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The Messy Business of Art, Research, and Collaboration: Audience Engagement in Home/Less/Mess

  • Dawn Farough EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 4, 2016

Abstract

The subject of theatre audience engagement has preoccupied scholars and practitioners in theatre studies and research-informed theatre. Yet at the same time, there is a profound absence of data about audience members. The Canadian play and research project, Home/Less/Mess, offers insight into the attitudes and emotions of over 300 audience members as they attend a very alternative theatre production in their small city. A collaboration between homeless writer/actors, academics, and community workers, Home/Less/Mess highlights conflicts concerning methodological approaches as well as different expectations of art and research. The group is held together by the shared goals of engaging audiences emotionally, intellectually, and politically. The audience survey is viewed as the tool which will reveal the effectiveness of those goals. The Home/Less/Mess survey benefited from a high response rate and the use of qualitative open-ended questions. The survey results reveal that many audience members, at least in the short term, were touched and educated by the homeless actors and their play.

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Published Online: 2016-11-4
Published in Print: 2016-11-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Spectatorship in the Theatre, the Cinema and Photography
  4. People, Places & Things: Addiction, Identity and Performance
  5. Safe Distance, Dark Tourism, and Ambivalent Spatial Relation in Gillian Plowman’s Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe, and Christine Evans’s Trojan Barbie
  6. Hell and Redemption in Greig Coetzee’s Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny
  7. The Messy Business of Art, Research, and Collaboration: Audience Engagement in Home/Less/Mess
  8. “A community of storytellers and translators”: Ubu and the Truth Commission
  9. Dismantling Recognition: Reading Isolation in The Goat
  10. Caryl Churchill’s 21st Century Poetics: Theatre Form and Feminism from Far Away to Ding Dong the Wicked
  11. “Opera Singing Interrupted”: Simon Stephens’s Carmen Disruption
  12. Reviews
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