Audience Making: the intentional artistic shaping of audience experience before, during, and after a performance.

What is Audience Making?

A theatrical event does not begin when the lights go down.

It begins when someone first hears about the production. It continues through the journey to the theatre, the experience of entering the space, the performance itself, and the conversations, memories, and reflections that remain after we leave.

Yet much of this journey is treated as an administrative concern rather than an artistic one.

Audience Making asks a simple question: How do a thousand individuals become an Audience?

A spectator is someone who experiences a performance. An Audience is something more: a spectator who becomes aware of their own witnessing, aware that they are not simply experiencing the event, but are present within its creation.

Audience Making is the intentional artistic shaping of that experience before, during, and after performance. It is not a new theatrical technique, but a way of recognizing and connecting practices that artists have been using for generations: invitation, hospitality, ritual, context, attention, participation, witnessing, and memory.

Audience Making doesn't demand more from an audience. It creates more possibilities for an audience.

The question is not simply how we get people into seats.

It is what we can do once they are there, and what might continue happening after they leave.

READ

The Aesthetics of Invitation: Audience Making in Contemporary Theatre
Presented at the 2026 NTU International Theatre Conference in Taipei.

The current paper developing Audience Making as an emerging field of artistic research and practice.

Read the paper

HEAR WHERE IT STARTED

The first time I began articulating Audience Making publicly, not as an administrative concern but as part of the artistic work, was in this conversation on the Theatre of Others Podcast.

HEAR OTHER DIRECTORS

I began noticing that other directors were independently wrestling with many of the same questions. This compilation brings some of those voices together.

The Event Doesn't End When the Audience Leaves

Audience Making is an ongoing investigation into the life of a theatrical event: how audiences are invited, prepared, witnessed, and remembered.

Future experiments will explore these questions through directing, devised performance, teaching, and further research. I'm interested in talking with directors, performers, educators, designers, scholars, and artists who are experimenting with the relationship between audience and performance.