Feeling together: the affective project of co-presence and the limits of the audience community

News headlines post-pandemic question whether audience members have 'forgotten how to behave' amidst incidents of disruption to theatre performances, suggesting audience norms are in a time of renegotiation and expectations of what it means to be co-present are shifting. This article uses qualitative audience data solicited from spectators attending live, in-person performances in 2021 and 2022 to examine how audiences conceive of, value, and cultivate collective experiences. Data suggest that affect is a strong motivator for audiences to attend co-present performance experiences, and that audiences are motivated to anticipate and enact affective projects in which feelings are circulated amongst a collective who may perceive themselves to feel together. These affective projects, however, are bound up in hegemonic norms that, while they may be pleasurable to some, also replicate exclusionary harms and are therefore in need of close examination and re-evaluation alongside larger reforms to the normative theatre audience experience.