people respond to the familiar. the familiar is safe, and gives audiences a chance to explore new things without needing to step too far from their comfort zone. the way to bring broader audiences to the arts is by equipping them with a vocabulary for the act that they can both understand, and feel comfortable using. hence why nick cave the musical would draw an audience – because the vocab is centered around nick cave, and not around the musical. here, people feel safe, and so can step out and try something new.

And, yeh, I’d have to see the this particular theatre too (which I’d like to now), or understand a bit more about it. Like I said, though, it seems to be as much about asking people to look past their preconceptions of an art form at the work itself, and I think that’s a useful exercise, but the form is there all the same.

As someone who likes to go to the theatre, be it STC or wherever, I don’t think it’s such a narrow and unasking structure as you paint. But I agree that we need to make things relevant and engaging; so it’s useful questioning.

Haha, yeh, discussion vis-a-vis sometime. Cheers.
N.

However, outside the context of the form the work is actually likely to be far more familiar and immediately understandable than what much “traditional” theatre would be – because its reference points are quite familiar in the wider world even if unfamiliar in the theatre world. It’s probably a case study in the danger of form based labelling and how it alienates potential audiences.

Anyhow, it’s hard to explain this without actually discussing work in front of us.

But on the point of letting art be vital and reach new audiences, it’s a useful problem to solve – how to widen the exposure of a particular production to audiences. I think your line of thinking is working very well when it raises issues about how to cultivate local work.

But I don’t see how the tradition of theatre is imposing itself over the work. Marketing anything at that level to wider audiences is challenging. Similarly, a critic which compared that form of theatre with a form of interpretation suitable for Elizabethan drama would be easily shouted down.

Anyway, thanks for the example. We’ll have to discuss it under better circumstances. I suspect that there are some assumptions about audiences in your argument – who they are and what their taste is. But I would, wouldn’t I? (Or perhaps it would help if you put forward the sort of audience demographic your argument is representing – for e.g. it doesn’t seem to be the baby boomers).

Good luck on the ABC. I’ll be tuning in and cheering for you.

They are technically a theatre company. They do live performance for live audiences but i think by putting it in the context of theatre it provides a false sense of who their potential audiences are.

Their work is high energy, draws in equal part on toys, pop culture, classical myths and child’s play. It references everything from WWE wrestiling to the Children Overboard saga and in my experience the potential audience is very different from say, the Melbourne Theatre Company subscriber set.

The question is how does this potential audience connect with that work if they don’t read the theatre pages? More to the point, if the reviewers who are writing for the theatre pages compare the work to the work of main stage theatre companies then the set of comparisons is probably highly inappropriate because it is simply not much of a analogue to what they’re trying to do.

Unless you’ve seen their work it is very hard to use the reference point, but i would say that their work is not necessarily well served by the structures it is obliged to fit into. Nor is the work of say PVI collective (http://www.pvicollective.com/) or virtially any of the groups who are making work that i find particularly interesting. The context that they can establish in direct contact with an audience is far better than the one that is established by the ways that they’re mediated by others.

But do you have examples of the newer forms which are constrained by the insistence upon artform over engagement with an audience? It’s generally the case that what is new questions form and is unrecognized in its time of creation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever an audience enjoys should be discussed under the confusing banner of ‘art’ or even compared to art at all.

Anyway, just curious about concrete examples of what is being constrained by the tradition of form. Some work definitely is, but I think it’s a very generalized category. The audience vs form opposition (or imbalance) is a useful one, but it can go too far on either scale.

Cheers!

LM