The Importance of Risk in Arts Practise
From Urban Press
There is a temptation, especially within theater, to base your arts practice on what will draw the biggest audience or command the highest price in today's market. This is a position which certainly has some value. The ability to judge how an audience will respond to your work is clearly a valuable skill in any art form. As a playwright I am conscious of the fact that I am asking audiences to pay for the work before they have seen it, so striking a balance between my artistic goals and my obligation to entertain seems to me to be doubly important.
The point at which this begins to concern me though is when the amount you stand to make becomes more important that what it is you are making. Good art inevitably involves an element of risk. On the other side of this coin the profit margins in theatre are razor thin, at almost all levels. Understandably the more money that's involved the more risk adverse most people become. This is why most proffesional theatre is generally more concerned with business practice than with arts practice. It is also why professional theatre, in this country anyway, has been struggling with a declining audience for at least the last 10 years. The traditional audience for theatre, sometimes affectionately known as the "blue rinse crowd", used to be women in their 50's with disposable income who occasionally dragged their husbands along. However there is no one coming through behind those women to replace them, and many of them have been in their 50s now for three decades at least. In my view the failure of the big professional companies to fill this gap comes down to their reliance on plays which are at least as old as their traditional audience, and which provide the viewer with very little that cannot also be found in TV or cinema at much less cost. In order to justify its place at the table theatre must engage the audience in ways in which other media cannot. Unfortunately for the large, slow moving giants of New Zealand theatre industry developing new audience must therefore involve some risk, as determining how well a particular show will do at the box office is an inexact science at best. Hollywood will attest to that.
The same argument can be extended to New Zealand's semi-pro and amateur scene. Many of us are also guilty of making easy choices when it comes to choosing which works to stage. We all exist, professionals and amateurs alike, with some degree of public subsidy. So, are we being subsidized to make art or to make a profit?
