9:00am | If you’re involved in the arts at all, it is difficult to avoid running into Victoria Bryan’s smiling face. She, it seems, is everywhere. She’s soft spoken, but engaging, and listens more than she speaks. When she speaks, though, her insights are profound.
She’s not one to get caught up in rhetoric, or to wallow in negativity. Her gentle positivity is contageous, and she doesn’t shy away from hard work.
She has one foot firmly planted in academia, and the other in theater. She graduated from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with a diploma in Stage Management, received a BA in Theater Design from Antioch, an MA in Art History from CSULB, and is nearing the completion of her PhD in Management from the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.
In formulating the thesis for her PhD, she decided to focus on the local art scene and, not surprisingly, the challenges and opportunities facing the many theater groups in Long Beach. I asked her what led her to this investigation?
Victoria: I started thinking about the relationship between our theatres and their audiences when I heard from more and more theatres about the problems they were having with finding enough audience members to attend their shows. Times are hard for many theatres – the economy, competition from other forms of entertainment, less subsidy from almost every source, and, of course, less arts education – which means fewer young audience members being primed and ready to start seeing shows.
But, with all that being said, we do have people who attend our theatres so I thought that it would be useful to go to the experts, the audience themselves, to better understand what they expect from a production, what’s important to them when they’re making a decision to buy a ticket, how their experience matches up with their expectations, and how they feel about their relationship to the theatres they attend.
Sander: I think that, for traditional theater organizations, and perhaps some of the larger ones, this is a serious problem. For others, though, it almost seems like they need larger facilities to accomodate their audience.
Victoria: Which theatres are you thinking about, that need larger venues?
Sander: Garage, for example. From what I understand, they sell out constantly.
Victoria: Yes, I’m happy to see that they do sell out often but I’ve also been there on nights when only about half of their approx. 35 seats are empty. Garage is a great example of a theatre who really know their audience members and have built a strong relationship with them.
Sander: Do more traditional theater groups need to understand their existing audience better, or find ways to create new audiences?
Victoria: That’s one of the reasons that I designed the study. Some of our theatres (Musical Theatre West, for example) have very sophisticated audience development programs, but many don’t have the resources for that kind of outreach. For many theatres, their resources are stretched very thin and, even if they do survey their audiences, they only hear back from people who attend their shows. Through the survey I’m doing, I will provide information back to theatres that draws on responses from all participating companies. I do think that in order to create theatre that has value for the audience, you have to know what the audiences value. Theatre is (obviously) two-way communication, so considering the reception of the work by the audience is vital.
Sander: Have there been discussions, beyond the research you’re doing, to create a system that would help all of the local arts organizations with audience outreach?
Victoria: I’m very excited about a local initiative, the Long Beach Theatre Arts Collaborative, being developed under the auspices of the Catalyst organization. Marlon Deleon, a directing major at CSULB, is coordinating this fledgling group, in which theatres are coming together to collaborate on strategies that will benefit all companies. So, that’s happening in the theatre community.
Some of the major arts funders, such as The Irvine Foundation, have offered interesting funding opportunities in the past few years, that focus on audience engagement and development, in their capacity building grant initiatives. I think your question points to something that is really needed, and Long Beach would be a great test site for such a program. Maybe an “Audience Institute” approach to outreach and development of relationships between creative producers and new audiences.
That makes me think of the recent restructuring of the Arts Council, UK. At the beginning of this year, they completely rebuilt their organizational structure. They renamed all of their jobs as relationship managers. The jobs are defined in a number of ways, by discipline, or geographic area, etc., but the title is always Relationship Manager. I think that’s an interesting way of supporting artists and arts organizations: To create a role for intermediaries, whose job is to facilitate intereaction between the two halves of the arts experience – producer and consumer.
Sander: How has the response been to the audience survey you’re conducting?
Victoria: There are over 500 so far. I only have eight theatres actively encouraging their audience members to participate. I’ll be adding the others in during the next couple of weeks. The online survey is available for anyone to take, about any Long Beach productions that they have seen in the past few months. I’m hoping to get a thousand resopnses by the time I finish data collection at the end of January.
Sander: While you’re still expecting many more surveys to be completed before you start analyzing the data in earnest, have any surprising trends revealed themselves to you?
Victoria: I don’t really have enough data in yet to see those trends clearly, but one aspect of the theatre-going experience that is identified as important by a large number of audience members is “the comfort of the theatre envirnoment.” Also, in a question that asks for one word that describes the audience members’ experience, three words have come up most often: intimate, personal, and alive. As I said, nothing clear in the data yet, just interesting samples of what I hope we will learn more about.
Sander: When you’ve successfully captured the quantity of data you need, how will it help shape the efforts of individual theater groups?
Victoria: I hope that, as theatres learn more about their audience members’ expectations and experience, they can use that information to develop their relationship with existing and new audience members. This is an area where we can learn from the business world, which has effectively used market research for many years. Also, as we learn more about the Long Beach theatre audience as a whole, it will offer insight into collaborative programming and marketing opportunities.
Sander: What role should audience opinion play in programming?
Victoria: Glad you asked that. I often get accused of suggesting that we should pander to public opinion, but that’s really not what I’m saying when I quote Peter Drucker “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” What I hear in that is that if we only pay attention to what we create, not how it is received, then we are in danger of not having enough audience for all the great theatre that we produce. To me, “creating a customer” means understanding the experience of the audience and strategizing how to develop both the company’s programming and the audience’s appreciation so that, together, they result in a spectacular theatre experience for both participants.
Sander: Do you see emerging roles for non-arts businesses, other than the traditional sponsorship relationship?
Victoria: Yes, very much so, in creative collaborations with artists and arts organizations. Those kinds of partnerships reduce the separation between the arts and the rest of what’s happening in our communities. There are so many ways that the arts can be used to meet marketing, healing, education, outreach, communications, and other goals for all types of organizations, whether they are for-profit, nonprofit, public, private, arts, or nonarts.
Sander: What about government involvement? While direct funding is becoming less available, are there other roles municipal government can play in supporting the arts?
Victoria: In so many cities (Ashland, Oregon; New York; San Francisco; etc.) the arts are a jewel in the civic crown – cultivated because they are seen as a valuable commodity that benefits the community in many ways (including economic). I think that’s how we would like to see the arts positioned in Long Beach, and we’re taking steps in that direction, with the recently completed new Create Long Beach: 10 Year Cultural Master Plan, and getting the City Council to approve the five arts initiatives last March.
Craig Watson and the Arts Council are doing great work in this area, but it’s hard work, to change public perception of the arts, so that they are thought of as community capital, to be considered as a resouce in all aspects of our civic life. We need not to be seen in the role of beggars, spare-changing, but rather as partners in making our city an exciting and thriving community.
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If you’ve attended a theater performance in Long Beach in the last few months, please share your experiences and insights with the theater community by taking the survey Victoria has created. Please note that the survey addresses one specific theater event that you attended. If you’ve attended multiple events, complete the survey again, once for each event.
Also, visit the Theatre Research Study facebook page for updates.