About this website: On the 26th and 27th of November 2009, a group of people came together at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham to begin to answer the question "How do we create a better future for theatre, here, in the West Midlands". This website holds the notes from the sessions held over those two days, and allows anyone (whether they were present at the event or not) to continue the conversations from the event. You can read Alison Gagen's full invitation to the event here

Assessment of Quality

Convenor:

Chris Gunter

Attendees:

Vanessa Oakes, Orla O’Loughlin, Louisa Davies, Oluwa Toyin, Keith, Emily Ayres, Chris Gunter

Description:

Dividing live community/commercial theatre – mixing actors and non-actors, how do we judge the quality of and address the stigma of ‘community’ work: assessing work on the quality of the experience that the community group have and also devising to their strengths.

How do we know when we are making ‘good quality’ work? Who has the right to assess quality, as opposed to taste. Audience bring their own baggage to the show which affects their experience of that work.

What are the criteria for assessing the quality of work:
- Would I see it again?
- Would I pay for it?/what would I pay for it?
- If you stripped everything away, the set, the costume, everything, would it still be worth anything? i.e. poor theatre
- What do your audiences say? (but yet taking their opinions with a pinch of salt – that you must do what you believe in and not over-compensate, 

Quality and taste are different, accept that something is of high quality even if it not your sort of thing. We talked about methods of gathering audience feedback and how reliable or useful they are, or whether freedom for audience to contact you rather than pressuring them into immediate evaluation is a better method.

Orla explained the new ACE initiative of peer review/assessment, where the ACE have organized around 1000 people who will be sent to review the work of RFO’s on behalf of ACE. We discussed the difficulty with this as of course this is only one opinion, and the criteria being used to complete this assessment is not clear. We then discussed public funding as a means of sustaining companies and getting out of the mindset that ACE are the only judge of work. Don’t wait for funding to make the work! And be a judge of your own work.

Oluwa from the Drum also joined and spoke about the role of venues in programming more experimental work and addressing how to persuade what is a generally more conservative, safe and religious audience in Birmingham that this is work that provides an unusual experience and to take a risk on it. But audiences can’t take a risk if the venue doesn’t!

Louisa said that mac has made a decision to focus more on programming regional work and push the boundaries of audience experience/expectation that way. Only in this way can we assess whether there is an audience for experimental work in Birmingham.