Theatre makers wanting to be successful should consider the conundrum: if only 8% of the population regularly attend the theatre, what are the other 92% interested in, asks Gavin Stride.
For some time I’ve held the view that making theatre is, in some ways, the easy bit. The real challenge is in getting an audience for that work. As if to illustrate this point, it disconcerts me that the first three of the Arts Council’s ambitions are described separately: 1) supporting artists, 2) building audiences, 3) creating resilience. It seems obvious that it is only in better connecting the first two of these that we will achieve the third. (You could argue that most plans to achieve resilience without looking at improving the quality, size and breadth of the audience will be nothing more than a sticking plaster to disguise our failure to be relevant.)
At the same time I have always rejected what might be described as the “gateway” notion of audience development – that audiences are “taken on a journey” from soft, crowd-pleasing shows to seriously dense text and opera. Surely good art is good and bad art, bad. Indeed shouldn’t good art be work that is both contemporary and popular, accessible and complex? Equally, is it really useful to think of art as high or low or to see local as the opposite of international... Keep reading on The Guardian
For some time I’ve held the view that making theatre is, in some ways, the easy bit. The real challenge is in getting an audience for that work. As if to illustrate this point, it disconcerts me that the first three of the Arts Council’s ambitions are described separately: 1) supporting artists, 2) building audiences, 3) creating resilience. It seems obvious that it is only in better connecting the first two of these that we will achieve the third. (You could argue that most plans to achieve resilience without looking at improving the quality, size and breadth of the audience will be nothing more than a sticking plaster to disguise our failure to be relevant.)
At the same time I have always rejected what might be described as the “gateway” notion of audience development – that audiences are “taken on a journey” from soft, crowd-pleasing shows to seriously dense text and opera. Surely good art is good and bad art, bad. Indeed shouldn’t good art be work that is both contemporary and popular, accessible and complex? Equally, is it really useful to think of art as high or low or to see local as the opposite of international... Keep reading on The Guardian