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What part do festivals play in audience development? Can they attract new audiences to the arts, or do they simply cater to an existing audience for a specific artform? Despite the flourishing festival scene in Britain, there is a relative paucity of publicly available research on festival audiences. This may be partly due to the practical difficulties of monitoring and gathering information, and the scale and unticketed nature of some festivals.

Arts Council England?s New Audiences Programme has supported research and evaluation into festival activity and audiences, and has invested in new programming, promoter development and new presentation formats.

Folk facts

The Association of Festival Organisers used its New Audiences grant to commission ground-breaking research into folk festivals and their impact on their audiences and on local economies and tourism. The report, by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, revealed that folk festivals, often seen as a minority interest, in fact attract 350,000 attendances from 106,000 people annually, with increasing numbers of young people and families. Over 350 folk festivals in the UK generate £77m of annual spending.

?[Festivals] are definitely a gateway to the artform,? says researcher Andrew McIntyre. ?Large numbers of people have their first arts experience at a festival.? He attributes this to the open, sociable atmosphere, the low risk to the attender and the perception that the programme has been selected by experts, thus guaranteeing quality. ?Existing connoisseurs see a festival as an orgy of provision when they stay up for three nights and see everything ? whereas the first-timer sees it as a menu,? he adds.

The report has proved an astonishingly effective advocacy tool for the folk festival sector. For example, Bridgnorth Folk Festival last year received £2,000 from its local authority, but this year will receive £10,000 from the same source.

New formats

New Audiences funding allowed Birmingham Arts Marketing (BAM) to develop ArtsFest, now an annual event. ?Effectively, that first year established that the event could draw significant audiences and build support among our key partners and funders,? said Paul Kaynes of BAM.

ArtsFest, inspired by Amsterdam?s Uitmarkt event, aims to attract people who would not normally attend a traditional arts event, and to find out whether new attenders go on to attend other arts events. It offers 250 free, half-hour events over a weekend ? a structure that Paul points out was new to the UK. ?Uitmarkt advised us very strongly to stick to this format, because over years of experience they had established that half an hour was exactly the right length of time ? people will then try things they wouldn?t otherwise risk trying. And that has been our experience.? Over 50% of those surveyed during 2000-2002 said they had attended an artform new to them.

Subsequent BAM research covers the first five years of ArtsFest, compares statistics, demographics and artistic content across the period, and follows attenders up by telephone. Initial data suggests that around 70% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they would be more likely to attend arts events in future.

Moving celebrations

Other festivals have experimented with formats to distribute the arts in new ways, particularly in the field of literature. Brighton Festival?s ?Poetry in Motion? used city buses as display spaces for poems written by local primary school children, to great acclaim from residents. Bath Literature Festival developed a virtual strand, changing the traditional relationships between audience and performer through live online debates, games, a poetry slam, a children?s chatroom and projects in internet writing.

Dreams of diversity

New Audiences has enabled culturally diverse work to find new audiences through festival formats. Carnival on de Road supported partnerships between regional carnival clubs with leading London-based carnival organisations to increase the skills and audiences of carnival artists throughout England. Projects such as Bradford?s Lord Mayor?s Carnival explored the traditions of African-Caribbean style carnival and English town carnival. The community arts group Continental Drift mounted Firestarter in 1999 and 2000, introducing new audiences to emerging musical talent at major festivals such as Leeds Breeze,
Glastonbury and Reading.

Other projects provided programming support for specific ethnic groups to create new work. Polyglot Theatre Company worked with the Eritrean theatre company Horn Reflections to stage The Harvest Plays, based on traditional fairy-tales, to bring theatre to London?s Eritrean Diaspora festival for the first time. The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television used its Bite the Mango Film Festival to create a vibrant image of African and Asian cinema.

So ? can festivals attract new audiences? One folk festival attender said, ?You go to hear groups that you have never heard of or something that you have never known about.? Another confirms this: ?I would go there specifically if there were people that I hadn?t heard of or for something new.?

Beyond the Page
Find extra information, downloadable reports, summaries and resources about festivals audiences at http://www.newaudiences.org.uk

Feedback to Essential Audiences can be sent to audiences@artsprofessional.co.uk

Essential Audiences is compiled and written by Catherine Rose. For more information about the New Audiences Programme, contact the Arts Council England, 14 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 3NQ.
t: 020 7973 6497 f: 020 7973 6791 e: newaudiences@artscouncil.org.uk textphone: 020 7973 6564