What do Birmingham audiences need or want?
- Convenor:
- Mike Tweddle
- Attendees:
- Mann Kumar, Alex Jones, Sayan Kent, Katerina Pushkin, Liz John, Ellie Robinson, Daniel Bradley
- Description:
We need a thriving theatre scene that isn’t the REP!
Building and maintaining an audience is a big problem for Brum theatre makers.
Ticket prices a problem perhaps. Old Joint Stock Theatre charges £10. If tickets were £5 perhaps audiences would be happier to take the risk with something less mainstream in a smaller space.
Although, if you don’t charge much, sometimes audiences don’t value it?How can we hang on to our audiences after an event? Make them return to the next event, develop their interest.
Huge numbers of potential audiences are spending large amounts of money on nights out: bars, clubs, comedy etc. So maybe accessibility is not so strongly linked to ticket pricing. Perhaps we have to market theatre more like a night out, and provide more than just ‘a show’, provide 5-6 hours of fun!
What specifically do Birmingham audiences want that is different from other cities/regions? Representation? We are not well represented on screen. Alex’s play about the Black Country, performed in local dialect, was not picked up in the region but was in London and abroad.
Something people forget about cultural diversity is that it’s not just about race. There are many diverse voices, dialects, and scenes that are under-represented in work.
Lots of ethnic minorities don’t want to go to the theatre. They are more likely to want to go to Broad St.
How can we market to people and keep them once they’ve come!
We need a centralized marketing service, specifically for theatre, and user-generated content. Like Theatre Bristol. It was suggested that the websites Created in Birmingham and Birmingham is not Shit are not really doing this.We need a system that allows more communication between different venues, events and companies. We should be sharing the marketing and spreading the word about all the possible venues and events through a centralized tool.
Audiences should discover its ok, and even good, to go to smaller venues. Most audiences aren’t even aware they exist (eg spaces in Digbeth). Even some of us weren’t aware they existed! We need to know as well!
Why is Birmingham’s identity not represented on the stage? Do audiences want this?
We perhaps also need to share outreach activities. Like divide up areas of the city and build relationships with certain schools/communitys. Get out amongst people and offer talks, experiences. We should reach out into the non-theatre going public but SHARE the responsibility.
Although, should we perhaps be attracting kids out of schools and into theatres? Helping them get used to it. But you can’t necessarily expect parents to pay for school theatre trips.
That are lots of diverse types of potential audiences, so we need something that happens in a place where all these types of people convene: the Rag Market or the Bull Ring.
We need a place like the Watch This Space on the South Bank: place with bars, music, multiple theatre performances, summer-long, in a central destination. Offers promotion to companies and accessible free theatre to people who wouldn’t normally go to the theatre!
Arts Fest is not fulfilling this role. It is a short, intense festival. Perhaps it should be broken up into theatre, dance, visual arts etc festivals and spread more around the year. When ArtsFest happens, lots of potential audience members actively avoid town.One of the problems for young or uninitiated audience members is that theatre has become too conservative. Young people want strange, experimental, risky. So do many older people.
Another idea suggested was a week-long run of a show, with a differently themed event happening afterwards each night, attracting different age groups or communities. Eg. One evening a drum and bass night, next a tea dance etc.
In London, there is a cultural currency in going to the theatre and hanging out afterwards. It is cool, it is respectable. In Birmingham, it’s not. There is no cultural currency. There is no Birmingham Fringe, at least in theatrer-goers minds. We need this database/website to give our work a presence and an identity!
We need to make more work that’s about our audiences.
People need to have knowledge about what they will see. Reviews, company info.
Scene Central is supposedly offering the kind of service we’re talking about, but hardly anyone in our group knew about it, and certainly audiences don’t.
Some experimental work is doing very well in unusual spaces – eg. Kindle at AE Harris – and so perhaps we shouldn’t be too down on the state of things!
We need to take more responsibility for making work that people will find genuinely exciting and accessible! We need to make work that can travel to audiences that won’t necessarily travel to us. For example, can we take work to the bars of Broad St?
Do we need more non-central theatre venues, like stand-up comedy has, to encourage people out of their houses of an evening?
There is a big regular theatre-going audience at the REP, Hippodrome, Alex etc so we should be making work that offers something else, something they can’t get in those places.
Experimental theatre can be very accessible, more so than plays at the REP. There is an audience, who at the moment aren’t coming, but who’d enjoy it.
Arts Council should support and lead the project to build this online system that allows us to share marketing, audiences, information, ideas, and to contact new audiences with a clear, open, dynamic website.