ABSTRACT
Audience research can take many forms, and theatre practitioners routinely study audience responses to artistic work as an organic part of artistic praxis. Their audience research has many outputs and is used to develop new plays, inform artistic programming decision-making, cultivate donors, and design marketing strategies. This chapter privileges such practitioner knowledge, specifically the knowledge dramaturgs generate about audiences through public facing dramaturgy. Public facing dramaturgy focuses on the development of audience-oriented dramaturgical materials or programs, such as post-performance discussions or lobby displays. Doing public-facing dramaturgy requires deep understanding of what audience members most need to engage with a performance, and dramaturgs develop these understandings through the organic processes of asking questions, gathering information about audiences, making sense of the information they gather, and making decisions about form and content in response to their learnings.
