IRES research on the audience

The audience of a music theatre:
identity and behaviour
the Teatro Regio of Turin

Luciana Conforti - Enrico Ercole
© 1999 IRES - Istituto di Ricerche Economico-Sociali del Piemonte

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This publication contains the results of the audience survey of the Teatro Regio of Torino, conducted in the first six months of 1997, which analyzed the answers of about 12,000 spectators. The survey had the aim of depicting the social and cultural profile of the audience, to sound out its opinions and judgments about present and future activities of the Teatro and, more generally, preferences and the relation with the music, attendance at shows and performance venues, taste and styles of cultural consumption.

The data emphasize the new participation of young people, of people with high levels of education, of specialized professions and, above all, of students, which have not substituted but rather joined the segments of traditional, more mature spectators. The result is that the Teatro audience – relative to the audience profile – is in line with the major international theatres. Various types of spectators are outlined within the audience, in order to identify, according to marketing studies terminology, the bands, or “audience segments” that are internally uniform but diversified among themselves according to the different ways of benefiting from the shows, the rapport with the Teatro, the frequency and intensity of the cultural consumption. The types of spectators, used as interpretation, assume an explanatory power of the group of behaviours, attitudes, judgments and preferences that were the object of the survey.

Furthermore, following this interpretive outline, the results of the survey show how the spectators overall manifest typical features of a group of cultural consumers in a post-industrial metropolitan city. The Teatro audience shows, in fact, characteristics such as heterogeneity, broad area of origin, elevated information, attention to the quality of the cultural offering, the inclination to cross the barriers between genres of shows, and the tendency to accept the innovations and proposals of the Teatro Regio and the cultural milieu of the city in a positive way.