Quantifying Rational Recreation

Evaluation report

 

 

 

 

 

Client:             Rational Rec

Consultant:     Felicity Mukherjee

Date:               July 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents                                                                                                                                           Page

 

Background                                                                                                                           3

 

Selected qualitative data                                                                                                     4

 

Selected quantitative data from the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club:                    

- Geographic                                                                                                             5

- Socio-economic                                                                                                     6

- The Working Men’s Club                                                                                       7

- Downstairs perceptions                                                                                         8

 

 

Selected quantitative data from the Spitalfields Festival Launch:

- Understanding musical performance                                                                   9 - 10

- Assessment of musical ability                                                                               11 - 12

 

 

Recommendations for Rational Rec’s ongoing development                                         13

 

Contact and bibliographic information                                                                               14

 

Background

 

Rational Rec commissioned artist Lucy Panesar at the end of 2007 to evaluate Rational Rec as a live art work, working with their audiences as her corporate alter-ego character Felicity Mukherjee, an independent consultant and specialist in market research and audience evaluation for the creative and cultural sector.  The evaluation took place earlier this year, and this is the final evaluation report.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rational Rec is a monthly inter-art social occasion, incorporating sound, music, text, performance, film and psychological experiments claiming to provide audiences with the opportunity to be artistically, intellectually and alcoholically stimulated. 

 

It takes its name from the Victorian term Rational Recreation, a late 19th Century movement connected with Working Men's Clubs, for which the self-assured Victorian middle class formulated new leisure activities reflecting the righteous ethos of productivity and moral respectability for the working class, whose recreation they felt was tacky and perverse.

 

The evaluation has examined the legacy of rational recreation, and has also been investigating socio-economic and cultural barriers to the appreciation of and participation in contemporary interarts events like Rational Rec.  This report will draw upon quantitative and qualitative data collected from live evaluation exercises with Rational Rec audiences at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club and the Spitalfields Festival Launch, and conclude with recommendations for Rational Rec’s ongoing development.

 

 

Selected qualitative data

A selection of responses from regular Rational Rec audience members and visitors from the downstairs Working Men’s Club bar, from depth interviews conducted at the 4th March Rational Rec event “Inter Inter Inter: a true interdisciplinary evening with music, dance, film and book making.”

 

Q. What do you think might be the artistic objective of Shlomowitz + Craenen’s 3rd set?

Regular audience member responses:

“Dada absurdist commentary on contemporary music”

“Thinking about human error/failure”

WMC visitor responses:

“Audition for the Klangers”

“Like the Ford advert”

 

Q. How effective do you think this work is in improving you culturally?

Regular audience member responses:

“Better than nothing or a night in the pub”

“Somewhat effective; premise apparent too soon”

WMC visitor responses:

“In the East End it doesn’t help if you’re not posh, you don’t get culture”

“Very expressive, seeing it for the first time”

 

Q. To what extent do you feel the work presented this evening was accessible to people not working in the arts but interested?

Regular audience member responses:

“No difference.  It’s a matter of being interested”

“40% / Moderately accessible”

WMC visitor responses:

            “May not be at first, but will grow on them”

            “Reckon it’s f*!?ng weird!”

 

Q. Any other comments about your experience of Rational Rec this evening?

Regular audience member responses:

“A very good evening; clear theme, varied work, a good balance between fun and serious”

 “My first time and I really enjoyed myself!

WMC visitor responses:

            “100% different! And the people are well behaved, you can see they enjoy themselves”

            “Not easy, felt I was losing the plot! Similar to the Rocky Horror Show”

Selected quantitative data

Geographic

Locations in London where audiences indicated as the main place where they:

Live

 

Work

 

Go for recreational activities

Socio-economic

The evaluation indicates moderate levels of upward social mobility with 14% claiming to have been working class as a child, and no one claiming to still be working class as an adult. 

When asked of their occupational status only 38% claimed to be practising artists, but over half of the audience felt art to be exclusive and elitist.

 

When asked to state which class each person pictured falls into, based on attire, posture and stature alone, the audience responses were on the whole correct, as indicated in the graph below.

 

a.                     b.                     c.
 

The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club

61% of regular Rational Rec audience members believed that Rational Rec is moderately successful in achieving its aim to “artistically, intellectually and alcoholically stimulate”, with one interviewee saying that they “enjoyed the event, but that the drink prices are contrary to free enterprise”.

 

The pie graph on the left indicates the frequency of visits by regular Rational Rec audience members to traditional Working Men’s Club bars

 

 

 

Regular Rational Rec audience members were also asked which words best described what they felt atmosphere is or might be like in the Working Men’s Club downstairs bar. To which the response was mostly positive, as indicated by the graph on the right.

 

Members of the downstairs Working Men’s Club bar were surveyed.  The graphs below show how long they had held club membership and how often they attended the club bar.  The mean average for times they had visited the upstairs bar was 3.36.

 

 

Downstairs perceptions

 

Members of the downstairs Working Men’s Club bar were also asked to study 3 photographs documenting Rational Rec events and say words to describe what they thought was happening in the photograph, and then give a score out of 10 for how rational they felt the activity was.

Words used to describe image 1:

Artistic innovation, Gospel singing, Upstairs always, Not for a working men’s club, Smoking and Suffragettes

 

Mean average rationalism score = 3.54

 

 

 

 

Words used to describe image 2:

Pirate DVD making, Musical mixing, Nothing to do with club member, Playing tapes, Sorting out CDs and Reading

 

Mean average rationalism score = 2.72

 

 

 

Words used to describe image 3:

Social Club, Rational Rec, Lovey-dovey!, Talking, Making friends and If this is art I’m the Queen of Sheba

 

Mean average rationalism score = 3.09

 

 

Rational Rec at the Spitalfields Festival Launch

Appreciation of musical performance

The charts above indicate that more people have a higher appreciation of musical performance than being performers themselves, and that over half the audience believe that the exposure they had to musical performance when growing up was very high. 

 

 

On the whole the audience did not believe it necessary to have prior knowledge or training to fully appreciate certain musical forms, and 68% believed ‘song’ to be the most accessible musical form, compared to ‘sonata’, ‘nocturne’ and ‘musique concrete’, as shown above.

 

 

 

The audience disagreed with the suggestion that people from underprivileged backgrounds are NOT likely to pursue careers in musical performance or that instruments can only be used by those who are trained and understand their function. 

 

When the audience were asked to identify 3 objects and their musical function, all respondents correctly identified the set of spoons and the violin, but only 21% were able to correctly identify the modular analogue synthesiser.  Full details are shown in the charts below:

 

Anatomical test

When the audience had their index and ring fingers measured, 53% of the audience were found to be anatomically advantaged in terms of musical ability, as according to Manning, male symphony orchestra musicians have lower finger ratios than less musical men.

 

 

 

 

 

Pitch recognition

 

When played 3 audio clips, only 23% of the audience were able to correctly identify a Concert Pitch A at 440 hertz, only 21% correctly identified a D Minor Chord and only 16% correctly identified a C diminished seventh chord. 

 

 

 

Musical performance ability

 

When asked to create an improvised musical performance using spoons the duration and amplitude of 47% of the performances were assessed as being above average, whilst the pitch and timbre were generally assessed as being below average. 

 

 

 

Recommended actions for improvement

 

On completion of the evaluation exercise the audience were given a total musical ability score out of 190 and one of the following recommended actions for improving their weakest area:

-         Practice daily with a specialist tutor

-         Increase exposure to musical performance

-         Have an implantation of pitch perception genes

-         Have a plastic surgery ring finger extension

 

 

Recommendations for Rational Rec’s ongoing development

Rational Rec say that they have now outgrown the Working Men’s Club, but that they remain devoted both to contemporary artistic practice in all its forms and to bringing this work to an ever-wider, diverse public by programming one off events and festivals with larger venues.  In response to the data analysis, it has been recommended that Rational Rec maintain links with venues frequented by people from lower socio-economic groupings such as the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, and that they aim to provide more activities reflecting the righteous ethos of productivity and moral respectability.

 

Henry Mayhew explained how the English working class are as hard worked as any people upon whom the sun shines, and how we should be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse. 

The mass of people, he says, when it seeks pleasure does not want to be elevated: it wants to laugh at something beneath its own level, and just as he used to go to Music Halls and feel his own superiority to the audience, so too does the audience go so that they might compare themselves favourably with the debased rapscallions of the songs. 

Rational Rec are therefore advised to programme works with more song, and that are of a lighter and more comic nature.

 

Taking advice from Victorian social reformer Walter Besant, who said that it is both sounder policy and truer economy to uproot a noxious weed than to pluck off its poisonous berries, Rational Rec are also advised to aim, in the long term, towards uprooting the identity shattering effects of the current social order, and use it’s influence to advocate for the introduction of new social model such as the clearly defined Indian Caste System or HG Wells’ more flexible Modern Utopian Model. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Either would help establish a clearer social identity, and by doing so positively influence the appreciation of and participation in contemporary interarts event by different audiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More information

 

Quantifying Rational Recreation was an audience evaluation conducted by Felicity Mukherjee, the alter-ego of live artist Lucy Panesar.

 

For more information about the artist or the services of Felicity Mukherjee please contact:

lucypanesar@yahoo.co.uk or visit www.lucypanesar.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliographic references

 

Collins, M. ‘The likes of us: A biography of the White Working Class.’ (Granta Books, 2004)

Dickens, C. From preface to ‘Oliver Twist’. (Third Edition, Chapman and Hill, 1841)

Mayhew, H. ‘London Labour and the London Poor’.  (Frank Cass and Co Ltd, 1851)

Wells, HG. ‘Modern Utopia’ (Chapter 9, 1905)