‘Shaped like a question mark’: found poetry from Herbert Blau's The Audience
Performance theorist Herbert Blau's The Audience (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990) is an important yet neglected theoretical text on theatre audience. Deconstructive, dense and allusive in nature, Blau's text creates a real challenge for his reader. This paper presents a study of The Audience employing what I am calling literature-voiced research poetry. This consists of found poems created from certain kinds of theoretical texts, particularly those that are, like Blau's, rich, thick and metaphorical in nature. In creating these found poems, I am moving into using an arts-based research methodology as a way of knowing within an inquiry process, as well as a way of analysing and representing data (Oberg, A., Arts-based educational research, Notes from presentation at Association for Graduate Education Students (AGES) meeting, University of Victoria, 18 March 2003). My dissertation, Marked by performance: a curriculum theory and poetics for audience in the performing arts (in progress), will...