Taking (a) Part in the Discourse, Re-staging the Social : The use of audience-participant conversation in performance since the start of the millennium

Dufty, Richard and Quick, Andrew and Rowe, Cami (2026) Taking (a) Part in the Discourse, Re-staging the Social : The use of audience-participant conversation in performance since the start of the millennium. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the emergence of conversation involving audiences as a dramaturgical device within UK performance over the last twenty-five years. It locates this as part of the general participatory turn in artistic practice and argues that using conversation in this way enables a staging of the social, facilitating exploration of paradigms for social relations and interpersonal discourse. The argument is that implicit in the use of conversation are certain ethical, philosophical and aesthetic qualities that inform the models of sociality that these performances propose and can act as a critique of dominant relational and discursive paradigms. This thesis argues that these conversational attributes inform the dramaturgical dynamics of performances employing this device, and that the framing of the theatrical event emphasises the performative aspects of the conversational relational paradigms proposed, including stressing their fundamentally contingent quality. The thesis is structured around four dramaturgical contexts within which ‘audience-participant’ conversation has been deployed: performance rehearsing debate and decision-making in the public sphere; performance using conversation to engender interpersonal intimacy; conversation used in a practice of community building and socio-political changemaking; and ‘co-authored’ performance where conversation is a site on which to explore the potential and limitations of discourse in self/other relations. This thesis employs a ‘polyphonic’ theoretical framework, drawing on diverse ideas from the ‘philosophy of dialogue’ to highlight the different ways conversation is used in these contexts. The qualitative research methods utilised include interviews with practitioners and first-hand critical spectatorship analysis. The use of audience-participant conversation is understood within the context of the advance of neoliberalism, the current trend towards authoritarianism, the contemporary condition of the public sphere, and the associated precariousness of notions of the dialogical that underpin liberal, democratic, humanistic principles. This thesis argues for the significance of this conversational practice as an exercise in defending these values.