Output details

There is no Audience: Meeting the Dramaturgical Challenges of the Spectator in Children’s Theatre

This output comprises a single-authored essay, the co-written introduction (Maguire 50%) to the volume in which it appears, and the co-editing (Maguire 50%) of the collection.

Maguire was the lead editor; Schuitema was still a doctoral student at that point. Further, this is a field in which Maguire has taken a pioneering role through his work with Young at Art’s ‘Making Space’ Symposium (part of the Belfast Children’s Festival 2009-12) and with TYA-NI and TYA Ireland’s ‘The Gathering’ annual event (co-hosted by the University in Derry/Londonderry in 2013).

This collection of essays is the first such critical engagement with the range of TYA practices in the UK. The research is driven by three principal questions:

a) What is significant about the practices of TYA in the UK?

b) How do or might the specific audiences for TYA engage with these practices?

c) What critical issues are raised by this engagement?

The methodology in Maguire’s essay is practice-led, as it is in the anthology more broadly. While the anthology is primarily autoethnographic in character, though, allowing insights into specific processes of value to practitioners, scholars and students, Maguire’s essay locates the discussion of the TYA audience within a broader context of reception studies, problematising assumptions which underpin much of TYA practice and previous theoretical discussions of spectatorship. One of the outcomes of the research has been to problem-mark the ways in which the relationship of children to actual performances might be analysed and evaluated. As the introduction identifies, this is a recurring issue within the anthology and at a methodological level; and, as Maguire specifically discusses, in the more fundamental conception of the audience as audience.