slow fade

I’ve been hosting Theatre Clubs for a long time now – a whole decade! – and in the first half of 2023 it’s reached its ideal state, with the support of Matt Burman, artistic director at Cambridge Junction. He’s enabled (and paid!) me to establish Theatre Club as a regular, promoted event in the Junction’s programme, which brings together regular attendees, occasional visitors and Junction staff to talk about work that sometimes challenges us, or refuses to fulfil conventional ideas of what theatre is, or what a play might be or do. The first conversation there, about Kakilang’s Home X – a dance show meets virtual reality game meets participatory piece, in which disparate people talk about their relationships to ideas of home, belonging, citizenship and migration – immediately joined the list of Theatre Clubs I dwell on and discuss with anyone who’ll listen. The particular mix of people meant that we met the show’s content with our own experiences: of moving to another country to live w...

This text is a somewhat tidied edit of a mostly scrappy keynote delivered at the launch event for the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts . My invitation had been to respond to the introductory texts, but each of those coaxed me into other chapters, and so every time I sat down to start writing, I became instead absorbed in reading more. The book is a mammoth compendium of essays from a multitude of perspectives in audience research: historical, philosophical, speculative, exploratory; interested in everything from the neuroscience of how people respond when watching a live performance to the nature of fandom and the political problem of globalising audiences. I finished collating my thoughts on the train to Leeds, where the event was taking place; after I read it out, someone from the audience said it was like listening to someone free associating, which was expressed as a compliment so that’s how I’m taking it. I didn’t have a title for this until I listened to ...