards the community they operate within, and ought to address societal needs, such as ensuring the promotion of cultural inclusion and meaningful participation among different types of audiences.

One of the tools to achieve aforementioned goals is to employ audience development and audience engagement strategies. As such processes have been researched less in continental Europe, especially within smaller cultural organisations, this thesis addresses the research gap whilst investigating internal audience-centric processes, understandings, existing strategies, burdening and enabling factors, and future directions of a memorial cultural centre in Lithuania, namely, the M. K. Čiurlionis House in Vilnius. The qualitative research method of a case study was chosen to ensure thorough analysis and aims to provide possible insights and inspiration for other small scale cultural centres around Europe.

The findings of this research indicate that audience-centric practises are positively influenced by the distinct place factor and location of the venue, horizontal organisational structure and encouraging work environment, in addition to intrinsic artistic values of the institution’s personnel, manifesting in appearance of unique audience engagement practises, such as “hosting”, qualitative listening-based audience research, support of young artists and creative partnership and collaboration abilities. Nevertheless, such processes are mainly challenged by conceptual confusion and translation of audience development and surrounding terminologies into other linguistic formats, fragmented local cultural ecosystem, physical space and human resource limitations, lack of defined strategic frameworks, and the dilemma of balancing audience-centricity together with maintaining artistic quality.