Playful research

This chapter proposes that among the approaches that one might value in researching audiences is that of playfulness. It deals with a deliberate eclecticism to demonstrate the existence of a style of playfulness within different methods and approaches. The chapter provides a higher-level objective to use audiences and playful research to invite readers to think about questions of research and knowledge. In the context of audience research, it explains that playfulness in research invites readers to engage in a more-than-representational understanding of the world and consequently tell new and different stories about audiences’ experiences of the performing arts. There is a particular relational and epistemological quality to playfulness that might usefully inform methods across a range of participatory, ethnographic, and sociological contexts interested in expanding the ways in which one undertake research with people. For the researcher, playfulness therefore becomes a strategy to invite genuinely human-to-human exchange, characterized by mutuality, of being in the game together, of comradeship and friendliness.