ABSTRACT
The recent ‘participatory turn’ has led to a focus on audience agency in live performance, especially in work that directly engages its participants. This chapter is a provocation to think about audience and participant agency in inclusive and respectful ways, beyond ‘giving’ agency to participants. It proposes a framework focusing on the context and experience of agency to better understand how it becomes meaningful for participants. This framework differentiates between two types of agency (agency of engagement and narrative agency) and includes a spectrum of agentive actions. I propose the term ‘conducting’ to describe the flow of agency within a performance, discussing The Money by Kaleider (2013) to present a nuanced understanding of how participants’ actions take on meaning within their experience. This approach situates the analysis of agency as a way to deconstruct the power relations within which it operates, both in performance and beyond.
