Chapter 7: Spectators, Participants and Co-Creators

It perhaps goes without saying that the audience is an essential aspect of any science-theatre production. Some researchers go so far as to suggest that performances only come into being in the presence of spectators (Bennett, 1997; Desgranges, 2015; Freshwater, 2009), yet empirical work exploring audience experience of theatre, let alone science-theatre, is scarce (Boerner et al., 2010; Freshwater, 2009), as pointed out in Chapter 2 (Conceptualising Science-Theatre). Although a tradition of empirical work with audiences began in the early part of the twentieth Century (Sauter, 2002), little has gone beyond an exploration of traditional socio-demographic measures (i.e., who attends). While the appropriateness of ‘reception’ studies is questioned by some who argue that it is the art itself which is important; Matthew Reason (e.g., 2015) has argued strongly in favour of the need to develop a tradition of audience reception research. In this sense, studies are beginning to appear that explore both the socio-demographic aspects of audiences for science-theatre and their experience of such performances (e.g., Almeida, Bento et al., 2018; Almeida, Freire et al., 2018; Almeida et al., 2021; Weitkamp et al., in press; Weitkamp & Mermikides, 2016).