How to Read Audience Feedback

Experience is the best teacher to a degree. Learning from the experiences of others, may give a person additional insights to the challenge of reading a crowd. Some performances may have to be performed 10 to 100 times, to get a realistic read from various audiences.

Whether you are making a speech, telling jokes, reading poetry, singing, dancing, or playing a musical instrument, correct feedback from an audience, can help improve future performances. Feedback from an audience can include applause and comments, written or spoken, as well as observation of an audience, both visually and sound wise. (Whether a performer or their routine is the problem, is a consideration that needs to be properly evaluated by a performer).

Applause from an audience, can be read incorrectly and often is. An experienced observer can vouch to the fact that applause response will vary from night to night. The best performance by an artist, may get little or no crowd response. The same performer on a different night, may get a standing applause from a poorer performance of the same material.

No applause, or a weak or sympathy applause, may suggest the performer was right, but the wrong speech or song was selected for the crowd. A slow song may not be appreciated, because the audience wanted to fast step on the dance floor. A fast song may not be appreciated, because romancers wanted a slow dance tune.

It has been said you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Likewise. you can perform your best, but you can not force a crowd to enjoy the performance. Moods of people vary with occasions and can change temporarily, or for ever after.

Properly entertaining a crowd, outweighs doing an excellently polished performance. Pleasing everyone is an impossible feat, outside the dream box, so don't try to please everyone. If you did try to please everyone, you would be in the audience and the negative talkers would step on the stage to replace you. (This is reading between the lines).