Photo by melissalambeau / CC BY-NC 2.0
Why do people feel such emotional intensity in their experiences with sports? And what can we do to encourage this level of emotion during arts experiences?
Wide World of Sports is credited with the famous phrase “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” and this is a great example of the extremes of emotion that sports often bring both participants and spectators. But there are several other factors at play:
Sadly, not all of these factors are available to us in the arts. For example, you don’t often get to scream in a symphony hall, with a few exceptions. And let’s face it, yelling and jumping around is fun.
We also don’t get the competition factor… either as supporters of a specific “team” or in the opportunity to “win” or “lose.” I’d pay good money to see fans of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company become rabid and scream doom and gloom to opposing theater companies, but sadly I don’t think it will happen.
But we do have some of these factors available to us, and we could be doing more to suggest them to our patrons.
For one, the arts arguably have an equal opportunity for intense emotional experiences. You only have to sit in on a touching performance on stage, hear the beautiful harmonies in a complex symphonic piece, marvel at the grace of the human body in motion, or get lost in a compelling piece of visual art to be moved deeply. Many people ride roller coasters to feel fear. I argue that many people also experience the arts to adjust their emotional state. To feel joy, or sadness, or wonder. Or perhaps to escape from an emotion they are feeling in the “real world.”
The arts also have the potential to tap into self-identity and repeated positive emotional experiences with family. Many people experience the Nutcracker year after year because they experienced the story when they were young, with their family (and Nutcracker productions drive the budgets of many ballet companies).
In my work with marketing staff at arts organizations, I often help the team to implement marketing and audience-engagement experiments that tap into emotional intensity. When it is done right, you’re not marketing at all. You’re just making it easier for people to connect to the emotional experiences they are already seeking. And the results can be valuable and meaningful for both organization and patron.
So, while the arts will probably never have something like the Terrible Towel, we do have the potential to create deep and rewarding emotional experiences for our patrons. When an arts experience allows us to know more about ourselves, understand complex issues more deeply, and empathize with the perspective of another, everybody “wins.”
References
“Chocolate Snorting Appears Safe From Feds”. US News & World Report. N.p., 2016. Web. 17 June 2016. [http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-03/chocolate-snorting-appears-safe-from-feds]
“This Conductor Just Started Plain Yelling In The Middle Of Scheherazade”. Classic FM. N.p., 2016. Web. 17 June 2016. [http://www.classicfm.com/composers/rimsky-korsakov/news/yelling-scheherazade/]
“Terrible Towel”. Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 17 June 2016. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrible_Towel
Posted By
Ron Evans
Categories
Articles, Emotion, Psychology