Kirsty Sedgman – författare

In How to Understand Theatre Audiences, Kirsty Sedgman offers a bold rethinking of what it means to watch, experience, and make meaning from live performance. Drawing on theatre history, spectatorship theory, years of classroom teaching, and hands-on research practice, this book is a lively introduction to key debates in Theatre & Performance Studies, providing accessible explanations of ideas like semiotics, phenomenology, relational aesthetics, and the emancipated spectator. At the same time, it is also a manifesto for taking audiences seriously – not as a homogenous mass but as diverse individuals whose experiences matter.Written in a clear, funny, and unapologetically opinionated style, the book is divided into two parts. ‘Reviewing Audience Research’ traces the long intellectual history of how audiences have been imagined, regulated, feared, and transformed over time. From Plato to participatory performance, and from unruly crowds to enforced silence, Sedgman dismantles the myth of the passive spectator and replaces it with a richly nuanced account of audiencing as an active, creative, and deeply political process. ‘Doing Audience Research’ then turns to the practical realities of empirical research: exploring methods from interviews, surveys, and focus groups to cognitive science techniques and creative participatory approaches and concluding by making a powerful case for listening seriously to what audiences say.Designed for students, scholars, practitioners, cultural professionals, and theatre fans alike, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to think better about spectatorship and the power of performance in a divided age.

We're living in an age of division. From abortion rights to immigration, gun control to climate change, civil debate has gone out the window. Manners, order, and respect are being eroded. Why can't we all be reasonable? The trouble is, what's 'reasonable' to one person is outrageous to another. Is it okay to let children play in the garden while others are working from home? To do your makeup on a train, or recline your seat on an aeroplane? What's the right way to breastfeed? To protect your neighbourhood? To protest against injustice and oppression? In a world where we all think we're being reasonable, how can we figure out what's right? Looking back through history and around the world, Kirsty Sedgman set out to discover how unfairness and discrimination got baked into our social norms, dividing us along lines of gender, class, disability, sexuality, race... Instead of measuring human behaviour against outdated standards of rules and reason, On Being Unreasonable argues that sometimes we need to act unreasonably to bring about positive change.

Manners, order and respect... these are all ideals we subscribe to. In opposed positions, we ought to be able to 'agree to disagree'. Today's world is built from structures of standards and reason, but it is imperative to ask who constructed these norms, and why. We are more divided than ever before-along lines of race, gender, class, disability-and it's time to question who benefits the most. What if our propensity to measure human behaviour against rules and reason is actually more problematic than it might seem? Kirsty Sedgman shows how power dynamics and the social biases involved have resulted in a wide acceptance of what people should and shouldn't do, but they create discriminatory realities and amount to a societal façade that is dangerous for genuine social progress. From taking the knee to breastfeeding in public, from neighbourhood vigilantism to the Colston Four-and exploring ideas around ethics, justice, society, and equality along the way-Sedgman explores notions of civility throughout history up to now.On Being Unreasonable mounts a vital and spirited defence of why and how being unreasonable can help improve the world. It examines and parses the pros and cons of our rules around reason, but leaves us with the rousing question: What if behaving unreasonably at times might be the best way to bring about meaningful change that is long overdue?

In How to Understand Theatre Audiences, Kirsty Sedgman offers a bold rethinking of what it means to watch, experience, and make meaning from live performance. Drawing on theatre history, spectatorship theory, years of classroom teaching, and hands-on research practice, this book is a lively introduction to key debates in Theatre & Performance Studies, providing accessible explanations of ideas like semiotics, phenomenology, relational aesthetics, and the emancipated spectator. At the same time, it is also a manifesto for taking audiences seriously – not as a homogenous mass but as diverse individuals whose experiences matter.Written in a clear, funny, and unapologetically opinionated style, the book is divided into two parts. ‘Reviewing Audience Research’ traces the long intellectual history of how audiences have been imagined, regulated, feared, and transformed over time. From Plato to participatory performance, and from unruly crowds to enforced silence, Sedgman dismantles the myth of the passive spectator and replaces it with a richly nuanced account of audiencing as an active, creative, and deeply political process. ‘Doing Audience Research’ then turns to the practical realities of empirical research: exploring methods from interviews, surveys, and focus groups to cognitive science techniques and creative participatory approaches and concluding by making a powerful case for listening seriously to what audiences say.Designed for students, scholars, practitioners, cultural professionals, and theatre fans alike, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to think better about spectatorship and the power of performance in a divided age.

How do audiences experience live performances? What is gained when a national theatre is born? These questions and more are the subject of Locating the Audience, the first in-depth study of how people form relationships with a new theatre company. Investigating the inaugural season of National Theatre Wales, Kirsty Sedgman explores how different people felt about the way their communities were 'engaged' and their places 'performed' by the theatre’s productions. Mapping the complex interplay between audience experience and identity, the book presents a significant contribution to our contemporary project of defining cultural value. Rather than understanding value as an end point, 'impact', Sedgman makes the provocative claim that cultural value can better be understood as a process.

Audiences are not what they used to be. Munching crisps or snapping selfies, chatting loudly or charging phones onstage – bad behaviour in theatre is apparently on the rise. And lately some spectators have begun to fight back…The Reasonable Audience explores the recent trend of ‘theatre etiquette’: an audience-led crusade to bring ‘manners and respect’ back to the auditorium. This comes at a time when, around the world, arts institutions are working to balance the traditional pleasures of receptive quietness with the need to foster more inclusive experiences. Through investigating the rhetorics of morality underpinning both sides of the argument, this book examines how models of 'good' and 'bad' spectatorship are constructed and legitimised. Is theatre etiquette actually snobbish? Are audiences really more selfish? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘reasonable’ within public space?Using theatre etiquette to explore wider issues of social participation, cultural exclusion, and the politics of identity, Kirsty Sedgman asks what it means to police the behaviour of others.