Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Convenors: The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (Kelsey Blair, Kelsey Jacobson, Signy Lynch, Scott Mealey, and Jenny Salisbury)
Participants: Kat Germain, Caroline Klimek, Bethany Schaufler-Biback, Derek Manderson
Significant exploration of the choppy waters and distant shores of audience reception can be a fraught and overwhelming task. It’s easy for the novice to lose their way amongst the policies and practicalities of spectatorship studies (Reason). In response, increasing numbers of audience researchers are venturing into these waters, hoping to broker equitable encounters between researchers, spectators, and theatre makers. This in-person workshop invites new and experienced audience researchers to join us on a Maritime spectatorship adventure with the goal of expanding our participants’ methodological navigation.
In conjunction with CATR programming– and with permission from the artists– participants will attend a local theatre production in Halifax. We will either focus on a show that is part of CATR’s programming (pending) or will work with local artists such as Dapopo Theatre. Using the polyvocal, mixed methods approach featured in our article from “From Site to Self” (Blair et al.), workshop participants will complete a survey and interview each other about the production at a post-performance session on audience research. The workshop will also highlight critical approaches to audience research and engage participants in an evaluation of current methods.
The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research will ensure institutional research ethics board approval for this activity. We are inviting participants to undertake this work with the intention of creating a forum contribution about audience experience for Theatre Research in Canada.
The workshop requires no special equipment. Observers will be welcome in our 90-minute session, but only participants will be involved in the survey and interview process.
Convened by the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research:
Kelsey Blair is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. Her areas of research include: performance studies, the socio-cultural study of sport, Broadway musical theatre, and theatre audience studies. Her first monograph, Sport and Performance in the Twenty-First Century, is forthcoming in December 2022.
Kelsey Jacobson is an assistant professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. Her first monograph, Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Perception of Realness in Contemporary Performance is forthcoming in February 2023.
Signy Lynch is a postdoctoral research fellow at UofT Mississauga. Her research interests include contemporary intercultural, intermedial and participatory performance, audience studies, and theatre criticism. She completed her PhD at York University in 2021 where she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal (2022) and Barbara Godard Prize for best dissertation in Canadian studies (2021).
Scott Mealey is a continuing sessional instructor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Crandall University. His research has been published in Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. He is a founding co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research.
Jenny Salisbury is a postdoctoral research fellow at OISE, University of Toronto. The project, titled “60 years of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (QTBIPOC) Activism and Care” uses verbatim theatre to amplify archives of Queer liberation. She is a sessional instructor specializing in community-engaged theatre and audiences.