Cheered and Checked: Performers and Audiences

Abstract

Performance draws on a uniquely wide range of disciplines and skills: electrics, electronics, architecture, carpentry, painting, graphic and scenic design, computing (for lighting and accounting), financial management, marketing, music, acoustics, acting, dancing, singing, and so on and so forth. Yet performance is not solely about displaying range: it is also concerned with aesthetic, intellectual and social integration. It encourages the integration of theory and practice; it combines psycho-motoric, affective and cognitive learning; it unites art with technology; it bonds performers with audiences. This combination of range and integration makes it the classic humanist discipline, which is why Lord Bacon so admired it.