Where the Audiences are

December 15, 2011 / Jon Keevy / 3 Comments

A list of Theatre Capacity in the Mother City

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!

Magnet	148
Hiddingh Little Theatre	225
Hiddingh Intimate	72
Hiddingh Arena	75
Theatre in the District	180
Fugard Main	280
Fugard Studio	145
Baxter Main	666
Baxter Flipside	200
Baxter Studio	172
Baxter Concert Hall	636
Artscape Main	541
Artscape Opera	1487
Artscape Arena	129
Theatre on the Bay	255
Masque Theatre	171
Kalk Bay Theatre	78
Theatre Arts Admin Collective	60
Maynardville	690
Obz Café	55

Cannibal’s Pie: Theatre Competition

October 30, 2011 / Jon Keevy / 4 Comments

There’s this thing called market share. You may have heard of it. It’s a pretty literal term measuring how big your slice of the pie is. For some calculations the pie is made of money and for others it’s a cannibal’s pie made of people.

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.

The Flying Dutchman is coming in for Landing

January 20, 2011 / Jon Keevy / Leave a comment

A week from today about 2000 people are going to take their seats in the Artscape Opera house. The stage will be shrouded by an unlit scrim. It’ll all be very mysterious. The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra will be doing their last minute checks and tuning their strings and making that really interesting low level cacophony that gets made before you her some serious music. The lights will dim, the conductor, Kamal Khan will take his place before the musicians and then it’ll start. The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner. 20 seconds in and an invisible brush will pass across the scrim, creating a living illustration of the ocean.

I’m really glad we still have a week to go.

It’s probably almost a year ago that Lara first approached me for the Dutchman; Sanjin and I had done the multimedia for her previous opera with the Wagner Society, Rossini’s La Scala di Seta in 2009, and were very excited for another. It’s been 2 years since then and our techniques have developed considerably as well as our understanding of each other as artists. What can we do this time around? I took lead on design – first gathering samples and inspiration for the style and then working through the beats of the story and music with Lara to storyboard the footage. I worked with ink and brush to evoke my main design focus, a painted world. The sea is vital to the story so I wanted everything, from the clouds to the rocks to have a sense of flow and life to them.

The biggest contrast between Sanjin and I is in the realm of technology – he knows cameras and computers upstairs and downstairs while I am always trying to find a chunky, unpredictable analogue solution. But these 2 approaches complement each other well. I went about planning to capture footage in weird ways and he figured out how to make it look good. We ended up getting a glass drawing table built and then buying a fish tank for our effects. 2 weekends were spent dripping, smearing, brushing, stirring, pouring, seeping, folding, tearing, soaking, splattering ink, water, paper and glitter in a studio.

A lot of beautiful effects were found and filed but less than a quarter of the recorded footage will be used for the opera, the rest will be filed away for future reference on another project. The next phase was to create the drawings that would actually feature in the video – this was me sitting at a table with ink and brush churning out waves, masts, shorelines and brush strokes for animating.

The big delay, and the reason I’m glad there’s still sometime before we put on the show, was filming the principals. Gary Simpson and Nkosazana Dimande only arrived in South Africa this month, and we could only get them into a studio 10 days ago. That’s a tight schedule for any kind of video work. The last couple of nights have been late ones with Sanjin and me staying up way past our bedtimes and drinking coke ‘til our kidneys complained.

But it looks rad. Sanjin has been cooking with the editing and has really started to master After Effects (and my Photoshop skills have come in handy once or twice too). A couple more all nighters and then Tuesday night is the final dress rehearsal. We have 1 absurdly short section that we’re still really wrestling with. Absurdly short. 10 seconds. We wanted this to be the best thing we’ve ever done.

And I think it will be.