Issue: This is like a crisis meeting: What can we learn from other art forms?

Convener(s): Richard Kingdom

Participants: Sinead MacManus, Martina Von Holn, Oyuind Vada, James Stenhouse, Cheryl Pierce, Enlouiselle, Claire Cooke, Richard Couldrey (and several others over the course of the discussion)

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

The impetus for the topic was of the DIY approaches to putting on shows found in music and the visual arts. How, for instance, bands exchange gigs and promote each other in their local areas without ever considering applying for funding while theatre companies often promote entire tours themselves without any local contacts and venues that they are visiting often don’t have the time or financial imperative to effectively market the work either. As a result, companies – particularly emerging ones – end up spending their time on the high levels of administration that getting grants, commissions, gigs, profile etc requires but that companies – and again, particularly emerging ones – don’t have the infrastructure to deal with this and make work. At this level there was an admiration of the ability for bands to ‘just do it’; rock up for a gig, spill out of the back of a van and go! So is this a model that theatre and performance makers could adopt or assimilate? Could theatre makers in different regions promote each other to create a well attended tour, could New Work Network and other similar organisations help to find audiences in regions that artists plan to visit?

The immediate restriction of the DIY approach is identifiably money. DIY models are great but rarely make enough money to provide a living. However, at an emerging level, they might in fact be healthier than the models and support structures provided for emerging theatre artists currently.

This led onto a discussion about funding. Subsidy for national touring from the arts council constitutes the largest proportion of a touring budget. But there is obviously the problem of getting that funding and those venue gigs and it was felt that this required a particular ability in terms of speaking the language and ‘playing the game’: if you want funding then you have to work for it, if you don’t want to do that work then you need to find a different strategy.

Audiences were identified as a current problem and something that other art forms have in their favour in that audiences have a better sense of what they’re getting partly because, as forms, they are far easier to distribute (we hear music on the radio all the time for instance and this gives us a good idea of what we’re going to get at a bands night – this saturation of form also makes it a lot easier for artists working in that medium to just get up and make some because there is a far clearer idea of how it works). Unfamiliarity makes audiences wary about taking a risk on something new and that audiences were generally far less forgiving of bad theatre whereas they might be far less annoyed by going to see a rubbish band or bad gallery show. So theatre, in a general sense, demands a greater investment from its audience (and also from its artists?) putting a far greater pressure on theatre performances than on other art forms. This was extended by a comparison of the gladiatorial style of stand-up compared to the meet-them-halfway relationship that theatre has with its audience. Doing a theatre show in the same environment as a pub band or stand-up comedy gig might help to bypass this pressure and allow performances to be forgivably poor but equally there is the concern about compromising the integrity of your theatre practice – ie the concentration and focus that it demands is one of its chief qualities (again, speaking generally). Nevertheless, the ability to ‘vote with your feet’ seemed like a healthy thing for audiences to feel ‘allowed’ to do. More exits, more intervals and more booze were suggested as catalysts for this. Furthermore – and perhaps critically – how would this inform the work that was being made? Might it make it better? A member of the group who had performed before the vocal crowds at The Globe, described this direct audience ‘feedback’ as a stimulating input into his performance. Theatre used to be far more of a social event after all and so perhaps it needs to get back to that?

But how do you reach new audiences in the first place. Well, myspace and youtube were offered as examples of building a following and being able to show people what you do rather than trying to describe it through inadequate and/or specialist terms. But still it’s an artist to audience marketing direction and how do you get the flow going in the opposite direction? Audiences are attracted to something that is new with hype around it so it’s a question of how do you get that going?

By reaching new venues, finding new ways for audiences to behave and by approaching the finances with greater ‘commercial responsibility’, theatre might be able to shift its current thinking patterns out of tired, well-trodden models in order to find healthier structures. This ‘thinking outside the box’ was identified as key to this topic.

There was an unresolved debate about the ‘official’ support structures of different art forms. The subsidised studios and small pots of making money available for visual artists and makers for instance. However, it was also argued that theatre already had more structure in this respect than, for example, music.

There was also some discussion about areas of artistic inspiration gained from cross-arts approaches but the focus of the discussion was on the structures of making and delivering the work.