You, The Audience
A giant creative conversation with theatre audiences that I dreamed up in partnership with Sarah Frankcom, then the Royal Exchange Artistic Director. This initiative was about helping the theatre rethink its ideas of ‘audience’ – who ‘audiences’ are as individuals and as a community, how theatre listens, engages and collaborates with its audiences and how this might be key to influencing the future of the theatre. You, The Audience was and is about listening and learning.
Over the three years that I developed the programme we collected audiences stories, created Theatre Café, a conversation group led by the public, worked with theatremaker Chris Thorpe to collect and ‘perform’ opinions and ideas from audience members, created a new audience forum, organised, curated and hosted A Night At The Theatre – in which 100 members of the public aged 9 – 73 slept in the theatre, supported 2,150 individuals to create an Audience Manifesto for theatre, built The Listening Exchange – a ‘sound shed’ to hear recordings of audience members sharing their thoughts about theatre and signing up to record their own, and curated and hosted a Theatre and Audience conference with a difference for industry professionals, academics, artists and audience members .
The Listening Exchange, designed by Amanda Stoodley