Culture professionals network | Guardian Professional: After many years working in theatre, including five as artistic director of the Broadway in Barking, I’ve attended my fair share of conferences about ways to encourage diversity in audiences for the arts. Race, youth and disability are always discussed but class remains the unnamed elephant in the room, often dismissed in a cursory mention of lower ticket prices. In my experience, class is the biggest barrier to accessing the arts, cutting across all the other marginalised groups.
6 comments:
I think this is a really good article because this is an all too real issue. Growing up, both my parents never really went to the theatre because it never really occurred to them to go. Yes, part of it was the ticket price, but just like how this article says, that was never really the main issue. There was a feeling of class segregation. Going to the theatre was something the rich upper class did because it was what the rich upper class liked to do. There was no thought that they, in the middle class would throughly enjoy as well.
So I'm just really happy to see that people are actually working toward class diversity because its just really important that everyone has the opportunity to love theatre.
I wonder how much of this is lost between America and England (this article being written by an English author) I think that here in America this does not apply in the same way. She said in her article that theater is payed for by the majority. In that case we are talking about regional theater with government funding. Broadway is its own entity as their funding comes from the few people who have the majority of the money. In the commercial model it is a business and they should have no other loyalty than their investors. Their responsibility is to make their investors as much money as they possibly can. In the regional world I honestly don't have enough experience to make a truly well informed opinion, but in the experience I do have, most of them are struggling to stay afloat. Outreach is important but if you don't have the money it should still come second to existing. Unless funding is not an issue you have other things to worry about as a theater in today's world.
I'm not sure how applicable a lot of this information is. It seemed like she was jumping around and touching on as many points as she could instead of focusing in on an actual issue. I don't know the the middle class is participating in the visitation of our theaters. Obviously, things are different in England as theater is in part funded by the government. The fact of the matter is, a lot of types of theater take immense resources and labor, which ends in high ticket prices that may seem to exclude the working class. Then were focusing on an economic issue, however, instead of an issue that relates directly to the theater alone.
Growing up, my parents took me to the theatre whenever they could. It was always an occasion, and I'd get all dressed up for the show. I was brought up to appreciate the glamour of going to the theatre and appreciating the work. A lot of my friends growing up, however, never had this experience. When we'd take school field trips to see a play or musical, they would often roll their eyes, and they couldn't care less about what was going on onstage. But that's just the way they were brought up. Not everyone's parents see the importance of live theatre. Along with that, a lot of parents find it unnecessary to spend the extra money to go to a show. I'm lucky in the sense that my parents and grandparents instilled an appreciation for live theatre at a very young age. There is so much to be learned from theatre, and it's a shame that not everyone can see that.
This is a problem I actually worry about a lot. This summer I worked for a theatre with very high ticket prices which catered to a very specific group of people- walking into the lobby before a show, you were overwhelmed by a sea of middle aged to elderly people wearing exclusively pastel colors and expensive shoes, buying incredibly overpriced concessions and discussing their summer homes. I appreciated the huge budgets we got to work with thanks to this audience, but I'm really not interested in making theatre for only the elite. They're a great audience, and rich donors keep us alive, but if we really want to make art it can't only be directed towards people who can pay $60 for a ticket. It's part of the reason why film and television is appealing- you're guaranteed to reach pretty much everyone, not just the upper classes. It doesn't matter how great your art is and what an amazing message you're sending- if you're only reaching a tiny fraction of the people you want to be speaking to, you're not doing your job as an artist. If your goal is to make really expensive theatre and get a lot of money from ticket sales, keep marketing to only the upper class. But if your goal is to really make art for people, all people, we need to figure out a way to make theatre accessible to everyone.
I think it's important to point out, as Isaac does, that this is an article about the culture and business of English theatre and, maybe more importantly, English sensibilities regarding class. Americans and English approach many things very differently than we might suspect. Two cultures divided by a common language, as an English friend of mine put it. Discussions of class are hard to compare across cultures, as the way we think about the subject is deeply informed by our shared (and unshared) histories. England's recorded national history is much longer than ours, and you might say their national identity is therefore deeper than ours. That long history has been marked by a culture in which class has, until very recently, been a strictly adhered to system. This should not be surprising since history of human society is full of such structures, from the caste system in India to the Papacy of the Vatican, to the serfdoms of Great Britain. Our identification with class is much more bipolar. Our national dogma continually espouses the virtues of a free society, and from an early age most Americans are indoctrinated with the fantasy that our society rewards hard work above all else and every American can be successful if they only apply themselves. Even in the face of undeniable segregation and preference along racial and economic lines, we stick to this story. Add to that the fact that the American "working class" is more and more better defined as the "working poor" as wage stagnation, outsourcing and ever increasing wealth disparity choke out the last vestiges of a once thriving economic and cultural sector of our society. In a lot of ways, I have to counter this article by asking, "Who gives a shit to whom theatre is paying attention?" I bet most working Americans would rather have a raise, affordable health care, and a chance for a better life for their children than a night out on Broadway. Later for the trappings of culture. Burn the theatres; build affordable housing.
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