This book asks that we consider the practices that facilitate audience participation on equal terms with other elements of the theatre maker's art; it offers a theoretical basis for this new approach, illustrated by examples from diverse participatory performances.

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.

Band 3 der von Florian Malzacher herausgegebenen englischsprachigen Reihe Performing Urgency. Im Kontext heutiger Politik, Wirtschaft und sich permanent verändernden kulturellen Trends kommt das traditionelle Theater mit seiner Trennung von aktiven Darstellern und passiven Zuschauern immer mehr aus der Mode. Zeitgenössische Künstler emanzipieren ihr Publikum, laden es auf die Bühne und in die Performance ein, beleidigen und provozieren es und erproben verschiedenste Techniken der Teilhabe. Das Buch verbindet zahlreiche Beispiele von Publikumsbeteiligung mit Problemen der Partizipation in Demokratie und sozial engagierter Kunst. The nineteenth century was a century of actors. The twentieth century was a century of directors. The twenty-first century is a century of spectators. With Jacques Rancière's The Emancipated Spectator (2009) being the most discussed theatre-related text of the last decade, there is an increase in scholarly and curatorial interest in the most mysterious, potentially dangerous and, in fact, most important participant of the performance, who stays silent, motionless, and hidden in darkness: the audience. And similarly, artists desire to finally 'meet the spectators': to let them speak, get into a dialogue with them, invite them to involve themselves in pursuing the performance.

Scholarly work on the impact of an active audience on theatrical and dance performance is a relatively new phenomenon, one that until now has manifested itself largely in the form of scattered dialogue on the subject. Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance serves as a corrective to this. While the passive audience has long been acknowledged in works on response theory and audience studies for its contribution to the performance event, performance styles that use the audience as an active contributing creative force have been appended to the studies as merely variations on a theme. This anthology brings together essays on direct audience participation in the work of fourteen widely varied theatrical and dance artists, covering performance genres of the past and present, popular entertainment and high art. Its comprehensiveness and uniqueness make it an important contribution to the literature on theater and its many forms and facets.

This book explores the concept of audience engagement from a number of complementary perspectives, including cultural value, arts marketing, co-creation and digital engagement. It offers a critical review of the existing literature on audience research and engagement, and provides an overview of established and emerging methodologies deployed to undertake research with audiences. The book focusses on the performing arts, but draws from a rich diversity of academic fields to make the case for a radically interdisciplinary approach to audience research. The book’s underlying thesis is that at the heart of audience research there is a mutual exchange of value wherein audiences ideally play the role of strategic partners in the mission fulfilment of arts organisations. Illustrating how audiences have traditionally been side-lined, homogenised and vilified, it contends that the future paradigm of audience studies should be based on an engagement model, wherein audiences take their rightful place as subjects rather than objects of empirical research.