I was invited to speak on the theme “Challenges, Creative Responses, and Meaningful Lessons in Audience Engagement” at the closing seminar of the New Performance Turku Biennial’s Audience Ambassadors project in March 2026. What emerged from that invitation was a manifesto on audience engagement rooted in practical experience.
When Good Intentions Meet a Complex Reality
Audience engagement and audience participation almost always begin with good intentions: a desire to be more open, more approachable, and more meaningful. Audience engagement makes art and culture accessible, meaningful, and shared. Its task is to open doors, dismantle barriers, and invite people in. It builds connections between creators, works, institutions, and audiences, while strengthening inclusion, equality, learning, and shared agency. It requires institutions to listen, adapt, and make room for others by sharing space, voice, and agency. Audience engagement declares: “Art does not belong to the few, but to everyone—not as a distant privilege, but as a shared right and a social force that transforms the way art and culture are woven into society.”
In practice, however, we quickly realize that accessibility does not emerge on its own, and participation is not the same as simply being invited in. One of the major challenges in audience engagement is often its position within arts organizations. Audience engagement is not an add-on, but a way of defining who art belongs to. Its task is to open doors, dismantle barriers, and build connections between the creator, the work, the institution, and the people they seek to reach. A mere invitation is not enough: audience engagement requires time, resources, expertise, and a clear place at the heart of artistic practice. It cannot be a side note to marketing or an isolated project; it must be grounded in a clear understanding of who is doing the work, for whom it is being done, and what it is intended to change.
Dialogue
At the heart of audience engagement lies dialogue: the desire to listen, to get to know others, and to build mutual understanding. It is important to ask with whom we are willing to engage in dialogue and on what terms. One of the most central questions in audience engagement continues to revolve around normativity. Who on stage or in art can represent something universally human—and who is always seen as a special case? In the performing arts, for example, audience engagement has a role in asking: What kinds of bodies and modes of expression are we accustomed to finding interesting? To whom are we able to speak from our own perspectives? Are we ourselves ready to change and learn? Can accessibility be part of a work’s structure and content? If these questions remain unasked and the underlying norms remain invisible, good intentions—the desire to be more open, accessible, and meaningful—as well as accessibility and inclusion easily remain mere talk.
Audience engagement requires transparency and opportunities for participation in various ways
The goals of audience engagement must be visible to everyone involved. We need to ask what this work means for the participant, the artist, and the institution. If everyone’s needs cannot be served at the same time, it must be stated openly whose needs are being prioritized at any given moment. Audience engagement must make room for different ways of participating. For some, art opens up most fully through their own experience. These participants are ready to immerse themselves as performers or co-creators alongside the artist. For others, the best route into art is through information, listening, or the opportunity to join a conversation. An important starting point for audience engagement is an idea rooted in community art: every participant’s creative contribution carries meaning.
Audience engagement does not only change audiences
Audience engagement is credible only if it honestly examines its own goals, structures, resources, and norms. A mere invitation is not enough. We must ask: for whom does the space truly open, on whose terms does participation take place, and to what end is audience engagement being carried out? Only then can audience engagement create meaningful experiences, strengthen agency, and transform creators, participants, and institutions alike. Audience engagement does not only change audiences—it changes everyone involved.
Katja Kirsi