ABSTRACT

This chapter reports on a pilot research and development project designed to explore the potential of post-performance dialogues between musicians and audiences at live events. The defining characteristic of the events studied is that audience feedback is given in response to questions formulated by the musicians involved, designed to provide information of genuine artistic interest and relevance to those concerned. Audience members are, thereby, drawn into a relationship which has elements of a focus group, or consultancy, rather than the more common ‘ask the performer’ model of post-performance events, which maintains the more traditional boundaries in which the performers give and the audience gratefully receives. In the kind of event being reported here the tables are turned: it is the audience who gives and the musicians who receive, thus offering the opportunity of a more explicitly collaborative two-way relationship between artist and audience.