Teaching spectatorship
Subtitle: essays and poems on audience in performance
By: Monica Prendergast.
Publisher: Cambria Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Amherst, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9781604975390
Subjects: Performing arts -- Audiences
Description: Teaching Spectatorship: Essays and Poems on Audience in Performance offers a curriculum theory for audience in performance presented in a series of essays and poems on this key yet neglected educational topic. In a contemporary world that has been described as the “society of the spectacle” and the “performative society,” it becomes a significant task for educators to find ways to assist students in becoming more active and critical spectators.

This unique book is presented in seven chapters that survey how audience has been taken up (or ignored) across many disciplines, including aesthetic philosophy, performance theory, cultural studies, and arts education. Drawing on key findings discovered in this extensive literature review, the author goes on to present a number of chapters that theorize how spectatorship may become a central concern of curriculum through committed and teacher-facilitated attendance of live performance. These performance experiences—which may be community-based or professional—then serve as catalysts for creative postperformance interactions with artists and further classroom explorations.

Throughout the text, the author makes use of an emergent arts-based methodology called poetic inquiry. The poems she creates offer readers other perspectives on the investigation and act as a reminder that cultural performance, like poetry, is an aesthetic event that calls us to attention, to wide-awakeness in the world.

Teaching Spectatorship is a groundbreaking study that makes a critical contribution to the fields of performance studies, curriculum theory, and drama/theatre education.
Notes: Table of Contents

Introduction: Freeing the Captive Audience: Performance, Education, 
and Everyday Life in Dramatized World


Chapter 1: “Playing Attention”: Contemporary Aesthetics 
and Performing Arts Audience Education


Chapter 2: “Shaped Like a Question Mark”: Losing/Locating 
the Audience in Performance Theory


Chapter 3: Found Poetry as Literature Review: Research Poems 
on Audience and Performance


Chapter 4: The “Ideal Spectator”: Dramatic Chorus, Collective Creation, 
and Curriculum


Chapter 5: Theatre Audience Education or How to See a Play: 
Toward a Curriculum Theory for Spectatorship in the Performing Arts


Chapter 6: Pedagogy of the Spectator: On Teaching 
and Learning Through Performance


Chapter 7: What Begins?: Audience in Performance Studies 
in Education


References
Index