Audience Agency in ‘Political’ Theatre in Rehearsal and Performance

Conveners:

Tom Ross-Williams: (Populace theatre)

Becki Hillman: (In Good Company)

Participants: Tom Brocklehurst, John Ward, Susana Davis Cook, Rod Dixon, Christina Caralina, Nicola Sianhope, Fran Hyde, Eve Leigh, Lauren Cooney, Emma Callander…

 

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Questions/provocations/models of practice/thoughts relating to the group discussion:

-       come to me with a solution, not a problem

-       how do giving answers/asking questions lead to political agency in performance?

-       positivity/negativity for politicisation in performance

-       the efficacy of ownership/belonging for a theatre of action

-       Theatre Uncut and David Greig: his short play last year needing audience to participate – and empowering model? (Engendered emotional responses from audience members who empathised with what was going on and had to perform role-play)… …(but is an audience reading from a script in unison always empowering?)

-       Third Ring Out (performance) – educative, gaming model of performance, which began anonymously but became more involved/actively engaged

-       An invitation to become active/the active engagement of the audience must not lead to nowhere! (Where can it lead? – into other actions/networks/practices/social movements or groups? Into further productions? – how can we facilitate further engagement, what obstacles might we encounter as practitioners and how might we overcome them??)

-       Collective identity feels safer for an audience to practice agency (builds confidence). How can we engender this in rehearsal/performance? By splitting people into groups? Inviting them to socialise? Involving them in process……..

-       Is the word ‘political’ a turn off to theatre audiences (and what audiences do we want to politicize?) Is it unsexy/not escapist enough?...Automatically unpopular? Or is this relative to historical/political/economic contexts? Where is it sexy/popular? (Scotland? Other…?)

-       OR reclaim the word ‘political’???

-       Is being told something or being preached at always something we shy away from or do we accept it in contexts that aren’t ‘political’?

-       Is theatre encountering its biggest period of ‘formal explosion’?!

There’s much more but I am running out of time!....... thanks to tom and participants for great discussion! Becki

-       Donation  only political theatre

-       Don’t turn the lights out on the audience

-       Giving people a shared experience

-       But give audience a  role in political theatre is important

-       Leave a show feeling galvanised rather than  pacified

-       The power of obstruction – audience unified by having to solve a problem  of sharing a tight space

-       Encouraging audiences to be disobedient

-       Audience  - Soho Theatre  (manipulated  but disempowered?)

-       Nature of the offer given to the audience

o   If we are told what to think do we turn off?         

o   Demanding to share viewpoints  to incite reactionary thinking/action

-       Connect  audience to tangible  stories rather than abstract ideas

o   Like the demolition of local building

o   Localised is political theatre

-       We can learn from other forms – circus/stand-up/dance

-       7:84 Black Black Oil

-       What is your language

o   Political issue explored through a ceilidh

-       Shalom Baby – political  moment a gay kiss in Stratford East

-       “Be the change you want to see in the world”

Leave the theatre with the world “yes!”

How can I persuade people who don’t already agree with me to see my work?

Convener(s): Dan Barnard

Participants: Becky, John, Daniel, Christina Elliot, Rebecca Manson Jones, Vicky Graham, Cristina Catalina

(lots of other brilliant people whose names I epically failed to record – sorry!)

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Really learn about the audience you are targeting – read their newspapers, really try to get into their heads.

Do pop up performances of tasters of the show

The most persuasive thing that makes someone see a show is if someone they know and trust recommends it to them.

Try piggy back emails with organizations that have your target audience.

Talk to Audiences London about your objectives and see if they can help.

Give lots of people 5 tickets to sell – they might well sell them to friends and relations who aren’t directly interested in the subject already

Be nuanced – what if the character you want to like in the play is often shown to be wrong?

Don’t put your conclusion in the marketing – let people work towards it with you.

Politics by stealth/Trick people!

Where is the show happening – take the show to the trouble spot – don’t expect people to come to you.

Taking a show outside London (or to outer London venues) can mean you connect to a different audience – in London there is so much choice that the audience is often even more self-selecting

Think about making the theatre aspect only part of a wider campaign.

The flip side is that if people care about an issue they might come to a show when they wouldn’t normally go to the theatre.

Take the show to the audience you want, make it free or cheap and create a forum that allows people to leave (part of the fear that puts people off theatre is that you are trapped).

Is theatre the best medium for the thing you want to say and the audience you want to reach? Always ask yourself this question.  Also, can you make the same piece work across different platforms?

Allow the process of making the show and researching a show to change your own mind – if you’re asking people to change you must be prepared to be changed yourself.

With theatre you can reach fewer people, but perhaps in a more intense way.

Much discussion of the notion of preaching – people don’t want to be preached at. They might not even want to pay to be questioned.

Outdoor theatre or theatre in contexts that people are comfortable in (e.g the local pub) is another way of getting to harder to reach people.

If you devise or write a show through interviewing local communities or the audience you want to reach, if you involve them in that process and create an attachment to the project, they are more likely to come and bring their friends.  Consider running open rehearsals that people can wander into from the street.

Consider having a non-political title and a strong marketing aesthetic that appeals to the people you want to reach.

Stratford East got local community members to programme six months of work – this work attracted a whole new audience.

Plan in detail your marketing strategy, targeted to those you want to attract

Consider having an evening of live music of local bands after your show so that people come to the whole evening.

More popular forms of entertainment are more participatory – if theatre could be more participatory would it attract a different audience?

Can you market one angle that is part of a show that gets people in who might be less aware of the other? Example of a show with subject matter including Jewishness and Gender – many Jewish people came and some of them had not thought about the Gender issues before.

Put thoughts about the audience at the heart of the creative process – potentially this could be part of the dramaturg’s role?

Idea of working with problematic collaborators – e.g an evening of three shows with different political perspectives so that audience of one watch all three.

Offer people structures to take any political activism the play stirs in them onwards.  A specific suggestion of postcards with : If you have one minute, if you have 5 minutes, if you have a day, if you have a week, if you have longer – what you can do.

Also the idea of making post show discussions a forum for debate where experts or activists talk or debate the issues of a show – and they offer other ways of engaging with the subject. This sort of information and debate could also take place online.

In terms of getting non theatre goers to go to the theatre, a study that Royal and Derngate carried out concluded that it was pointless to try to engage those who never go to the theatre and that you should focus instead on trying to get those who come to the theatre 3 times a year to come 4 times a year – and so on – that this was much more attractive.

Also, look at what other forms of popular culture have and see what you can steal from them to make theatre more attractive.

The idea of a theatre reward card  (like Nectar etc) to encourage people to go to the theatre more – the more you see the more you save