Call for contributions: Audience Participation as Vernacular Practice
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Organization: Royal Central School of Speech and Drama University of London
Call for contributions: Audience Participation as Vernacular Practice
We are seeking contributions for an edited volume on the subject of audience participation across performance forms and traditions, focusing on practices that evolve among audience communities, rather than being led by performance makers or artists.
This volume will be published by State University of New York Press as part of the series Studies in Vernacular Music.
This text will be both international and interdisciplinary in its scope and reach. It represents a new direction in studies in audience participatory performance across art forms and an opportunity to broaden the frame of reference of this sub-field. Recent studies of audience participation across performance studies have tended to be concerned with certain areas:
· experimental and innovative practice, for example immersive performance, live art, socially engaged or educational theatre,
· the aims of, and the work done by, practitioners to change audience behaviour, and to craft experiences for participants in this work,
· somatic, cognitive or interpretive engagement and work done by audiences as they encounter a performance,
· and performances in Europe and the Anglosphere, and especially in the UK.
There is an under-explored hinterland to these phenomena in folk, popular and ritual performance forms, especially beyond theatre in ‘the west’, and in participatory practices led by audiences or performance communities. The broad variety and history of audience practices outside the western tradition is often noted, yet sometimes decentered in the discourse. This is where the concept of vernacularity serves to re-orient thinking about active audiences: it invites us to consider what is learned and shared through participation and experience, what is handed down and preserved, and when re-invention, resistance and/or protest expressed through the collective of the audience acquires its own momentum.
The aim of the volume is to offer space to celebrate, articulate and interrogate practices from around the world, from indigenous and working-class communities, and from minoritised subcultures, and from within the hidden corners of mainstream and fashionable performance forms. In common with other volumes in the series, the volume will insist that omission of these other genres, and the generational wisdom, acuity, artistry, and intention behind vernacular performance, can be redressed. It holds that the topic is apposite and timely for audience participation studies.
This initial call for contributions is directed to dance, music, theatre and performance scholars, along with researchers of improvisation, digital media, cultural studies and other overlapping disciplines. Potential subject matter can include, but is not limited to:
· Investigations of audience practices drawn from or constructed outside dominant institutions, and/or drawing from ‘folk’ practices.
· Audience practices that inhabit dominant institutions while questioning their spoken or unspoken expectations.
· Audience practices across production, creation, invitation, and the practices of involvement.
· Audience practices embodied in/through audiences, performers or other practitioners.
· How vernacular practices are appropriated, exploited, or extracted.
· How vernacular practices sustain, spread, and/or understand themselves.
· Embodied understanding of the practices of participatory performance.
· Histories of the erasure, suppression or appropriation of vernacular practices of audience participation.
· Vernacular audience participation as resistance.
· Vernacular audience participation as inheritance.
· Methodologies for understanding audiences as practitioners.
Provisional schedule
1st May 2026 – submission of proposals.
1st August 2026 – notification of acceptance and initial feedback
1st December 2026 – submission of draft chapters of 7-9000 words
1st February 2027 – further feedback
1st May 2027 – submission of final drafts
Publication is anticipated in early 2028.
Co-editors
Dr Gareth White
Reader in Theatre and Performance
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
University of London
Dr Chris Smith
Professor of Musicology
Texas Tech School of Music
Texas Tech University
Please email gareth.white@cssd.ac.uk with a chapter outline of 3-500 words, and a biography of up to 100 words.
Link to pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XjBhT8cCaDTZC8UXPc8x5bB5XvNmjBnT/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XjBhT8cCaDTZC8UXPc8x5bB5XvNmjBnT/view?usp=sharing
Gareth White