Hi all,
I'm helping put together an awesome session for this year's TLCC about Educating Your Audience. The concept is that the more an audience knows about an art form, they more they'll enjoy it and want to keep coming back. But at the same time, we know that audiences don't necessarily want to be "educated" or sit through lectures.
So what we're interested in finding is organisations who have found cool and innovative ways to increase their audience's knowledge of an art form, with an aim to increasing customer engagement and retention. If your organisation is doing something cool, we'd LOVE to hear your story, and may consider you for presenting in the session.
We've got a couple of ideas from the classical sector, but we'd especially love to hear from people in museums / galleries and other types of art forms. But any and all stories of what your organisation does are welcome.
Cheers,
Matt
Hi Matt -
We do a couple of different things (besides the standard post show discussions).
One is a series called Speak Up! that is a panel (or panels) of people from the outside world talking about some of the themes of the play. We don't do this for every show, but there are a couple every year that strike cords with people. You can see a sampling of it from our show The Great Wilderness (http://www.seattlerep.org/Plays/1314/GW/Dates). These have been really well received by the public who enjoy taking the themes of the play into a broader context of society.
We also do a series called Stage Voices which usually deals with the playwright getting their vision to stage.
I'm not sure who will be going to the conference from our marketing department yet!
Heather
We do the standard pre-show lectures with a subject matter expert and post show talk backs with cast and crew. However in the past few years we have started a program aimed at audience engagement and education, mostly around our Broadway shows.
We realized that many of the shows were also films and that it might be interesting for patrons to know about what the differences are between the two forms and how a movie becomes a stage musical. We set up informational stations around the lobbies, some are just postings with pictures and info, we generally have a video that is tied to the creation or backstage look at the show, and then there is an interactive component. For example, War Horse had a puppet making station where patrons could make a puppet of the horse to understand how it moved.
For our patrons that are also donors of a certain level, we invite them to working rehearsals for the dance companies that we present and behind the scenes tours with the Broadway shows.