DROP
Platform
Breakout session 3
Audiences
Questions
- How can young and emerging choreographers connect to an audience?
- How are presenters connected to an audience?
- In what kind of venue or place is this happening?
- What strategies could be valuable?
- How can artists and presenters cooperate in reaching out to the audience?
- How is being in a network beneficial to audience development (quality and quantity)?
Outcomes
- Shifts in audiences’ needs
- instead of one long show, shift towards more and shorter programmes.
- making the evening into an event – marathon shows for example.
- people want value for their money.
- audience taking ownership; connecting
- attention span has changed (diminished).
- bite-sized pieces of work
- contextualisation is important.
Connecting venues and artists
- producing and presenting in the same venue.
- artists supporting other artists in their work, as an audience.
- collisions in the venue could be connections.
- crossovers that happen by chance could be organised and followed up
- community meets professional/commercial
- workshops and outreach to connect and develop an audience.
- relationship between producer and artist or artist and venue is important.
- dance buddy scheme: partnering artists and theatres for mentoring each other and supporting, including marketing.
- theatres and venues passing on info on programming, i.e. Newport and Cardiff (Chapter).
- diversity vs commercial
- open rehearsals to open doors of curiosity
- when communicating the performance, loyalty to the artist is important
- customizing to needs of venue and artist.
- joint responsibility of artist, producer and presenter of bums on seats.
- developing further curiosity by good curation.
- two way partnership: artist and audience
Importance of space to meet
- art needs spaces to connect in and network in: café, bar, theatre, cinema, art gallery.
- example of Kitsch & Sync: performance starts in one space and moves to another.
- Stepping stone theory of audience development, making performances more accessible.
- moving an audience within a venue to different spaces changes the audience’s mindset.
Contextualising the performance.
- post show talks
- programme notes
- marketing materials
- reviews
- how to descrbe the work to make it accessible.
- podcasts
- interviews with artists.
- trailers of work
- social media
- performance should be packaged/themed properly
- curation is the key.
- performance should be contextualised.
- how to connect to a local community
- how to get an audience to be curious.
Facilitate – Curate – Contextualise
- share experiences
- networks between artists, venues, organisations, communities.
- building databases – capturing info
- trust between venue, artists, programmers
- safe houses: network of venues providing national tour opportunities
- Dance Roads model could be rolled out.
- branding certain evenings, so that audience comes to brand, not performance