Working Group with Dr. Sarah Hoover

Working Group with Dr. Sarah Hoover

As theatre-makers and researchers increasingly attend to the agentive and embodied role of the audience, what methodologies can be drawn from artistic research and audience research to create a scaffolding for mixed-method projects that focus on the relational, complex knowledge-making processes of theatre? This discussion sought to explore the potentials and pitfalls of integrating these two methodologies to develop research projects in which the audience’s effort is recognized as citizen-research and the results are recognized as artistic contributions. In particular, as reflection is common to methods from both fields, it centred reflective moments and processes as they can be incorporated into theatrical events such that the contributions of audiences are celebrated and the knowledge they create disseminated both inside and outside the academe.

Dr Sarah Hoover is an early-career researcher and dramaturg, with specialisms in interactive theatre and performance, live-action role play techniques, and poststructuralist theories of affect in performance. Currently she is an Assistant Lecturer with University College Cork’s School of Film, Music and Theatre. Her monograph “Dramaturgies of Interaction: strategies and structures to larp audiences into theatre” is forthcoming through Palgrave MacMillan (2023). Other recent projects include dramaturgy for Writing With Objects, Game Theory Theatre (2022 and 2023), “Think Outside My Box: Staging Respectability and Responsibility in Ireland’s Repeal the 8th Referendum” co-authored with Miriam Haughton and Ciara L. Murphy in Feminist Encounters (March 2022) and the revised “Performance Studies and Role-Playing Games” chapter of Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, Routledge 2018 (revision 2023).

Presented over Zoom.