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Audience studies is an offshoot of cultural studies and communication studies, which in themselves have historic roots in anthropology, sociology, and other related disciplines (e.g., psychology and linguistics). Even a cursory survey of what is being published and discussed in contemporary audience studies quickly reveals that the focus of inquiry is almost entirely on “mediatized performance” (Auslander, 1999, p. 5); that is, audiences are studied predominantly in relation to television, film, the Internet, or other forms of mass media. Very rarely does one find any study of live audiences, although some work has been done on rock concert and sports spectatorship (Auslander, 1999; Kennedy, 2001). A recent article in a new online audience studies journal, Particip@tions, notes that “there is little qualitative research asking whether there is indeed a distinct nature to the experience of live performance” (Reason, 2004, n.p.) and that, “the experiential impact of liveness on actual audiences, by its nature something elusive and difficult to access, remains an under-researched area” (n.p.).
In a key anthology published by Routledge, The Audience Studies Reader (Brooker & Jermyn, 2003), not one of over 30 entries directly takes up live audiences in the performing arts. However, French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau’s important text The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) is excerpted. His work assists in the articulation of a shift in audience studies from an effects-based theory (what a performance does to its audience), to a more interactive theory of an audience’s uses and gratifications of spectatorship. De Certeau (1984) argues that we have the potential to resist the dominance of popular culture and capitalist power structures through everyday acts of “reading, talking, dwelling, cooking etc.” (p. xx).
He places proposed acts of resistance up against a media-driven world: