New Directions in Theatre Studies (ENGL40029)

In this subject students will discover new paradigms in theatre and performance studies, guided by an expert in the field. At theatre’s core is an encounter between a performance and an audience. Recent scholarship on audiences and spectatorship rejects the binary of active doing and passive viewing, instead understanding audiences as performers with their own conventions and behaviours: applause, laughter, heckling, hissing, or throwing fruit, to name a few. Students will learn how these conventions shift across historical periods, contexts, and genres. They will examine idealisations and assumptions about spectatorship in seminal theories of performance and aesthetics and will evaluate the limitations and affordances of more empirical, data-driven approaches to studying audiences. Students will apply these ideas to live performance events as well as archival evidence. As part of this subject students will also consider audience as an aspect of writing, learning to position themselves as viewers, participants, and scholars.