ABSTRACT
This introduction to the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts frames and situates the diversity of ideas and perspectives about audiences and audiencing found in the volume’s 46 chapters. In writing, the editors have been cautious about both the value and possibility of presenting definitive statements about the what, why, how and when of audiences and the performing arts. Instead, they have sought to pluralistically lay out some of the challenges and pleasures that face audience research, using different tones and styles of writing to open up how we think, research and understand audiences. This pluralistic approach includes two open, playful discussions that describe audiences as at once ordinary and extraordinary and thus fundamentally paradoxical – suggesting that it is these characteristics that define precisely why we find the study of audiences/ing so challenging. Adopting a more traditional academic voice, the editors also interrogate whether audience research should be considered a discipline or field of studies and engage with the urgent need to actively pursue both the diversification and decolonisation of the critical studies of audiences. Interspaced through all these discussions, the editors present examples of their own formative experiences as spectators – first-person accounts of being an audience – thereby foregrounding the importance of experience, affect and memory in audience research.
