Shot on Friday by Boniswa who was standing on a chair snugly fitted over Briony (you can still the legs on the right, I’ll have to sort that out).

I’m going for what in my mind is a slightly retro feel, balancing warm wood and desaturation. Briony was very patient and fun during the during shoot (and just looks amazing too) – rehearsals have also been suspiciously easy. Maybe we’re just not working hard enough.

We had a good get together with the entire team and got profile shots and Sanjin took video and interviewed us (once again I proved that I can say any number of reasonably intelligent things until there is a record device pointed at me).

The email address is real but totally changeable. What do you think, fun or forgettable?

I’ll be working on it more this week and should have a beautiful and completely different one in a couple of days.

Cheerio,

JK

And I have no answer.

I’m starting up the marketing for my play Owl and I really wanted to find that organised, edgy dynamo that would take it on. Unfortunately the organised, edgy folk I know aren’t biting – they’re busy, which is a constant state of being for organised, edgy dynamos.

Fortunately they took the time to help me, giving me contacts, ideas and strategies. For which I’m amazingly grateful. All this put another idea in my head: I’ve been proposing a silver bullet to the marketing woes of theatre. But there isn’t one. I need to learn more, hustle more, work more. But most of all, I need to be more honest about what I can do better. I think it all starts with that.

Theatre marketers assume there’s a market. There isn’t, there’s only a target market. That one erroneous assumption is why theatre makers believe they’re in an art that is becoming irrelevant. From this flow the dull mailing list based strategies that people ignore. Once you realise that you don’t have a market you can start asking yourself how you’re going to get one.

Step 1: Who are they? What do they do for fun?

Let’s say you’re doing a play about… oh, I don’t know… a haunted house and it’s ghoulish inhabitants. It’s a black comedy, it’s not for kids. It’s not the kind of play that draws the regular theatre crowd – the silver foxes who love a bit of Fugard, read the newspapers, listen to Fine Music Radio and get their Sunday best on for Dame Janet and Sir Anthony. No – this is the kind of play made for people who download movies, argue about the difference between nerds and geeks and dress a little… oddly. Look at who likes your subject matter, not as individuals but as subcultures. In Adam Thurman’s words: “what flag are you flying?”

Step 2: Find someone who speaks their language

If I asked you to name as many theatre publicists in Cape Town as you could I doubt I could get more than three names out of you, maybe five at a push. Independent hired guns – Not employees of a single entity. And they are all white women of a particular kind right? No disrespect intended – The three I can think of are top of their game, working magic for big shows and companies. They are well connected and talented and they understand the regular theatre crowd. And that is why they can only help you so much. If you want geeks to come to your show, you need a geek. You want hipsters, you need a hipster. You want kids, you need a mum.

Marketing is the creation and management of a relationship, for it to thrive you need to speak the language. Authentically. When I worked in book store, customers would constantly be recommending books to me because people love to share their passion. And of course I recommended book as well; I shared my opinions. I loved working there because I was passionate about books too. What stuck out for me was that I wasn’t a salesman in these situations, I was sharing not selling. We had a clerk who didn’t work out, let’s call him Shelby. Shelby didn’t really read. He could read, he just didn’t. He got hired because we suddenly found ourselves short staffed over the holidays. He could direct people around the shop; he could tell people about best sellers, he could point out our staff picks. But he didn’t understand what it was that a crime reader wanted out of a story if they preferred Mankell to Grisham. Or what someone wanted when they had exhausted all Gaiman’s books and wanted something similar. Shelby was an outsider, he didn’t speak the language.

The image we have of a publicist is out of date. We cannot stick with what we know, what we think of as ‘safe’ – safe is staying at home on Friday night. Safe is dull. Safe doesn’t change the world, not in the smallest way.

Step 3: Do it

So you found a geek to help sell your theatrical horror comedy. Hopefully you didn’t just grab the first one you thought of, hopefully you picked someone with drive, organisational skills and a bit of charm. Now sit down and make a list of everything that has to be done:

• The Basics
  • Press mailing list and widely read release carriers like Artslink
  • A press release with expanded content – So that’s your basic grab and 100 words with a pack of print quality photos and biographies to back it up.
  • Everyone involve posting on their social media about how they feel about/what they are doing for the show. Everyone ignores advertising.
• Now, time to get creative. Your insider knows things you don’t know about your target market, you need to use this insight to figure out new strategies. (If he doesn’t actually know any more than you and you hired them because you’re too busy, fair enough. But be careful: hand-holding isn’t fun and doesn’t save time.)
  • What do they read? Draft an alternative press list, contact newsletters, online forums and clubs that share similar interests.
  • Who do they follow? Find the connectors, the ones open to interesting experiences and sharing them. The bloggers, the party organisers. Doing a Horror in Cape Town? Find the guy who started Zombie Walk here, email the Legion Ink moderators, go meet the DMs of the various Ds.
  • What do they want? Find what appeals to them and add the incentive. Is it going to be free wine or block booking discounts? Dull and done. Give people discounts for coming dressed for Halloween, get a popcorn machine, make it something they’re going to talk about. The whole experience. I’m sure your play is great. But will the whole night be? People talk about they didn’t expect, they talk about little touches like wine served in teacups or that Lurch sold them their tickets.

I’m sure someone is going to accuse me of making it sound easy. It’s not. But coming up with different ideas is. It’s hard to implement a different approach, but let’s admit that it’s not the reason we hold back. We play it safe because we are tired. The theatre makers I know and admire work damn hard, they work long hours and routinely turn their living rooms into workshops. But pouring all your creativity and time into the work and not finding a partner capable of doing the same with the marketing is a waste. Let the people who’ll love the work as much as you see it.

Oh and by the way – if you were intrigued by the idea of a haunted house filled with ghoulish characters then go watch Beren Belknap’s Madame Touxflouwe at the Artscape Arena – 5^th January 2012. It’s really very funny. In a macabre way.

Ever wonder where the audiences are? I don’t have an answer for you, but I know where they could be…

425 are sitting in the Fugard (145 in the Studio and 280 in the Main) while 372 are at the three theatres on Hiddingh campus: 72 in the Arena, 75 in the Intimate and 225 in the Little. 225 are in Camps Bay at Theatre on the Bay while next to the other ocean 78 are chilling in Kalk Bay Theatre and 171 are at the Masque. Over in Obs there are 60 at the Theatre Arts Admin Collective, 55 at Obz Café and 148 sitting in the old match factory that is home to Magnet Theatre. For the outdoorsy types Maynardville can pack 690 folks on cold chairs with warm sherry. 1674 could be inside the tower of brick work that is the Baxter Theatre Centre, but only if they ran the Flipside (200) at the same as the Main stage (666), more likely that they’ll just run one of them with the Golden Arrow Studio’s 172 and the Concert Hall’s 636. But if all the theatres I’m counting are full then chances are that Wally would be hiding out among the 2157 strong crowd at the Artscape. Maybe with the Arena’s 129, or the Main’s 541, but most likely he’d be half hidden by the woman with the ugly hat in the Opera House where it’d be almost impossible to spot him among the 1487 people.

All numbers are subject to variations, some more than others, for instance empty box spaces like Hiddingh’s  Arena or Fugard’s Studio have completely changeable seating, while bigger theatres like the Artscape or even the Little take out or add rows of seating depending or orchestra pits and aprons.

Have a pie Chart!

A colourful Pie!

Or are they? I sharpened my pencil to do some concept art for Crowsong with a fair bit of trepidation. but…

It all seems good. Maybe be even better than I was when I last put my pencil down… the lines are bold, there are strong character and emotional choices, the style is jagged but holds weight. I need to push perspective still – make the posture more dynamic.

But basically I’m feeling good. Definitely a little cocky.

I think the key factor though is that I had very specific images in my head to draw from, rather than just doodling. This got me to actively make clear choices, from expressions to setting.

It also helps that I’m not drawing too many women for this, since they’re sort of my weak point. Puppet girl doesn’t count I think.

It’s that voice, asking you the questions you need to answer with lines and shading, that every artist needs to cultivate. At university you have the professor/tutor/Papa Muf asking them for you – you need to take that on board yourself.

Ultimately the questions aren’t hard. What is the picture/scene/paragraph about? Can you tell the whole story in this one expression/movement/moment?

The answers aren’t hard either. For whatever reason though, we forget to ask them. Call it laziness, apathy, lack of ambition or imagination – it doesn’t matter.  You are better than that.

I’m just going to leave you with my photoshoping in progress:

mad skillz, buddy.

The internet is a good place for ideas. It’s sort of like that Hadron Collider thingy, smashing bits together at high speed to see what does or doesn’t come out. Here’s an interesting sentence I tripped over in an article on New York theatre troupe Superhero Clubhouse:

“Superhero Clubhouse describes themselves an open door collective, embracing both the value of longstanding relationships as well as the transient nature of artists.”

I’ve seen a number of companies get formed and break up. This week I heard the official news that FTH:K was losing two more of its key people: Rob Murray and Liezl de Kock, who’ll be heading out to work with Ubom! in the Eastern Cape (their blog for more about this). The company is emphatically not breaking up, but it does put the question of its future into the scrum. But there definitely will be a future.

As captured in the quote, artists are transient. They like collaborating and creating, they don’t like repetition. After 6 years it’s probably time for a change – it’s good for the company and good for the artist. Much like the particles in that super collider thingy, artists need to move about and come into contact with new ideas and people at high speed if they’re going to change (I’d say grow, but that’d definitely be mixing up the analogy).

Like Superhero Clubhouse, our institutions need to understand artists and let them move, the problem being that for any company less than 10 years old it is a monthly, weekly, daily struggle to survive. Finding funding is hard. Even what we think of as established companies like Magnet and FTH:K aren’t immune. What will happen when the founders move on? Will there still be a company?

FTH:K has always emphasized the management side of its operations. It has everything in place to continue, having mentored and nurtured the next wave of its ranks to take over. Could this be the first South African ‘open door collective’ in a truly sustainable sense? The next couple of years will tell, but I have faith in the staying power of a good idea well executed.

I wrote this article back in 2009 after watching Done London.

Plays that want to be Films

July 18, 2009

Theatre is finally dead. Awesome. After years of watching its slow decline I have finally seen its death. It has ceased to be, passed on and moved up to that big playhouse in the sky. Except its corpse won’t keep still. Oh, no it will not. Like a blank-eyed zombie it still lurches around, empty of its essence, its life-force seeking out not braaaaaaains but boxoffice. What is motivating this shuffling cadaver? What has taken up residence in place of theatricality? Film.

I like film, it’s a beautiful medium used by many great storytellers to great effect. But it is a different medium to theatre, something my generation of writers seems to have forgotten. Film and theatre have always swapped their promiscuous lovers since before the Lumière brothers’ film spectacles – Eisenstein even started his career in the theatre – so there is a lot of common ground between the two. The very nature of each medium, the qualities that create their own special blends of advantages and disadvantages, means that they tell stories in very different ways. The stories differ in ways both dramatic and subtle, the kinds of performances that are given by the actors are worlds apart and the arrangements of narrative elements are especially divergent. All these factors mean that despite interrelated forms, you cannot tell a story onstage the way you would on film.

Done London is the latest culprit I’ve seen of writing and directing theatre for film. It is rooted in a film genre – slice-of-life multi-plot – and features naturalistic story, dialogue and acting, ‘montages’ set to genre music for time passing, linear narrative progression and multiple locations. None of which would make this a play in film drag by itself, but taken together they move the play out of play categories. And so audiences get what they’re used to seeing on flat screens in dark rooms.

All of which would be fine if theatre was in fact dead. It’s not. It’s vibrant, exciting and theatrical. Whatever experiment is carried out by the playwrights, directors and performers in theatre, let it not be an experiment in disguising the nature of the form. Audiences may be in love with movies and TV, but that does not mean theatremakers should be giving them what they see in movies and on TV. Ultimately there is really only one way to kill theatre – use it to imitate another medium.

http://stagedog.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/plays-that-want-to-be-films/

Now I wonder if I was right at all.

The dominance of film has essentially changed our vocabulary, we all understand the concepts of montages to music, of cuts and long versus close up shots. I watched Neil Coppen’s Abnormal Loads last month and it made me question my antipathy to theatre using film techniques. In the hands of a creative designer/director like Coppen stage directions calling for long shots of a village sprouting in a valley, or a dream juxtaposing a rapid fire number of images ‘out-film’ film.  The same potential is there in Beren Belknap’s developing style – no accident that both these director/designer/writers are as immersed in modern media as theatre.

So I must abase myself to admit I was off the mark to condemn theatre using filmic techniques and stylistic flourishes as theatre in film drag, because it’s not hard and fast like that. Instead what we’re seeing are artists are using the creativity of theatre magic to speak in the vocabulary of film to tell their stories. Some artists are just doing it a lot better than others.

I’m concerned about the cannibal pie right now. Audience. And what I really want to know is: how big is this pie? When I first started thinking about pies and such I had a little revelation: there are no slices in this pie, the market isn’t saturated. The same people who watch the Mechanicals’ Rep season will go check out the Artscape Spring Season and pop into Kalk Bay to see what’s playing there. Like most of my revelations it got replaced by another one that said the opposite in a louder voice. Having been at the opening of the Pink Couch’s Mafeking Road last week at the Intimate and of Solomon and Marion on Saturday at the Baxter I could use my keen powers of observation to tell that they were completely different people. Of course that’s a pretty small data set – statistically insignificant is the term – but it supports the slice analogy, and a good analogy is totally awesome.

Now there are two ways to increase the size of your slice: Take someone else’s or make the pie bigger.

So because stealing is frowned upon in our society unless you have a official title it stands to reason that we need to make the pie bigger to make our slice big enough to fill our stomachs for the month. That’s one of the goals of the Pink Couch – get the next generation watching theatre. Pretty sweet goal. But it should also be one of the goals of the big companies. Right now Solomon and Marion is R130 for students. That’s pretty steep for students. But it’s also a fair price. And is Solomon and Marion really aimed at the next generation anyway?

The big theatres have the big slices of the pie, fair enough. They’ve been around for ages, they build and maintain audience bases, they provide secure employment in an industry where most people don’t know what they’ll be doing in 4 months, they have programmes promoting and supporting new work. But maybe that first revelation I had wasn’t so crazy after all. What if the pie can be shared? What if there was pin board up at the Baxter or the Artscape or the Fugard that listed productions at other venues? By small, independent companies? The more theatre people see, the more they’ll want to see and the pie will miraculously get bigger.

The market isn’t saturated. We can afford to say that there’s other theatre out there. Let the big theatres have their big slice and share it too, and let the independents work on making the pie bigger. After all the tattooed hipster of today is the tattooed ballie of tomorrow and we need to get him into the auditorium now if he’s going to be shelling out R180 for a ticket tomorrow.

My first thought was: Am I on a safari? Because a buck was just passed.

Most of the theatre-makers I know do the majority of their marketing themselves. But let’s say just for a moment that they didn’t, that they have a dedicated Marketing Minion to do it (the ideal world for some). They would still be responsible for the shitty poster/garbled press release/passive-aggressive facebook invite that the Minion produced. Why?

Because it’s your play.

Theatre isn’t run by a sinister cabal of producers who set ticket prices, lay down budgets, dictate casting and collaborations and take every decision away from the powerless theatre-makers. Sometimes it feels that way (and a half decent argument could be made that the economy serves this function), but it isn’t. So just like you don’t cast an utter numpty in your play, you don’t let an utter numpty do your marketing. Even if that numpty is you. If you can’t hire a professional Marketing Minion and you can’t use your flirty eyelashes and boyish hips to get some pro bono, and your friends are all marketing numpties too then READ THE MANUAL. And by this I mean do some research, use the internet, ask for advice, look at publicity you think works and rip it off, etc, etc, etc.

Here’s something you may not know.

A play happens between at least two people. The performer and the audience. It can have a story. It can also not have a story. It can have words or not, music or not, lights or not. But it will have a relationship between at least two people. And that relationship, the interaction and reaction, is the play.

People who say that the job of theatre makers is to make theatre, not market it don’t understand what theatre and marketing are. They are two parts of a relationship. It’s not just about bums on seats, it’s perception, values, expectations.

Don’t leave that to a numpty.

Oh shit, I moved off sassy satire into outright sarcasm. That’s not what I meant to do. I meant to parody the thinking of marketing in the theatre scene, instead I just got angry.

Look, I don’t have a degree in marketing or sales or anything other than theatre. But I can see that if you are not giving people reasons to see theatre then they won’t. I go watch shows because I work in theatre, I have a professional interest. So if you see me at your show it’s not because you did anything right. You can only measure that by counting strangers.

TheatreSports has lasted for 18 years, which makes it a pretty successful company. It has no sponsorship or funding other than what people pay for tickets. I’ll be the first to admit that our marketing is patchy at best, but we have one incredible strength: we give people the reason to see our show. We don’t tell people how good we are, our awards, how long we’ve been running for or that theatre is an amazing cultural phenomenon that deserves support. We tell them that it’s hilarious improvised comedy. And when they come for hilarious improvised comedy, we give it to them.

Essentially marketing is telling people what you have for them. You cannot get people to pay to see something they don’t want to and you can’t get someone to come back if you can’t deliver.

So, semi-fictional people I began addressing at the start, look at the points of contact you have with the public – your posters, releases and facebook/blog posts – and ask yourself what reason you’re giving people to see your show.