Companion survey I. 

The Suitcase is going back to basics in a current project we call ‘Companion survey’. We are placing small questionnaires, a pencil, and a candy on each seat at four of The Royal Danish Theatre’s stages, three nights on each stage. That means we potentially reach up to 10.000 audiences.

Why are we doing this?

This traditional survey may seem like a very old-fashioned way of exploring the audience’s experiences. However, being part of a ‘Mixed methods’ setup at The Royal Danish Theatre, the work of the Suitcase aims to contribute to creating a broader insight into our audience and their experience with performance art. In this project, we are testing the validity of our traditional online surveys (which are described more here). These online surveys measure the experience of the ticket purchasers, but they do not give us any information about the dates, friends, and families they bring with them to the theatre.

In this companion survey, we test whether the companions are similar to the ticket purchasers when it comes to age, gender, and how they rate a performance and the overall experience in the theatre.

See how it looked as we set up for this large survey:

This project is in many ways very simple – pens, paper – a classic physical questionnaire. However, carrying out this simple idea involves quite a bit of detailed planning. We will follow up with thoughts on the process of this work in a later blog post.