For promoters, a key issue is fitting the space to the art; just as much as fitting the art to the space. Ed McKeon explains why.
Over recent years it has become fashionable for arts organisations and practitioners to explore alternative spaces for presenting and making work, operating outside of established venues both to find new contexts (industrial, agricultural, social) to interpret, relate to and comment on, and to bridge the gap with new audiences. To many promoters, especially music promoters, this fascination with unconventional spaces has been the case for years - not every Internet café has a gallery, but many churches, pubs, clubs, cafés, street corners, schools, village halls, and historic houses are regularly used as music venues.
Promoters, especially music promoters, exist and operate in the gaps between established venues and the need of artists to explore new contexts, and between the supply of artistic product and the demand of audiences. There are strong similarities with issues faced by many arts festivals. Like them, many promoters either work in a specialist area of programming, which isn?t provided for by local venues, or operate in locations where there are few if any arts venues available. So it?s not surprising that Oxford Contemporary Music (OCM), which now promotes two series over seven months, started out as a festival.
Conflicting demands
One of the key issues, then, is finding the right space to present each performance, and matching this experience with the expectations of audiences. And here lies the rub: promotion offers great flexibility and versatility (you don?t need retractable seating to transform the space, you can just use another space), but it also makes heavy demands on ensuring each performance offers the audience all the comforts, service and ambience they would expect from an established venue, which can be particularly problematic in non-specialist spaces.
It?s easy to take for granted the facilities available to specialist arts venues, ranging from the box office, staging and technical suite, to the basics of seating, heating and car parking. Before considering whether a space will be suitable for the performance you have in mind, you need to know how you?re going to get an audience there and how you can meet people?s needs and expectations from the time they arrive to the time they depart. You can have, or create, the most beautiful space, perfect for the performance, but if an audience can?t find it, park their cars, buy a ticket (in advance), see or hear the show, and sit comfortably then the event will fall on its knees. And that?s before taking account of disabled access, and other basics like the provision of a bar, toilets and green room.
For music promotions, there are further problems to be overcome, such as ensuring that the acoustic supports the work being promoted, providing amplification (though this can also go wrong), and perhaps ensuring the availability of a piano. And whilst noisy heating can be a mild distraction in text-based work, it can ruin a music performance. Non-specialist spaces and buildings generally serve other purposes too, so unlike arts venues they may also have particular restrictions on their use, and they have to be returned to their normal state afterwards.
And it?s not just non-arts spaces that sometimes need effects to help achieve the right ambience. For example, almost all jazz performances in Oxford take place in pubs, but as well as access issues these generally have limited space to make high profile work viable and affordable for most people, so lighting and audio equipment is needed to achieve the right atmosphere within more conventional arts spaces.
Building relationships
Of course, not all promotion takes place outside of established venues, but the fact that so much does is a result not only of the scarcity of specialist arts spaces, but also of the cost of hiring many of those that do exist and the difficulty of finding available dates. For example, many theatres operate with week-long runs, so finding one-off dates for a single performance can be problematic. On the other hand, many audiences remain loyal to particular spaces and venues, so programming work in a range of places makes it essential to build a strong relationship with audiences, in particular by developing a strong brand identity.
For OCM, this is a particularly tricky process, both because ?contemporary music? as a term is acknowledged to be off-putting to many audiences, and because Oxford has so many arts ?brands? vying for attention. Our strategy has been both to demonstrate how elastic a term contemporary music is (embracing jazz, folk, 'world', and Western contemporary art musics, as well as animatronics, theatre, dance and other artforms), and to collaborate with venues and other promoters rather than competing for diminishing returns. By co-promoting, we have been able to extend our programming into areas that other promoters and venues wouldn?t otherwise venture into, either because of programming experience, artistic risk or cost, or a combination.
Brand identity
It should come as no surprise that churches are important venues for music in Oxford, and this can lead to a conflict of expectations for audiences. People don?t generally expect contemporary music in churches, even less so events like flamenco or Nitin Sawhney and his band, as we have promoted, so brand recognition is as important as preparing the space with lighting and hiring a sound engineer in gaining the trust of an audience and making the event special.
Branding is crucial in other respects, too, as readers of Naomi Klein's No Logo and the May Day protestors would acknowledge. A brand acts as a mark of quality, and hence of trust and (hopefully) loyalty; but it is also used to distinguish one product from another, no matter how similar. For promoters who primarily buy in touring work, this raises an important issue - how to retain brand distinctiveness when so many others are offering the same product. In our case, it's essential for us to retain a distinctive programme and identity, both from other promoters and venues within Oxford, but also those within reasonable travelling distance.
In the future, we plan to solicit more work, commissioning and creating a clear identity without losing the eclecticism of our programme. So in particular we want to use our brand and identity to encourage greater crossover between different parts of a programme, reflecting our mission to foster an open attitude towards new work, whatever its form. We also want to re-establish a sense of occasion about each series, giving a festival 'feel' within a longer concert series to generate a greater profile during each series, a sense of anticipation beforehand, and stronger visibility through a concentration of activity.
Promoters have the potential to bridge the gaps between venues, artists and audiences, and can use their brand identity to build the trust of audiences to take risks, be curious, explore new spaces and discover new work. But the brand identity has to be one audiences can trust.
Ed McKeon is Director of Oxford Contemporary Music t: 01865 791355 f: 01865 432674 e: edward.mckeon@ofcm.ision.co.uk