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Preface
This collection of essays and poems on teaching spectatorship is designed as a response to an urgent educational responsibility: How do we understand and respond to our ever-greater roles as audience members in a technologically, politically, culturally and economically performative society? The lived-through experience of the live performing arts offers a powerful medium for young people within which to find relevance and genuine connection with artists and artistic practice that is not generally available through “mediatized” forms of performance. This collection of linked chapters and poems is intended to provoke educational attention toward the improvement of the critical cultural literacy of future audiences for the performing arts and, by extension, to all the myriad performances played out for us and by us every day.
The paradigm shift in our culture from predominantly textual to predominantly visual creates a pressing need for aesthetic and critical understandings of the many ways we experience everyday life as audiences in performance. Live performance forms—theatre, dance, performance art, opera, music—offer a crucial counterbalance to the prevailing forces of film, television and other mass media forms of performance.