'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don’t understand, we are just sitting here.' Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have scrutinised how audiences respond, make meaning and co-create while watching a performance, little research has considered the behaviour of the theatre audience as a performance in and of itself. This insightful book describes how an audience performs through its myriad gestural, vocal and paralingual actions, and considers the following questions: If the audience are performers, who are their audiences? How have audiences’ roles changed throughout history? How do talkbacks and technology influence the audience’s role as critics? What influence does the audience have on the creation of community in theatre? How can the audience function as both consumer and co-creator? Drawing from over 140 interviews with audience members, actors and ushers in the UK, USA and Austrialia, Heim reveals the lived experience of audience members at the theatrical event. It is a fresh reading of mainstream audiences’ activities, bringing their voices to the fore and exploring their emerging new roles in the theatre of the Twenty-First Century.

How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.

An analysis of dramatic performance drawing on examples from the entire range of the theatre. The author examines the nature of the theatrical event by considering all its constituent elements in relation to the audience and concludes that there are two interacting modes of drama.

The performing arts around the world need to develop their audiences, and arts marketing in the current mode has a limited ability to help. This book provides guidance about understanding and researching your audience. The book provides international best-practice case studies of projects that employ innovative methods to build knowledge of their audience. The collection presents internationally renowned scholars' current research on contemporary practices, framed by newly emerging theory. 'The Audience Experience' identifies a momentous change in what it means to be part of an audience for a live arts performance. Together, new communication technologies and new kinds of audiences have transformed the expectations of performance, and 'The Audience Experience' explores key trends in the contemporary presentation of performing arts.

Since the turn of the century, Performance Studies has emerged as an increasingly vibrant discipline. Its concerns - embodiment, ethical research and social change - are held in common with many other fields, however a unique combination of methods and applications is used in exploration of the discipline. Bridging live art practices - theatre, performance art and dance - with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it is truly hybrid and experimental in its techniques. This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays from leading scholars who reflect on their own experiences in Performance Studies and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Theories which have been absorbed into the field are applied to compelling topics in current academic, artistic and community settings. The collection is designed to reflect the diversity of outlooks and provide a guide for students as well as scholars seeking a perspective on research trends.

What does theatre do for – and to – those who witness, watch, and participate in it? Theatre & Audience provides a provocative overview of the questions raised by theatrical encounters between performers and audiences. Focusing on European and North American theatre and its audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it explores belief in theatre's potential to influence, impact and transform. Illustrated by examples of performance which have sought to generate active audience involvement – from Brecht's epic theatre to the Blue Man Group – it seeks to unsettle any simple equation between audience participation and empowerment. Foreword by Lois Weaver.

Describes the techniques musicians can use to "conjure the energy, the charisma, and the command of the stage necessary" to transform their performances.