ABSTRACT
This chapter finds innovative ways to make the investigation of audience experience more rigorous, and examines how the experience of “touching the past” might affect individual lives in the present. It provides a unique platform for audience researchers to experiment with, and study, how immersive heritage performance affects audience engagement with history. The chapter investigates the methodologies used to evaluate audience members’ responses to the first Robert Paston Footprints production at Oxnead Hall. Paston’s Whirlpool of Misadventures was both the most successful and the most problematic example of audience data capture, providing a unique platform to illustrate the challenges, as well as benefits, discovered in the mixed methods approach to audience research. Whirlpool used a triangulation of research tools to evaluate audience response to the production. However, recent scholarship has built upon audience research found in media studies and the social sciences to further qualitative analysis of audience experience.
