ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to interrogate the processes of meaning-making as they are stretched, tested, and re-constituted in performance participation, and in the contradictions, confusions, and complications that ensue. It is about how meaning is made, between people, between bodies, between artworks and people participating in them, and in the encounters between people and themselves, as provoked in performance participation. The lens of performance participation focuses on two things and their interaction: first, being on show and, second, engaging ourselves. The first is obvious: if this is a performance situation, then things are on show, people are on show, in ways that are continuous with but also marked out from the performances that people and things give in everyday life.
