Last night I accepted an invite to the Adelaide Festival Centre’s forum entitled Building Arts Audiences Collaboratively, hosted by the charming Fenella Kernebone (who did an excellent job with an at times prickly crowd) and managed by some of the Centre’s brilliant, forward thinking staff – and regardless how much I disliked the content of the forum itself, thanks is most definitely due to them for putting together a very thought provoking event, working hard to start a dialogue and inviting me to take part. It was part of their In Conversation With series, which you can read more about here.
That said, the interesting thing about the Building Arts Audiences Collaboratively forum is that it had very little to do with either audiences or collaboratively building them. For some reason when this topic comes up, or at least when it comes up through forums driven by larger, usually publically funded Arts organisations it has three recurring themes:
(1) Attendance is down in the Arts because large Arts organisations don’t have enough money.
(2) Attendance is down in the Arts because the Festival Centre needs money to upgrade its facilities.
(3) Attendance is down in the Arts because young people don’t go to anything because they’ve got short attention spans because of the internet and they’re all horrible and self centred.
With varying degrees of subtlety, I’ve heard those three points recycled time and time again. And in this case, the subtlety was somewhat missing, with the usual truisms about Gen Y’s short attention span, lack of engagement and a general sense that audiences – particularly younger audiences – just plain don’t know what’s good for them.
Having spent the last few years working with micro venues that operate out of dingy basements, disused buildings and shoeboxes down side alleys, and doing so with very limited funding, I don’t buy the first two excuses. People don’t go to a venue to see a well subsidised seat. If the content is good enough, they’ll sit on the floor. Last month I spent two hours sitting on a milk crate in an overcrowded, unairconditioned death trap watching experimental theatre. I don’t believe the Arts is about funding. Funding is a secondary. It’s a means to an end. You don’t make art or build audience just by getting funding.
On the third point, given the myriad of other organisations, ranging from the MRC to the AEAF to Magazine, who seem to have no trouble finding a Gen Y audience, I flat out reject the idea that the reason major Arts companies are losing audience is something to do with the failed cultural consumption habits of those in their teens, twenties and thirties.
Not only do I reject that argument, I find it offensive. I’ve been hearing it for ten years now and I think it’s a pretty simplistic attempt to avoid dealing with more pressing questions about the relevance of particular approaches to cultural production and gatekeeping in the 21st century.
And based on the conversations I had with a bunch of people aged between 18 and 40 after the forum, I certainly wasn’t alone. There were a number of young people, and an equal number of not so young people, all of whom are more than a little tired of being told ‘youth’ is mysteriously to blame for the reputed cultural decline of 21st Century Australia.
I don’t believe a lack of audiences for events like the Adelaide Festival or places like the Festival Centre can be blamed on Gen X or Y or Z by dint of their reputed short attention span, self absorbed fetish for social media, lack of respect for ‘quality’ art or theatre, poor education or whatever simplistic rationale is currently being drummed up to position them as scapegoats.
And, to top it off, it was just plain weird to hear unsupported clichés about ‘the great unwashed’ and the short attention spans of Gen Y being focused on at a forum where I’d been expecting to hear about building audiences. One of the best questions of the evening (raised by a member of the audience) was whether the issues with audience development related to a limited attempt to reach new audiences. Oddly, the response from all panellists was simply “No.” They didn’t think they needed to reach new audiences.
That response – or lack thereof – was kind of emblematic of the forum as a whole. I almost got the impression some of the panellists actually didn’t like audiences and sort of blamed them for not building themselves – as if the audience was one, big surly teenager who was too busy hanging out with its friends and playing with its mobile phone to appreciate the Fine Art it had been so benevolently offered. Which would explain why the forum started with one panellist telling a (young) audience member off for tweeting. God forbid the audience should engage in dialogue when there were Arts professionals there to tell them how to develop themselves properly.
Which kind of made me wonder why the Festival Centre had put on a forum about audience development in the first place.
But then, as one of the pesky youths told me in the foyer afterwards, if you go back through the Festival Centre’s annual reports, comparing 2007 to 2010, they’ve lost audience at a fairly substantial rate, and they’re particularly struggling to find an audience under 30.
The Pesky Youth told me that attendance – both ticketed and overall – at the Festival Centre is down by a quarter since 2007. Obviously, I’d never take someone from Gen Y at their word because they have the attention of a goldfish, so I went and looked up the figures myself. In summary, the Festival Centre’s annual reports indicate:
Audience at Ticketed Events for 2006-2007: 530 000 to 1179 performances (average 500 people per show)
Total Visitation for 2006 – 2007: 895,000
Audience at Ticketed Events for 2009-2010: 459,687 to 806 performances (average 570 people per show)
Total Visitation for 2009-2010: 753,281
You can download their reports here.
I’m hesitant to make easy assumptions about those figures, particularly the decrease in the number of shows. Theatre in particular takes time to develop. Better to have fewer shows and more time for its practitioners to develop their work. But, on the whole, the Pesky Youth was right. There’s been a decrease in audience of about a quarter since 2007, even if attendance per show is up a bit.
To their credit, the Festival Centre has tried to increase its youth audience (defining youth as 16 to 30) with their Green Room program (which you can read about on page 25 of their last annual report). They sold a total of 324 Green Room tickets in 2009-2010, and began using Facebook and Twitter to build their online presence. Their Facebook page obtained a total of 187 fans. It’s since gone up to 400. Additionally, they’ve also been doing a widely commended job over the past twelve months in broadening their programming, actively seeking to work with younger people and setting up things like the In Conversation With forums.
Just to put that in perspective, the last two week long Format festival had an estimate of 3000 to 4000 attendees, 80% of whom were under 30 and our Facebook page has 925 fans. Our total yearly income from public funding for the 2010-2011 financial year is $13,000. Tuxedo Cat’s Facebook page has 1247 followers. Their total public funding for the current financial year is $10,000, awarded for the purchase of new equipment. I don’t have comparable figures for the other organisations who seem to be leading the way in this sphere – like Felt or the AEAF or the MRC. But they don’t seem to be having issues with developing a younger audience.
I sound like I’m picking on the Festival Centre here, but that’s not the point. My point is that there’s clearly an issue with building younger audiences for large Arts organisations. The Centre should be congratulated on attempting to address that. But based on last night’s panel, and the comparative ease which other organisations are engaging with younger audiences, I think there’s a need to move away from simplistic scapegoating of Gen Y and a belief that more funding will solve everything.
I was talking to another Pesky Youth at the bar afterwards, who raised an alternative approach to the topic of audience development by larger publicly funded Arts organisations. They argued that if we remove the easy excuses of “More money” or “Blame young people” it leaves us with a question that pretty much never seems to come up in these sorts of forums. It just sits there like the proverbial white elephant. I’m going to finish this post with it, and a request for those of you who’ve waded through this whole spiel to have a shot at answering it:
Perhaps the problem isn’t the audience? Perhaps the reason audiences – particularly younger audiences – aren’t attending major Arts events in higher numbers isn’t because they’re too busy on Facebook or they don’t appreciate quality art or they’re too lazy to come into the city or they’d rather spend their money elsewhere. Perhaps the problem is the content? Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s what’s on (or not on) the stage that’s the problem, not the people in (or not in) the seats?
Reasons I would go to smaller arts organisations for my arts over larger arts organisations:
- Someone I actually know may be involved in producing the work I would see at a smaller arts organisation
- Cheaper
- I repetitively get invited to art shows/theatre shows at smaller arts organisations, both by the organisation itself and my friends.
- Smaller arts organisations are putting on more experimental/exciting/contemporary work
- Smaller arts organisations are supporting local practitioners making new work. There is a sense that these practitioners are on the verge of exciting things – that their career is just beginning.
All of that said, larger models for arts organisations are not redundant. The new programming at Art Gallery of South Australia is attracting swathes of young audiences. How? By changing the content – more exciting, contemporary, bold artists and artworks involved. More stuff that is relevant to our time rather than historical work squarely aimed at the Art Gallery’s white-haired audience (who shouldn’t be ignored…but maybe they want to see something new too?). As long as intellectual rigour in the work presented is still a criteria, I see nothing wrong with presenting work that is new, exciting and appealing to people who have no vested interest in the arts.
I want to take time to ingest this thoroughly before making a more detailed response, but there’s two very important words that need to be considered here: Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan Stevens played in the Festival Theatre earlier this year to a crowd who, from what I could see, were generally under 30, and were all on a high after the show. I can’t go into details, but I can certainly say that that show in particular smashed expectations on both tickets sold and revenue.
Other than that, and Wicked [which, admittedly, I only cared about because a family member was involved in the production in Melbourne] there’s not really anything else that interests me that happens at AFC.
As you say, maybe they should cut out their hobnobby bullshit and let someone who is actually in touch with youth [or, heaven forbid, under 30 themselves] make some planning suggestions.
I’d hazard a guess that the success [and outright amazingness, I'm getting skin tingles just thinking back to the show] of Sufjan Stevens will push the centre along this path, even if only a little, over the next few years.
More so perhaps than the content of the shows (although that’s a valid point), judging from the panel’s response it seems to me that the FCT has failed to use a period of subsidisation to generate its own sustainability, and hasn’t felt as much pressure to be self-funding as perhaps it does now, and rather than make changes to their comfortable existence, they prefer to bemoan the withdrawal of the teat.
I see no shortage of younger people visiting the city, I see the (relative) success of smaller events and festivals like the ones you mentioned, and I have to assume that if (e.g.) the Festival Centre is struggling for numbers, then they’re doing something wrong. The sooner they admit to that, the sooner they can fix it …
Also, the structure of larger organisations may work against them. When you have a person in charge of Marketing and a person in charge of Programming, it may happen that the Programming director sees it as the Marketing director’s job to build the audience. In a smaller organisation those two people would work incredibly closely (or even be the same person), thus that the content of the program is marketing in itself.
Chloe, very well put. I especially like the bit about marketing being inherently built into the program, so true, and something the smaller and indie orgs do so well.
The structure of larger organisations work against them in other ways as well – once you are operating at a certain capacity then you need to make a certain amount of money to sustain it (staff, overheads, etc). Small orgs tend to be more flexible and thus responsive to what audiences want/need. One of my key concerns at EWF is how to grow this org into one that is stable and sustainable, without becoming so ‘well established’ that we fall victim to the establishment mindset and lose sight of why we do what we do and how we became successful in the first place.
Sufjan Stevens gets mentioned a lot, and that along with things like inviting a number of younger practitioners – including a non-artist like myself- along to the forum would indicate, to me at least, that the Festival Centre itself is trying to figure out, albeit not always successfully, how to rebuild a younger audience. Like I said in the post, I think they should be commended for setting something like this up. I don’t think this is about debating the merits of the Festival Centre or the Festival of Arts. I think it’s about wondering why there’s not a greater attempt to collaborate across boundaries to collectively build audience. I’m pretty sure it’s happened before. I’m not sure why it’s not happening now.
I guess the thing I’d hoped to see in the forum is how we might stop seeing major performing arts centres or galleries as existing in a separate realm from medium, unfunded, micro or more creative industries focused ventures. I look at Format’s relationship with Fringe, AC Arts and Vitals, and the conversations we’ve had with things like ANAT, and see a great potential for collaboration in building audiences across the strata of the cultural and creative industries. That collaboration is already happening and proves this isn’t an issue of one or the other – old established or young experimental, but a far more diverse playing field. That said, there are a number of major stakeholders, who seemed pretty successfully personified by the panellists last night, who aren’t anywhere near that playing field and give the distinct impression we should all just grow up and start paying $100 to come see their latest production of Don’s Party. I’m not sure how they perceive themselves but I frequently find they come across as either naive as to the shifts in cultural habits of the past fifteen years or simply protecting their own sense of privilege, which is where things get frustrating.
“It used to work and now it doesn’t, so it’s the kids/parents/society/Facebook/everyone else’s fault” is a fairly common thing to hear. My experience of working in government agencies is that this sort of mentality is the result of people getting too comfortable in their positions and believing that, if they don’t get yelled at, they’re doing their job to perfection. Then they stay there, doing the same thing for 20 years while technology grips the rest of the world and wonder why things have changed ‘suddenly’.
(I’m pretty sure the pesky youth was talking about Subscriber numbers at the State Theatre Company: 4777 in their 05/06 Annual Report, 3563 in 09/10.
Not that I would know anything about pesky youths.)
I’ve been reading this whilst listening to the podcast. What I can’t get over, and I’m sure my fellow ‘young people’ who got to go last night feel the same, is the whingeing about facilities and money. And also quite obviously NOT about building audiences collaboratively.
I agree with Chloe – the reasons I go to see things are because either someone I know is involved and/or has invited me, or I am going to see somethign I have never seen before/have always been intrigued by. A new play, a new exhibition, a new music event OR an experimental play, artwork etc. I work in the Festival Centre and for work have to see all State Theatre plays and all major productions. 1 in 10 performances is actually something I am interested in. Generally speaking I go to things at smaller, more run-down venues, because that is where more interesting things are happening.
And that ‘evil’ social media is how I find out about most of it! Now sorry, I gotta go back to my facebook.
It’d be naive to say some of the issue isn’t to do with staffing, and particularly staff who’ve been doing the same job for a long time with no pressure to adapt. But that’s not a problem specific to the Arts, that’s specific to most larger organisations whose outcomes are measured in social good rather than purely financial good. It’s much harder to measure and evaluate best organisational practice when you’re trying to deal with more than the easily quantifiable dollar outcome.
That said, as came up in the User Gen Cities forum, there’s an issue here about how/if we can build in the capacity to innovate within a larger organisation. I don’t really see we have a choice. Again, that’s what was disappointing about last night. It wasn’t about how we build new audiences collaboratively. It was about how it was all the audience’s fault. It’s like listening to Warner Bros executives whinging about Napster in 2003: “They should respect our art enough to pay heaps for it! Why are they getting their art from somewhere else?” In the case of the music industry, they had to adapt or go broke, so they adapted, and now everyone buys music through iTunes – a platform that didn’t even exist a few years ago – and more money gets made off of touring and merchandise than hard copy record sales. The issue I see with the Arts industry is public funding insulates them from the need to adapt and sets up organisations designed to work towards specific definitions of artistic quality, which might have been fine twenty years ago but seems to be drifting away from and, if last night is anything to go by, actively alienating their audiences.
A while ago I had someone from a funded company tell me it was easier for the micros to innovate because they don’t have funding and thus there’s fewer reporting commitments or something. I told them we don’t have a choice. If we don’t innovate, we don’t keep up with and engage with our audience, we don’t sell any drinks and we can’t pay the rent. Without funding, you have to think ahead. That isn’t a criticism of funding for the Arts – which I think most people reading this blog pretty actively support. But that sense of insulating isn’t doing anyone any favours.
i am somewhere in between the pesky youths and the um… white hairs. i started going to exhibitions and theatre shows at the festival theatre with my mother when i was very young. i remember vividly how risky, engaging and of-the-moment some of the events were and wonder at how the theatre became so staid and middle of the road.
i still sometimes think of one of the artworks i saw at an event there; it was a video animation about the cyclical nature of greed; it had amongst other things, a fat man eating grapes and a starving man eating nothing… the fat man was, in the end, eating the starving man. perhaps a bit didactic for today’s audiences.
but the fact is that the festival theatre, in the 80s, was not afraid to program content which was thought provoking, political, and fun.
In my work (to myself), I call them “chants” – numbly repeated phrases, themes and even words. Not for the first time descriptions of roadblocks you encounter in your work look not at all dissimilar to those I encounter in mine; in a public, ‘community’, housing ‘co-operative’. Thank you for the content of your writing.
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The book ‘What Good are The Arts?’ by John Carey agues that participation in the arts is undervalued and consumption of the arts is overvalued, and I think young people ‘get this’ more than previous generations. Large arts organisations who present work and ask audiences to pay to’ consume’ art may find audience development difficult. Here in Perth, I wonder if there’s too large a gap between ‘community’ or ‘amateur’ theatre which is popular and participatory, and ‘subsidised theatre’ which is perceived as elitist and passive. Your point about content is right, though. Clever programming and audience development go hand-in-hand.
More than ever, we need to involve young people in the creation of new work, the development of the arts and audience development activities.
We also need to reach out to the new cultural demographics in society. Larger, building-based organisations in particular may find it helpful by welcoming some emerging creators and curators of work to feel involved in the work that they are doing, helping them to improve programming and develop new audiences, even at the risk of alienating the over-50′s.
There is a lot to be learned from the small-medium sector in the ways of collaboration. Many companies have proven success in this area.
It’s interesting to note though that these small co-ops do not have award rates paid to artists (a split of any profit is the usual deal) nor the industrial relations requirements of the majors. Add to this the restrictions of funding bodies requiring certain boxes to be ticked and you’ve got a group of major arts orgs who struggle to be agile.
So agility is a real bonus to the sme’s… However it cannot be compared as they are different worlds with different end goals.
A grungy venue with a cutting edge piece of theatre with budget production values might be the most moving and amazing arts experience of my life, but if someone is paying $60 (which doesn’t even cover the artists salaries) at a professional venue such as the AFC, there is an expectation that the production values are higher, the artists are trained and experienced (and usually well known) AND the art is good.
I question whether these worlds ever could realistically collide or if each sector should work under their own terms and hope for cross-pollination through an ethos of cultural diversity?
Easy, cheap and good are going to beat awkward, expensive and crap. I went and saw ‘November’ at the Festival Centre and dare anyone to tell me that I wouldn’t have better spent my time doing anything else.
It’s competition for attention that is going on here, and the quality level to be sustainable is rising. They want to build a community or audience around themselves? My community is my friends and family, and Facebook is generally a better way to connect with them than seeing subsidised art.
If I want to watch something amusing or thoughtful or interesting, I can fire up youtube, twitter, facebook or Devour and see what interesting people have put together across the globe.
I agree that being a larger organisation does reduce agility. Yes – being forced to pay artists properly, pay producers properly, and the expectation that a certain ‘standard’ be met reduces the ability for experimentation. But this isn’t a good excuse for dull programming. At the end of the day if the issue is too much responsibility is restricting experimentation maybe larger organisations need to change the way they are structured such that they are able to be more flexible in a fast-paced world.
Again I bring up the Art Gallery of SA as a great example. Huge changes in programming have been achieved in a short amount of time. I don’t doubt that feathers have been ruffled in the changes that must have occurred within that organisation. However the Art Gallery of SA is programming they way they are at the moment on the basis of their STRENGTHS as a larger organisation. No small to medium sized .organisation could hope to do what the Art Gallery of SA is doing at the moment. Quite frankly that is what I want to see from South Australia’s large arts organisations – exciting art and culture at a scale that no smaller organisation in SA could provide.
A grungy venue with a cutting edge piece of theatre with budget production values might be the most moving and amazing arts experience of my life, but if someone is paying $60 (which doesn’t even cover the artists salaries) at a professional venue such as the AFC, there is an expectation that the production values are higher, the artists are trained and experienced (and usually well known) AND the art is good.
I think this is where the idea of collaboration can truly come in to play: if you look at these places which are giving you the “most moving and amazing arts experience of [your] life”, couldn’t we have organisations like the AFC take them in, give them money to pay wages and increase production values? You certainly see this happening in Melbourne with Malthouse, both through co-productions in their main theatre with smaller, often fringe and emerging companies, and through creative development residencies in their smaller theatre. The company also programs by a half-year at a time, rather than a full year, so they can have flexibility to take up the best new work.
Adelaide company The Border Project seems to be currently working on this model from the other side: establish as a fringe venture, get presented by the AFC, and now they work in co-productions with companies such as the Sydney Theatre Company, Windmill, and, yes, Malthouse. Their next show is showing at Malthouse with the Melbourne Festival of Arts, and in Mount Gambier with Country Arts SA, but they couldn’t find anyone to partner with to show it in Adelaide.
Hey Jane – good point just now. Kind of like what AFC’s inspace development and inspace program does?
From what I can gather, it gives rehearsal space, production equipment and other advice to indie Sa companies and artists (usually about 3 or 4 a year) to develope a work and then holds showings of these works.
Then, in some instances the following year the mainstage versions of these works are performaned in the Space as part of the inspace program – Katrina Lazaroff’s piece last year started out as a development piece.
Certainly some great parallels to inSPACE. I’m not sure if the development works offer a wage to artists at the moment (anyone know?), and I would love to see more shows taken from that rehearsal room into the theatre, but it’s a great example of small companies being given exposure. Possibly the most exciting thing coming out of the AFC from my perspective, not sure why I didn’t think to mention it here.
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