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 an 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.

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 an 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.