How do audiences perceive, receive, and value what they see?

The core of Dr. Jacobson’s research is the examination of what it means to be an audience member in the 21st-century. She asks, how and why do audience members engage with artistic experiences? Her studies have considered the role audiences play in creating a sense of felt realness in theatre of the real; the impact of social media on notions of identity, performance, and community in digital spectatorship; the function and ethics of audience labour in immersive and participatory theatre; and the qualitative methodologies appropriate to engaging in theatre audience research in both in-person and digital realms.

Her research questions include:

• What do audiences perceive as more or less real in theatre? How is realness produced in the act of performance?

• How and what do audiences contribute to live experiences? How do audience members impact other audience members’ experiences of the same event?

• How do digitized and streamed performances impact the theatre-going experience?

Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Production of Realness in Contemporary Performance

How realness is perceived, produced, and felt by contemporary audiences - and the stakes of feeling real in a post-truth world.

In the “post-truth” era, the question of how people perceive things to be real, even when they are not based in fact, preoccupies us. Lessons learned in the theatre - about how emotion and affect produce an experience of realness - are more relevant than ever.

Real-ish draws on extensive interviews with audience members about their perceptions of realness in documentary, participatory, historical, and immersive performances. In studying these forms that make up the theatre of the real, Kelsey Jacobson considers how theatrical experiences of realness not only exist as a product of their real-world source material but can also unfurl as real products in their own right. Using the concept of real-ish-ness - which captures the complex feeling that is generated by engaging with elements of reality - the book examines how audiences experience the apparently real within the time and space of a performance, and how it is closely tied to the immediacy and intimacy experienced in relation to others.

When feeling - rather than fact - becomes a way of knowing truths about the world, understanding the cultivation and circulation of such feelings of realness is paramount. In exploring this process, Real-ish centres audience voices and, perhaps most importantly, audience feelings during performance.

Being Together: Investigating Perceptions and Products of Audience Co-Presence in Contemporary Theatre

From 2021-2024, Dr. Jacobson and her research team conducted seventy-five interviews with audience members attending the Kick & Push Festival in Kingston, ON to investigate audience perception and valuation of co-presence, especially relevant in the post-pandemic restriction era. Initial findings can be explored in the two reports below.

This research was supported by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.