Appendix C Together Project interview notes
The show was staged at The Royal Exchange and this gave an excellent opportunity for all venue personnel to see it and this helped them think about how the venues themselves could support audience engagement activity. The venue specific approach was considered to be much better than having one person undertake work across all tour venues but Christie did feel that this added to her workload and it was very time consuming to manage everyone individually. Christie also undertook to develop a ‘shopping list’ of engagement activity which the LEP’s could choose from and undertake. She deliberately avoided bringing all the personnel together as she was keen they developed their own activity plans and were not overly influenced by what other LEP’s were doing. At Washington another approach was used where a part-time member of staff from the venue was used and they did a good job. The advantage of this approach for Christie was that the person knew the venue and vice versa. The show sold out at Washington. At the end of this process, Christie felt she had a clear view of what had worked and what had not worked. A key learning point was not to assume that you know what audiences want before you talk to them and really understand their motivations and understanding of a show. Key Learning points Christie felt the project has been very significant both for her career development personally but also for Unlimited. As a Company they are now seeking to allocate time and resource to having dedicated Audience Engagement support. AIDY? is touring again and Christie has recruited a person to do 10 days’ work in advance of the show to undertake development work. A key learning point was that Unlimited need to go to the audience rather than expect them to come to them. As a Company they are now excited about taking ambitious shows to smaller venues and making that work for both the Company and audiences. Smaller audiences responded brilliantly to the two shows in the Together project. The most effective engagement personnel were those who knew the venue and their area really well. Only knowing one of these two components reduced the effectiveness of the LEP. Venues, perhaps predictably, were mixed in terms of their willingness to get involved in audience development work with some seeing it as a ‘core part of what we do’ and others seeing it as extra work for a small show with a short run. One excellent example of a co-operative approach is Barnsley where they took a risk with programming the shows – but got involved in audience work with the result that Unlimited and Barnsley are now co-commissioning a new piece of work called How I Hacked My Way Into Space.
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