Author: Jon Keevy

Owl at the National Arts Festival 2012

/ Jon Keevy / 8 Comments

The Grahamstown festival costs a lot. It takes up money and time and it soaks up your passion like a wonder-mop. I’m going to run with the mop analogy I think; it has potential. For instance what you get back out depends on how hard and desperately you wring it. I’m not sure how the planning fits in, that might be an aspect that’s important in managing a project like presenting Owl at the NAF but not so much in mopping. There’s a law of diminishing returns that applies to planning for mopping, after an hour of preparation there isn’t much more you can do. Not so with planning a production. The more thought and planning you put in, the better the production will do at festival. I know people with five year plans. Yes, like Stalin – except not, you know, bastardy. I don’t have a five year plan. This time last year I had a one year plan and right now I have two year plan. I’m working my way up.

My plan for Owl was to do a two week run at the Intimate Theatre in February / March and then do it at the NAF as part of the Cape Town Edge and follow that with a run at the Schools Fest. From there we’d get exciting offers to go tour or do a run in Joburg. What I wanted to get out of each phase was different. The Intimate run I wanted to road test the material and get press coverage. This we achieved and we even made a modest profit; it’s easy to make a modest profit when your costs are so low. All this I covered here, in my report on Owl.

But now we get to the new stuff; how did Owl fare at the National Arts Festival? The critical success at the Intimate and the brief run at Kalk Bay Theatre shifted my expectations for Grahamstown. I thought Owl would have some buzz and pick up audiences from word-of-mouth. After all, we had loads of awesome quotes from press folk. But here’s only truth I’ve found in the theatre industry: talent, praise, charm and hard work guarantee nothing. They are necessary – no one gets anywhere without them – but there are no guarantees and you will always wish you had more of those qualities, believing that you could tip the scales just enough.

As it was, Owl was not a success at the festival in one, crucial way: very few people came to see it. It was a success in other ways though; the few people who did see it were the right people, the people who you want to connect with, and consequently Owl was invited to two overseas festivals, Brighton and Prague. Obligatory fist pump, just to show I’m excited. OK, celebrations aside, let’s get to the nuts and bolts of what went wrong and what went right.

First of all, I’m going to repeat that Grahamstown costs quite a bit. It’s not that any, single charge is unreasonable – it’s that there are so many of them to many different organisations. There are your festival costs (registration and venue hire), then there are your travel costs (petrol, accommodation and meal allowances – multiply this by the size of your team), your actual production costs (still mercifully low for Owl) and then your marketing costs (Labelled here as CTE contribution, since that covers the publicist, the posters, etc.) – an area where most people try to save money. By a strange bit of fortune my spending on the Festival, Marketing and Travel areas was more or less evenly divided, which isn’t actually a good thing. There is a rough correlation between the amount of effort and money you spend on marketing so you should always be throwing more into it. Your production values have less of a connection than most people would care to admit and the amount you spend on fringe registration and accommodation don’t connect to your income at all. In fact, since we already had the set and costumes for Owl there was no spending on this area.

Here’s a pie chart. My total costs were just under R15 000 while my income from an average of 22 people per show was just under R10 000. So we made a loss of around R5 000.

But we were saved financially by the Schools Festival, which runs for 5 days directly after the NAF. We applied with all that good press we’d gotten and so were included. The Schools Festival straight out buys the show, pays for your accommodation and S&T, and fills the auditorium with touring school groups. The additional performances increased our costs by only R500 but tripled our income. So, tip for the NAF: try your hardest to get on to the Schools Festival. That means having your press kit up to date and planning so you have some damn good clippings in it.

Where I think I failed was that I didn’t work hard enough to sell Owl to the festival punters. I was stage managing London Road and trying to run the Edge in general (more on the Edge later) as well as popping in on Godfrey Johnson’s two shows – Stories of Crime and Passion and Shadow of Brel. Owl certainly suffered for this. Another oversight is that festivals work differently to runs in Cape Town. The audiences you’re trying to coax in have travelled 800km, they have over 400 shows to choose from and they are away from their social networks – both real and virtual. In their home towns these people are the first wave of audiences, they have their ear to the ground and see a play almost every week. They are the ones who tweet and post on facebook about the must-see shows and they are the ones who listen to the buzz. It’s a situation of the semi-starved going on a binge. You can’t entice them the way you do back home and when they rave they don’t rave to their buddies who don’t often go see shows but might just if the week is looking a bit stagnant. Oh no, they’re raving to other festinos, other theatre-lovers. And most of them already have a pack of tickets booked. The raving has to be so good that they will squeeze in a sixth show on that day or even drop a show they have already paid for.

Your marketing has to be better. You’re competing against local theatre legends. You’re competing against a main programme with amazing international artists. You’re competing against music, beer and a decimated forest of flyers and posters.

My marketing was not good enough. Fortunately Owl didn’t get completely lost and the right people came to see it. Fortunately we were on the Schools Fest. These things aren’t chance, they happened because I worked to make them happen, just as a low audience turn out wasn’t chance either, it was the result of an area where I didn’t work hard enough. Not a mistake I’m going to repeat.

A Week to Talk About

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Grahamstown is a week away. Literally. The first performances are Thursday the 28th – that’s Stories of Crime and Passion, the Shadow of Brel, London Road and Owl. That’s a hell of a day. In the fever of preparation it’s been hard to find time to write a meaning post on something significant like research or practical ideas on marketing and producing. Instead of writing it I have to be doing it. A pretty common excuse for artists, but ultimately we need to be writing down our thoughts for them to develop. Art grows when a thought is planted, in the hurly burly of production we have to find time to sit on a park bench and let our minds wander. It’s not that I can’t work under pressure, I can and do, but I can’t think freely under pressure. That stroke of insight, that ‘Ah ha!’ moment, needs space to happen. The gap between the first musing and the flash can be huge, sometimes years can pass before you’re ready to make an idea you had into art. That’s why I keep a notebook; it’s my external memory.

As much as this is fundamental to the personal act of making art, it is also crucial to the practical and social act of making art happen. The Cape Town theatre industry seems to have academic writing hanging around the university libraries and reviews at various points along a popular/critical spectrum. It’s hard to find out how people actually make art happen. It’s pretty much the point of this blog and I’ve been letting that down for the past month. So on the one hand, sorry, and on the other, let’s start a conversation about theatre that doesn’t happen over beer in smoky bars or in a library or a lecture hall. Let’s start talking about what it takes to make art in this country.

My Trip to Sweden

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I arrived back from Sweden last week. The journey lasted 19 hours including 2 stops – in Istanbul and in Joburg. It capped off an incredible week in Lund, the tiny university town in the south of Sweden. I was there with Beren Belknap, Lindelwa Kisana and Frankie Nassimbeni as a part of ASSITEJ’s Inspiring a Generation programme; Pieter Bosch Botha was with us as our wrangler. The goal of the programme is to get more voices writing plays for young audiences – phase one back in late May had us in workshops for a week finding our own inspiration; this trip to Lund was phase two. We were visiting during the Bibu.se Festival of children’s theatre and our schedule was packed with shows and workshops. I had my first draft of Get Kraken! in hand and was ready to work on it and have my mind pried open by some European theatre.

We arrived in Copenhagen and were met By Niclas Malcroma, the head of ASSITEJ Sweden, who we hadn’t seen since April. We took the train across the Oresund bridge into Sweden from Denmark and when we arrived at Lund’s station we were greeted by the Swedish participants Christofer Bocker, Jonathan Lehtonen, Isa Schöier and Anna Nygren, and our workshop leader Lucia Cajchanova. There was a lot of hugging, which was awkward for me given the 19 hours of travelling without a shower or a refresher round of deodorant.

Our first day was about settling in, getting a sense of the place and popping out for a late beer because the perpetual twilight was messing with my brain.

On Tuesday our programme began in earnest, we registered and headed off to our first Swedish production – Swan Lake. For kids. But what that means in Sweden is very different to what it means here in Cape Town. The theatre was filled children from about 6 to 10 years old (granted I’m just guessing based on height) and they were clearly engaged through most of the work despite it needing ‘grown-up’ adjectives like ‘conceptual’. It was as fascinating   to watch the kids as to watch the performance for me. It was very clear when they were engaged, when they lost focus and when the performance hooked them again. It dissolved the idea that an audience, any audience, could not be recovered once lost.

Over the week we saw about 10 shows of varying quality and style, all contributed to the question we threw back and forth amongst ourselves: what is it that makes a performance for the youth? Typically we’d discuss whether a show deserved that label on our walks between venues, no one quite agreeing since that’d mean agreeing on a definition – something I think we all consciously avoided for our own reasons. My reason was that I kept thinking of J.R.R. Tolkien’s words in On Fairy Stories, referring to stories for children:

“Their books like their clothes should allow for growth, and their books at any rate should encourage it.”

All temporal art creates a causal chain from which we can infer the thesis of the creator, at its most obvious and didactic we refer to it as the moral of the story. The clearer this message is, the more likely we are to think of it as being for children and the inverse is true too – we believe that work for children should be clear. Tolkien’s words remind me though that an important part of development is challenge. While certainly the delivery of clear principles is important, so is the stimulus of an idea just a little out of reach.

The question on my mind was then about how we balance these two, and that relates to understanding the development of children and the context. The audiences of Swedish youngsters I saw were primed for theatre, ready to be surprised and challenged. Can South African theatre for the youth make such daring choices at this stage?

Most of these debates were kept out of the workshops and happened in informal moments, while walking or eating together. The workshops were focused on developing the proposals that came out of the first round in Cape Town. Lucia was a great leader of these, although I do think she could have pushed us harder to do more writing – the exercises that we did do certainly cracked open our drafts. The back and forth over story ideas were some of the liveliest debates during the trip and the ones I value the most. The most useful exercise for me was having the character tell the story in their own words – by coincidence it paralleled my own attempts to wrestle with Owl earlier this year, but in a more fruitful format. This was where the value of the week really shone.

We finished the week with an over long explanation of our journey to 7 curious people in a huge auditorium and struggled to express the different perspectives within the group or connect to the handful of listeners. It is a challenge to express the complexities of arriving in an alien culture and having to balance the internal process of creating a story with the external interactions planned to stimulate it.

It was, overall, a great experience.

Thank You

/ Jon Keevy

I spend a lot of time being cynical about the theatre industry. There is a lot to be cynical about – whopping great piles of fuel for the furnace of anger – but a great deal of why I am cynical is my purely selfish frustration. I want people to come see my work, I want to be able to spend more time writing and less time hustling, I want opportunities handed to me, I want people to recognise my talent and nurture it. I want. I want. I want.

My mother had this to say to a 6-year-old’s tantrum: “I want doesn’t get”.

Whether or not you deserve recognition is not a relevant question. I know it’s hard work. I know it’s probably harder for you because I know that the degree of support that I’ve been given, support I didn’t earn or deserve, is a rarity. We are all born into this world naked and crying in need. At that red and wriggly point in our lives we have done nothing to deserve what follows except be.

Good things have been happening for me this year. I do not know how much I deserve, but I do know that everything I’ve done was made possible by the love of my Ma and Pa.