Street performers have to create and manage their own performance events. This makes street performance an ideal type of situation for studying how an audience is assembled and sustained in practice. This thesis uses detailed video-based ethnographic analysis to investigate these processes in street performances in Covent Garden, London. Drawing on the performance literature, the role of the physical structure of the environment, the arrangement of physical objects within the environment and the physical placement of people are all examined. The argument of the thesis is that these analyses alone are insufficient to explain how an audience is established or sustained. Rather, an audience is an ongoing interactional achievement built up through a structured sequence of interactions between performers, passers-by and audience members. Through these interactions performers get people’s attention, achieve the recognition that what is going on is a performance, build a collective sense of audience membership, establish moral obligations to each other and the performer, and train the audience how to respond. The interactional principles uncovered in this thesis establish the audience as a social group worthy of studying in its own right, and are in support of a multiparty human-human interaction approach to design for crowds and audiences.

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Each year people are injured and even die in crowd related accidents, often during planned events. Recent studies have emphasized the need for using a systems approach to study these events. In this study the systems approach of resilience theory is combined with the crowd psychology-models Extended Social Identity Model and the Aggravation and Mitigation Model to examine event safety at a music festival, a domain previously largely unexplored by these perspectives. By using an ethnographic approach as well as interviewing visitors the study set out to answer questions about when and how the safety organization adjusted itself under conditions relating to crowds. Another goal was to study the social identity of the visitors as well as the interaction between the safety organization and the visitors at the festival to explain the presence or absence of crowd conflict. Using thematic analysis several situations were identified where the safety organization adjusted itself, as well as the strategies that the organization used in these different circumstances. It was also concluded that the absence of crowd conflict could best be explained by three factors. First of all, no history of crowd conflict existed between the safety organization and the visitors, secondly, there were no groups present with the goal of creating conflict, and thirdly, the social processes taking place between the safety organization and the visitors were all mitigating in nature. The mitigating nature of the social processes was partly attributable to the strategies identified for adjusting to crowd conditions.