Content in this section centers one crucial aspect of theatremaking: the audience. How do theatremakers identify and attract the right audience for a particular work? What are the different levels of engagement, from simple spectatorship to participation? Amrita Ramanan’s 2013 series gathers thoughts from leaders in the field and is a great place to start, as are videos from Theatre Communications Group’s 2015 Audience (R)Evolution Convening.
In this first installment, Playwright Rick Stemm discusses his process for creating Heroes Must Die, a video game and production influenced by audience interaction.
Eco-theatre scholar and pioneer Una Chaudhuri considers how theatre is inventing new strategies for performance offered or necessitated by climate change.
In this installment, Damon Krometis discusses the Boston premiere of An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and the ways this production positioned the audience as both spectators and participants.
Is Theatre Helpful? (or some things I learned from rehearsing The Oldest Boy)
9 April 2016
Playwright Sarah Ruhl discusses the impulse and plan for theatres across the country to host readings of her play The Oldest Boy as a benefit to raise relief funds to aid earthquake victims in Nepal.
Could A Play Stop A Demagogue? Theatre and Electoral Politics
7 April 2016
Have jokey depictions of elections on stage and screen helped cause a joke of a real-life presidential campaign? Jonathan Mandell visits two experimental theatre projects that are tackling this year’s presidential election in serious and intriguing ways.
ArtsEmerson in Boston presented the panel discussion Curation and the Politcs of Listening, part of the Naming Ourselves Public Dialogue series, livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv Tuesday 5 April at 7 p.m. EDT (New York) / 6 p.m. CDT (Chicago) / 4 p.m. PDT (Los Angeles). In Twitter, use #howlround to participate in the conversation and follow @howlroundtv.
Lessons of The Fall Season from A Class Of New York Newcomers
22 December 2015
Jonathan Mandell reflects on the Fall season of New York theatre through the lens of Erin Mee’s “Drama and Performance” class at NYU, in which students see and discuss sixteen shows throughout the semester.
Jeff Chang on Detroit-based Complex Movements’ Beware of the Dandelions, a narrative, concert, visual installation, architectural piece, and convening space to distribute revolutionary ideas and activate creative ecosystems and economies of change.
Five Lessons The Grateful Dead Can Teach Live Theatre
15 November 2015
Jonathan Mandell reflects on a recent experience at a Grateful Dead concert, and asks if theatres can adopt some similar strategies for audience engagement.
In the second installment of his The Audience Position series, Damon Krometis describes the unwritten contract and relationship between actors and audience members.
Rethinking Our Response to Cell Phones in the Theatre
21 October 2015
Playwright John J King proposes that instead of scolding and shaming audience members who don’t follow cell phone rules in the theatre, we as a community should spend more time orienting new attendees to our world.
HowlRound presented the Greater Boston Theatre Board Convening livestreamed on the commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Saturday 19 September. In Twitter, use #howlround and follow @howlroundtv.
Challenges with Radical Hospitality in Act II of Berkeley Rep’s Production of Notes from the Field, Doing Time in Education
The California Chapter by Anna Deveare Smith
28 August 2015
SK Kerastas describes an experience grappling with the concept of “radical hospitality” during Anna Deveare Smith’s Notes from the Field, Doing Time in Education: The California Chapter.