1. Introduction

This chapter constitutes a plea for audiences. It argues that performing arts audiences have been consistently sidelined, homogenised, and disempowered over the past 150 years and that this has had a negative impact on the field of audience studies. The chapter advocates for an engagement-based approach to audience research, which places audiences at the heart of empirical enquiries into the complex multi-sensory experiences that they have before, during and after their performing arts encounters. It also explores the terminology surrounding audience research and illustrates how some of the key terms used to describe audiences are both unhelpful and reductive. The chapter explores the key challenges facing audience research and outlines the aims and scope of the book, highlighting its underlying philosophy of audience centricity.