Touring is the artistic life-blood of the country, enabling audiences to experience arts events as they flow from region to region. Arts Council England?s New Audiences programme recognised and supported the importance of touring as an element in audience development, with funding for 71 projects totalling £1,852,501 (almost a tenth of the programme).
Organisations were able to create new work and to develop their touring circuits to bring arts events to new attenders. Companies and venues worked jointly to develop specific marketing, education and outreach work to complement these tours. Many projects succeeded in attracting first-time attenders to artforms which may be perceived as ?difficult? or ?unusual?, such as opera, dance and circus.
Bread and circuses
Bristol-based Circomedia ? the Centre for Contemporary Circus and Physical Performance ? used New Audiences funding to support four extra dates for its touring company, Dark Horse. This project, DiveUrgence, made use of research carried out by Belfast?s Queen?s University, which found that young people can benefit from circus-related activities to improve their self-esteem and social skills. Working with locally-based organisations, the tour reached nearly 700 new audience members, many from deprived rural and inner urban areas, of whom about 90% were under 24.
English National Ballet (ENB) ran a two-stranded project in the North West, where they have developed strong connections with local individuals, schools, community groups and theatres. A series of 30 outreach workshops, called Turning Out, reached 563 young people who had little or no access to ballet. This was followed by Test Drive, which offered subsidised tickets to non-ballet attenders for ENB performances at the Liverpool Empire. An estimated 718 new attenders were attracted to the ballet ? nearly 70% of them female.
Lindsey Sinclair, Acting Education Officer at ENB, was working as the Education Assistant at the time. ?We maintain quite a strong presence in the North West, and we?ve done other big projects there since Turning Out,? she says. ?We?ve also maintained links with some of the groups we worked with on that project ? there are now a lot of familiar faces coming back as both audience and participants.?
Other companies using New Audiences to extend their touring circuits were the Mark Baldwin Dance Company, Siobhan Davies Dance Company and Yorkshire Dance?s Union City project, whose Base uk production formed its first professional tour.
Enabling touring
New work by companies employing disabled actors and dancers also benefited from the programme. Garry Gibson, the director of Fittings Multi Media Arts, points out, ?Much disability art tends to perform to the same circuit of small-scale venues and to relatively small but committed audiences.? Additionally, there are few truly accessible venues. The company collaborated with Graeae, one of Britain?s best-known theatre companies of actors with physical and sensory impairments, to produce The Last Freakshow. It was designed to be ?exciting, interesting, far-reaching and current? and was drawn from research into disability history and culture, prosthetics and the freak show. The production toured to both conventional and non-traditional venues, including the Glastonbury Festival.
Candoco, the London-based professional integrated dance company, targeted young audiences with disabilities as potential attenders for their project in Leeds. They worked in partnership with the Northern School of Contemporary Dance and the Riley Theatre, linking with integrated mainstream schools and schools with special units. Schools received promotional meet the artist sessions and taster sessions involving the whole company. The project achieved an 88% capacity audience and involved 408 young people in workshops.
Art on the road
It is not only performing companies that have created new opportunities for audiences through the programme. Galleries have also reached out to new audiences by developing their touring product. The John Hansard Gallery created a version of The Masque, an exhibition of photographic portraits by six artists, specifically to tour free of charge to colleges in Southampton and Cambridge. Masque Out, was a reduced, but structurally complete version of the main exhibition, and was created in partnership with Southern Arts Touring Exhibition Service. The show reached 6,300 people, of whom around 70% were from the target 15-18 age group.
The Exeter-based Spacex Gallery?s project, Three Exhibitions for New Audiences, offered work by international artists. Spacex promoted its exhibitions at The Cavern, a local club which hosts DJs and rock bands, and also worked with a secure unit for young offenders. Workshops in schools and at the gallery were aimed at children, and also reached an audience of children and young adults with disabilities, and young parents with their pre-school children.
Marketing and touring
All the New Audiences touring projects show the importance of partnerships between venues and companies, as well as other agencies and community organisations. A new publication, ?Marketing and Touring: a practical guide to marketing an event on tour? by Heather Maitland, is to be published in July 2004 by Arts Council England.
Beyond the Page
For downloads, interviews and more information, visit 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