Pink Couch

Cannibal’s Pie: Theatre Competition

/ 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.

Surviving the Festival

/ Jon Keevy / 2 Comments

The truck, all locked and loaded. Photo: Amy Jephta

Survival. Supposedly it’s for the fittest. In that case I really didn’t expect to still be standing after the festival, but though I’m out of breath I am still breathing. I went up this year with London Road and the ladies conquered St Andrew’s Hall and the fest generally (I’m not sure of the final figures, but London Road looks to have taken the title of highest grossing production this year). But the real sweat had come before the festival began with the preproduction for the Cape Town Edge.

For a little back story: Tanya from FTH:K had approached Tara and me to run the Edge in 2011 at the end of last year; we accepted and set about planning, with Tara bringing fellow Pink Coucher Mat Lewis in.  We divided the project up as best we could; my portfolio was the budget and marketing materials. As Tara’s schedule began to fill up with amazing opportunities we brought in Fiona Gordon to be our Tara surrogate. But enough about them… back to me.

Marketing materials boils down to all the print and web media and making sure it could be accessed by the groups and by interested press people. So we started small with a revamp of the CTE logo and built up through posters, press kits, badges, flyers, facebook pages, a blog and then to the hardest part: the Booklet. I went a little mad. What I’m most proud of if kicking the ass of skeptics who believe that Photoshop is a bad choice to do a booklet in. Using my full knowledge of the program (and learning a couple of new tricks) I worked out a damn efficient method. I now know that anyone who tells you it can’t be done is just someone who can’t do it (put that on an inspirational poster).

During the fest itself I stepped back from the Edge and let Mat and Fiona handle things. Mat is an exceptional and imaginative techie, which is a shame considering how gifted he is as an actor, and got everything running smoothly inside while Fiona and Dani Le Chat made the outside fun and funky.

But all the hard work would have meant very little if it wasn’t for Mark from Fushin. He is a legend and saved the day, bringing in amazing tents, delicious hot food straight from a mobile kitchen and, best of all, a liquor license.

It wasn’t all fun and games though. On the drive up the Nic Danger team were in a car accident and had to cancel the show. There was a lot of confusion that first day and the feeling was that the slot was a loss. But as it became clearer what everyone’s injuries were a spirit of togetherness kicked in. Trent was the worst injured and he was flown back to Cape Town. The remaining ninjas banded together and decided to use all their contacts to put together a comedy variety show. Lots of comics and performers came to the party, giving their time to look silly on stage to help raise funds to pay for Trent’s hospital bills. It was really a moment of feeling that the theatre is a community, not an industry. Other artists and producers made donations direct to the hospital. So, a big thank you to all everyone and especially to the audiences. Thank you a thousand times.

So we survived. Now to start planning for next year…