Staying away in droves?

If you belong to an acting or dance outfit or a chorus or choir, unless you are in the very highest league, you have probably noticed that it seems to be getting harder and harder to attract the public to your shows.  The problem is reportedly worse in "big market" cities than in smaller towns, and I've heard many people explain it away by pointing out how many more entertainment choices people have these days.  But that seems a pretty weak theory.

Are they really staying home and watching TV?  TV is a lousy medium for conveying art, and the programming is just getting worse, the commercials more frequent.  People still go to theaters to see movies, because the big screen is more immersive and one step closer to reality, but the burden of suspending disbelief is still pretty high because let's face it, everyone is flat and projected on the screen.  Live performances can be so much more compelling.  Imagine - real people!

Is this true for your group?  Look out in your audience - is it entirely full of F's?  I mean, Friends, Family and Freebies?  That's not a good sign.  If everyone in the audience who paid had to have their arm twisted, you have to ask yourself if you're really giving people what they want and need from performance.

Art and performance are much older than civilization.  They have been present in every single culture the world has seen, and that means performance serves some kind of useful purpose that is common to humanity.  So if it's so healthy and useful for us culturally, why are people "staying away in droves?"

Perhaps we have forgotten what they want and what they need from art and performance.

Failing performance groups are failing to understand the first rule, which is that you've got to give people what they want, and that the purpose of performance is to give people an experience that they can't get elsewhere, to transport them outside of themselves for an hour or two, and maybe teach them something about themselves.  That's the goods.  If you do that, they will love it, and they will come back, and they will bring their friends.

Sadly in the musical realm, it seems that more attention is paid to "getting it right" than to delivering the goods.  But if people just wanted to hear perfect music, they could save a lot of money by buying a CD and a set of headphones.

Here's an example that proves the point.  I spend a lot of time in the barbershop harmony world, and there are two kinds of quartets that get lots of gigs: International Champs, and comedy quartets - you have to be really good, or funny.  Comedy quartets get a lot of gigs, even though they tend not to be the best singing quartets, because they are entertaining.  And they are entertaining because of their huge advantage, which is that they know they are there to entertain, not to be perfect or impressive.  So they're pretty much the only ones playing what I think is the right game, and from a "getting shows" perspective, they eat everyone's lunch.  Money talks.

So if you want to get people clamoring to come to your shows, do you have to be funny?  Of course not - funny is just one path; one thing that people need.  It's just that most groups have forgotten to consider the audience at all.

I know some choirs who hardly ever sing for the public.  So it's more like a bowling league.  Just getting together, trying to throw strikes.  How sad, for performers to be so ignorant of their potential.

Success and growth for your organization will only come from giving the audience what they want out of art, which is truth and passion, not perfection.  Truth and passion are all about them.  Perfection is all about you.