Building new publics: using agile, community-engaged, and applied theatre methodologies as social intervention in audience research

This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre company, and their verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope created from the data of a global ethnographic research project, we extend Schechner's (1988, 2003. Performance Theory. London: Routledge.) notion of gathering and dispersing to illustrate how an 'agile' research methodology acts as both inquiry and social intervention. This dual focus provides theatre artists and practitioners with novel ways to become more intentional about building engaged, intergenerational audiences.