Towards a Multi-dimensional Understanding of the Performer–Audience Relationship

The performer–audience relationship is a powerful aspect of live performance, with performers’ strong emotional experiences with music frequently involving an audience response. Yet, despite the large body of research on audience experiences of live performance, there is limited work on the ways in which audiences influence the performer’s creative process during performance, as well as in its preparation and evaluation. This article explores musicians’ perceptions of their audiences, drawing on selected findings from a questionnaire survey with seventy-eight musicians that forms part of an ongoing research project on musicians’ perceptions and experiences of live performance. We outline a series of vignettes that illustrate how performers’ experiences are dynamically related to their performance environment. Our arguments are informed by an ecological perspective, which views the creative process as distributed across, and actively entangled with, the social, material and cultural constituents of the environment. We suggest that this orientation is useful in helping to disentangle the messy connections and interactions within live performance that are otherwise unaddressed in current performance studies scholarship. We conclude by considering the implications of performer perspectives for working towards a framework for understanding the performer–audience relationship and its potential applications and impacts for musicians’ wellbeing and training.