Appel à contibutions pour la revue Participations: Journal of audience and reception studies
Special Issue on Audiences for Theatre & Dance

Date publication: mai 2015
Deadline: 21 février 2014

http://www.participations.org/index.htm

Issue editors: Matthew Reason and Kirsty Sedgman

The presence of an audience is central to theatre and dance. It is there in Peter Brooks’ classic definition of a figure walking across an empty space ‘whilst someone else is watching him’. Yet while there is a strong tradition of empirical audience research within media studies (particularly in relation to film and television), apart from a few exceptions, both theatre and dance studies have only just begun to take the challenge of understanding how actual audiences engage in live performance seriously.

Recent shifts, however, have seen a growing focus on the dynamics of performance spectatorship, addressing questions of audience experiences from a range of perspectives, including perception, embodiment, representations, politics of participation and arts marketing. This special edition of Participations seeks to continue this trend, through collecting papers with a focus on empiricalresearch on audiences for theatre- and dance-based performance.

We are interested in papers that consider the different kinds of values that audiences attach to live performance events. Although theoretical papers that seek, for example, to dismantle or reconsider prevalent assumptions about audiences will be considered, Participations is predominantly concerned with the different ways actual audiences can be approached by researchers. As such, we also welcome submissions that reflect on the kinds of knowledge which particular research methods have been able to gather.

Possible topics for discussion could be (but are not limited to):

Alternative or distinct performance/audience relationships (one-on-one; participatory; immersive; site-specific; co-authorship).
Fandom and theatre/dance; the celebrity on stage; the staging of TV/films.
Methodological challenges for empirical audience research.
Sociological studies considering issues of taste, class, gender and identity.
The influence of new technology on conceptions of liveness, staging and theatricality.
The politics of spectatorship; aesthetic experience and artistic value.
Empathy, kinesthesia and synesthesia.
Audienceresearch and the cognitive sciences.

Through this collection we seek to generate an interdisciplinary discussion on how theatre- and dance-basedperformance matters to its audiences. We invite contributions from any research fields with interest in live performance and empirical audience research.

300-word abstracts can be sent to Kirsty Sedgman
kis09@aber.ac.uk
Abstract deadline: 21st February 2014

Matthew Reason
Reader in Theatre, York St John University
m.reason@yorksj.ac.uk