On Thursday I hosted the last (for now, I will be returning with one, maybe two more, as part of my Edinburgh Previews in July, and the Everybody’s Reading Festival in October) of the regular Performance in the Pub nights that I’ve been running since January 2012. They’ve been a brilliant bloody thing to be a part of. And I’m not going to blather on about my own experience of it all for a change, as I did enough to that effect over on this blog post for the year anniversary. I’m really sad to have stopped running them, but to do so from a different city, and with all the new projects I’m working on now I’m in That London, and the problems of subsidising it out of the unpredictable income of a freelancer, is pretty much untenable. Alas. Alack. Etc.

I did get to do a cool thing to end on though – I handed out one of 40 limited edition coasters with writing on the back – donated by friends and performers from past events. That’s the main picture here – designed by the ever-brilliant Lee Keith Innes. Pay him to do stuff, yeah? Felt nice to give people something to keep, of the art as well as the merch.

I also do want to carry on supporting and promoting this kind of thing. I’ll be trying to do something Proper with the site and the legacy of it all as soon as I have a moment (September), but for now, I was wondering if you could help me? Could you tell me what that legacy is? If you’ve experienced Performance in the Pub in any way – whether one of the online bits of work over the summer, whether you’ve seen a show, or performed in one, if you have a moment, could you tell me a little bit about your strongest impression/s of the experience? Any moments that stand out? Either on Twitter @performancepub, on the Performance in the Pub Facebook page, or in the comments section here. Tell me about a moment, a feeling, an idea, anything that’s stuck with you. That you still remember or return to.

If you have the time, thank you.

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2013/05/how-was-it-for-you/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2013/04/announcing-the-last-ever-for-now-performance-in-the-pub/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=announcing-the-last-ever-for-now-performance-in-the-pub http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2013/04/announcing-the-last-ever-for-now-performance-in-the-pub/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:05:38 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=3209

Facebook event! 

Eventbrite link!

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for a long time. 3 weeks or so. OK, so not AGES, but a while. A bit. It has a title: “A Conversation With My Father: final, Bradford week”. But I’m not really sure what to write. Because unlike all the other things that I write about – on my blog, or for zines and reviews, my PhD and academic papers, I’m not looking at this from the outside. I’m in it. Properly buried deep inside it, and it, in turn, in me. I think of two images when I write that. I think about a song that used to play off a tape my mum kept in the car. Dusty Springfield. And her grainy sounding voice with the crunch of tyres on gravel.

“Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel”

That stationary smell of the inside of the black car with the grey patterned seats on a hot day. The song my dad used to sing every time we came back from a long drive, from Scarborough, Whitby, Wales on holiday.

“Here we are again
Happy as can be.”

And I think of that Ren and Stimpy* gross-out kids cartoon, that was on in the 90s, on Nickelodeon. Satellite TV! Imagine that. And this one episode (I can’t find a still from it you’ll be glad to hear) where Stimpy turns himself inside out. I think of that, too. I think of how I felt standing in front of gently house-lit friends, family, and strangers at the end of the Bradford week and telling them this story. I think of the bits of the show, the quiet bits that stay behind my eyes – that Alex, my collaborator, that he knows, but probably, he’s the only one. Some of the things I’ve seen, and the things I feel, most of them I tell you… and to stand there and tell you what I do, what I’ve done, in situations where I’m scared, cold, angry, frightened, or about the rationalisations I draw out of myself, that allow me to step back out of danger, to walk away from the symbol I’ve tried to be. That’s what it feels like when I tell you about those memories. Inside out. Raw. In the same way when I sit across the table and look at the empty chair where my dad was when I did the interview, empty, now, though, in the theatre. And I describe him to you. As he appears to me simultaneously across 28 years. A shimmering reality of a person.

I set out to make a piece of theatre about the space between them and us. In order to do that, I stand in that inbetween, set-aside space of the theatre and tell you about Hannah and Roger Nicklin. One of us a policeman, the other a protestor. Both of us more than that. Me and my dad. I’m proud of us both. I’m scared of when we might let ourselves down.

In Sheffield, at the very end of the third week, we did a MAJOR rewrite. Except it wasn’t major. It felt major, until it lay there in front of us, and then suddenly that was it. The story. Muddled, woven, difficult and true. Exactly in the same way life is. Rachel from Third Angel saw the uncut show on the Wednesday of that week and had said ‘you need to decide whether this is political, or it’s personal, which is the thing that matters most’.

It’s personal. It has to be. Through that it will – of course – be political, and the subject area, inevitably so. But the show Alex and I made; with the very great help of my dad, with the generous support of 4 theatres in the North and Middle of England; the show Alex and I made together is one only I can tell. It’s a true story. I can prove it, if you’ll consent to listen to me.

Also, I totally wrote an hour long show, learnt it all, and then remembered it in front of an audience.

I hope you’d be proud.

Here’s two things audience members said:

“Totally beautiful, affecting evening: A Conversation with my Father by the inestimable @hannahnicklin #Recommended in the strongest terms” – @discoverbrevity

“’A Conversation with my Father’ by @hannahnicklin – a terrific thing. The personal and political blend with charm and incisive thinking, win” @ADatMill

It’s going to be in Edinburgh from the 14th–24th of August. 8.05pm start. I’d love it if you could come. Venue announcement coming soon, and of course, I’ll definitely bring it to The Cookie in Leicester on the way up to preview, maybe somewhere in London and Leeds if I can too. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, forgive me for some thank yous: Thank you, Alex. Thank you Third Angel. Thank you to Arts Council England, ARC Stockton, and Theatre in the Mill. Thank you to Embrace Arts, Leicester, and to Sheffield Theatres. Thanks Lawrence for filming it, Lee for making some proper good (forthcoming) print work for it. And thanks, Daddy, for all that you are, and all you helped give me.

The end of week four. C’est tout.

*that was a weird show. You know what was weirder? Googling it just now and discovering the slashfic.

On Sunday I gave a provocation at a Salon hosted by Coney at Camden People’s Theatre, introduced by the lovely Tom Frankland (pictured). I was invited to respond to the question ‘how (can) we ask people to act?’, and offer my own question for discussion. Here is the thing that I said.

Audiences want to believe.
Audiences want to be told.
Audience want to play along.
Audiences turn away from ‘what is’ to conspire together to hold between them ‘what if’ – what if this were true, what if this was a different place and you were a different version of you.

The word ‘conspire’, by the way, means ‘to breathe together’.

Theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum held apart by collective hands. Even if it is just me, maker, and you, participant. In that space between, that hot metallic space between ‘what is’ and ‘what if’ we breathe together.

I read that meaning of ‘conspire’ in a book called The Most Radical Gesture. In it a woman called Sadie quotes an old drunk French philosopher who said:

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.

I’m not citing him out of purposeful irony.

There’s something there for me about co-creation.

I make community theatre. For some reason people insist on calling me a ‘digital artist’ but as far as I’m concern you might as well also call me a ‘water drinking artist’.

I make community theatre. Communities online and off.

3 years ago I collected stories of kissing in the rain online and wrote a soundwalk around them, designed to be listened to under a white umbrella in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Incidentally that’s the only time I’ve been to Manchester and it didn’t rain).

In The Umbrella Project - yes umbrellas are a thing for me – 250 umbrellas were released into the wild of York with a number on them which when called, depending on the time of day, asked a different question; Tell me about York at night; Tell me about an encounter with a stranger; Tell me about a journey.

I also collected stories in person, and made 3 sound walks for different times of day, with each question’s answers as source material.

For Northern Big Board I spent 4 weeks in residence in a swimming and diving pool in Shipley near Bradford. The pool was suffering under government cuts and at the time were facing huge staffing upheaval – where, for example, 4 people with over 80s years experience of both working there and with one another were being interviewed for only 2 posts. And being interviewed for it by a friend.

I listened. I asked questions. Of both pool users and staff. Questions like ‘what does this place mean to you?’ ‘if you could have a plaque put up to you anywhere in the building where would you put it’ and ‘tell me about a time when you were the best of yourself’.

Dave told me about what it feels like to rip a dive – a perfect entry off a 10m platform – like silence he said.

Gee told me about looking up as he was administering CPR to someone who had had a heart attack to see his full team standing ready to take over and said ‘they were the best of me’.

Angie spoke of a place she had worked for over 35 years, the people she had seen grow up, have their own kids. She said ‘we’re like a family’ and that the cuts were like ‘a death in the family’.

I made 7 different interactive and non-interactive installations with their stories.

I set out to find common voices in these pieces – common experience, a common city, a community. But what I found – the overwhelming thing I found when I asked people for stories was the answer “oh, I haven’t got anything interesting to say.”

In York I asked a man with a zimmer frame – tell me about a journey – and he replied ‘oh, I’ve nothing to tell you.’ I reframed the question a couple of times and then he said ‘well, I have sailed around the world single handedly.’

No joke.

He told me ‘you can’t fight the ocean, you’d never win, you have to move with it.’

In Shipley people lit up when they saw their words on a plaque in their favourite place in the pool. They ran around trying to spot them all – came to me afterwards and asked if they could keep them. Their own words.

In Shipley when I asked one woman ‘tell me about a time you were the best of yourself’ she burst into tears at the idea that she might ever be worth enough to have an answer to that question.

Capitalism has stolen our stories.
It sells them back to us, like bottled water.
They are never about us.
They never listen.

Audiences want to believe.
Audiences want to be told what to do.
Audiences want to play along.
They turn away from ‘what is’ and carefully pass ‘what if’ between them.

I think the beginning of asking audiences to act is to make something they aren’t afraid to break. You’re not afraid to break things when you know they can be fixed. How they’re put together.

Something that doesn’t say ‘believe’ but ‘look’, that doesn’t tell, asks. Not ‘play along’ but ‘construct’ that in turning await from ‘what is’ turns us towards one another, within ‘what if’.

The work I told you about – my part in it – was constructing a mirror. Unimportant. The important part, I’ve discovered is the asking questions – in listening – but crucially in a way that tells people that they will be listened to. The work is the device that says ‘I heard you’.

The last thing I want to share with you is a definition of community I read in a different book. Another french dude – Jean Luc Nancy, in fact.

For Nancy community is not defined by space or proximity. No material communality – community – he says – should not be ‘productive’ infact it is impossible, indescribable, unavowable.

The clearest examples of community he talks about is that between lovers, and between the person dying and their companion. It is in the inability to truly accompany someone to their death in the knowledge you will take the same journey alone.

It is in the thrusting together ourselves together as we continue to do because we can never truly be close enough. The way I love you, this ache in the place I know in my head is not my heart is- is- this is- never enough never enough.

Community  is the space between. Th space between what is – me – and what if – you, with your alike agency.

It is not the characters capitalism makes us to one another.
But hot, metallic possibility.

I am not you but what if
That has not happened to me but what if
I have not made that action but what if

In short; empathy.

These, I suggest, are the components of audience action:

• Knowing that you will be listened to
• Thinking you have something worth saying
• Listening to other people.

We cannot ask people to act. We can only offer them a space where they might recognise their being in the world, their being together with others, and their implication – the effect they might have upon that nexus. A space for action. A space of community.

We can offer them the community found in the in-between – in between possibility; in between you and me; in between idea and action – and we can offer them the ability to play with it without worrying it might break – by making it with them. Knowing that our coming together is impossible. Knowing the point is we try.

So, I have a question for you:

When was the last time you let someone change your mind?

While I am too exhausted – due to 2 solid weeks finishing the show, then moving house and starting a new job – to actually put out a proper reflective blog post on the making of A Conversation With My Father (coming to an Edinburgh near you soon(!)) I thought I’d offer you a bit of bonus material from off the cutting room floor. Consider it part of the show’s DVD extras DIRECTOR’S CUT, or something. You’ll see how it fits in if you see the final show (you should, the last two weeks of Edinburgh in an UNDISCLOSED VENUE) – where in fact the whole thing becomes condensed down to the single line “filled with the subversive silence of a school corridor during class”. But for now, in it’s solitary state (and completely out of context) here’s the story ‘School Corridor’. Enjoy:

School Corridor

I’m standing in the corridor outside a classroom.

I’m 14, wearing a white school shirt and black trousers, with my blue and white diagonally striped tie worn long, because that’s the opposite of what the cool kids do.

We’re on the first floor, outside a science classroom – the science classrooms are different to the rest, all high tables, tall benches, and Bunsen burners in the centre of each table. The corridor outside follows the outside edge of the building, with big windows all along the inside opposite me, looking onto a glass covered courtyard in the centre.

The corridor is usually full of people, shouting, fighting, teasing girls, pulling at newly acquired bra straps, rushing to get to their next lesson, or queuing up waiting to go in.

But now it’s quiet.

The only other person outside the classrooms is a boy called Nathan. Nathan is the son of one of Lincolnshire constabulary’s few black policeman, and is one of the cool kids. One of their leaders.

He’s standing on the other side of the science classroom door too, because he’s been sent out. Like me.

We haven’t been sent out together, but we have been sent out for the same thing: being cheeky.

We don’t have our usual teacher today. I corrected them about something. They don’t know me. Don’t know that though I’m a bit gobby, I’m a Good Girl, really. The teacher thought I was being cheeky –

- I was being cheeky -

 and has sent me out.

I am angry at the injustice of it.

Or at least the injustice of being caught.

And I’m also scared. Scared because I’ve never been here before.

The empty school corridor is kind of… suffocating. It’s quiet and heavy, in a way I haven’t noticed before when out inbetween lessons, on an errand for a teacher, or with permission to go to the toilet. A place to move through then.

Now it’s a place with unknown rules.

A place for waiting…

…the feeling is…fuzzy… like the feeling you get in your extremities when you think you might faint but more… in my tummy. Here. I’m nervous. Worried. I don’t know what will happen next.

The waiting makes it worse. I can’t control what happens next.

To Nathan, this is just part of his day.

His control is not caring.

I’m trying to hide the fact that I’m scared.

But he’s still laughing at me.

It seems like ages, it probably isn’t.

The teacher comes out.

And I do what I do when I’m always scared.

I get ultra logical. I’m both wholly present in my body, heavy and more 3d. While I also watch from afar, observe my actions. I explain clearly and remember snippets of my mum talking about negotiation and assertiveness training that she did at work recently. Open body language, steady eye contact, listening, a clearly articulate response about why I don’t deserve to be punished for independent thinking.

Nathan sniggers at me.

The teacher lets me back in the classroom. Nathan stays out on the corridor.

The teacher was probably going to do that anyway.

 

You know, I’m not quite sure how interesting process blog posts are. Do you care enough about a show you haven’t seen to want to know how Alex and I are putting it together? If you are, let me know, I will totally write that. But I’m hedging my bets on ‘not interested yet’ and so am instead going to post a few photos of interesting looking things from the week. The 2nd week of the 4 weeks we have to make the show into something finished and full length. At week 2 version of the piece we defiinitely have enough material, and a little too much in places. The next two weeks (starting 25th Feb) are my favourite bits of writing, and I hope will be in devising, too: editing. Cutting. Making it fucking tight. Just the right word, just the right placing, or flicker of thought across my face, just the right question, well asked.

Also, before I paste a bit of new stuff in below, I must really say how proper proper brilliant ARC and all who sail in her are. So welcoming, and a wonderful, interested, articulate and empassioned mid-week workshop and after show discussion. Thanks to Annabel Turpin in particular (whose offer of space and a small grant began this whole development process) and Helen’s support, too, a brilliant programme manager.

Also, good news! Alex is no longer full of the black death. He did exactly zero vomiting during this week of the devising process. Improvement.

Oh, and you can now invite people to the facebook event for the Bradford showing. Check it out: Click

Photos:

the layout of my typical protest gear

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the layout of my typical protest gear

The Tweeture - twitter made huggable and slightly sociopathic. Creature by Slingshot. Picture by CultureHackDay on Flickr

So below is a job application I put in a while back. They didn’t want these ideas, but I thought someone might. Open source job applications? Heh. It just felt a bit like staking my territory on this stuff, anyway. And I wanted to share it. I’m cutting out stuff that refers directly to the organisation and their job description, though, as it’s not a dig at them at all. Just some crystallising of thinking I wanted to put in public if not practice. 

[stripped-out intro] I want to talk to you about ‘digital’.

What is digital in the arts? The easiest thing is to tell you what it’s not; it’s not live streaming, it’s not Twitter, and mostly, it is not marketing. It won’t sell stuff.

The act of selling is based on a broadcast ‘push’ model of communication that is increasingly irrelevant in a world of filter, of ‘pull’. We don’t live in the information age. We live in a noisy data-ridden one. Noise is data without context. Information is data with it. Our lives are noisier and noisier, and only through tools like personalisation are we able to filter it back into information. Personalisation – things like subscribing to people you like through social media, and getting your information via word of mouth and recommendation. Getting people to care, not see, is the key thing.

So I just want to set this out. For me, digital isn’t marketing, and it isn’t broadcasting. It doesn’t mean it can’t serve a similar purpose. But also I believe those words aren’t useful while they are so tied to an old communications-space.

Digital a different space, and space is important; we shape it but it also shapes us. McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ should still be ringing in all of our ears: it doesn’t matter what you say as much as how you say it. What one train carried wasn’t half so important as the way the infrastructure changed our society. The digital age is changing our behaviour - how we communicate, and how we expect to interact. Audiences for the most part are now better considered participants. You can determine the level of interaction you want to employ, but know that it has to be a conscious and considered choice. It is my rule of thumb that you think ‘why’, always. Not ‘let’s make a digital thing and see if they interact’ but begin with the questions: ‘why interact?’ ‘Why should they care?’ This has implications. The greater the input invited, the less the direct authorial control, the role of author might become more like curator, or the task might even become massively authorial. The important point is that the relationship between audience and creator is no longer typically one thing. Who they both are, the story being told, and the platform it’s being told on all need to shape the techniques used. I propose that a creative digital producer should start by thinking about the space they design, the experience – not just the content or delivery method.

As one example, I’ve been an ‘active evaluator’ working alongside Hoipolloi to develop this online space that allows people to explore the online version of Hugh Hughes’ childhood, the same thing the live show of Stories From an Invisible Town explores. I’ve been working alongside them on the interaction design, and I’ve developed the following mantra:

• Why interact
• Why continue to interact?
• Why come back?

(You could ask similarly of your content; why care? Why continue to care? Why pass it on?). The work is a standalone online experience where you wander through the muddled memories of the central character – you build your own collection by tracing your own path through things past. It operative associatively – like memory does – and delivers a variety of content. It is of the universe from which the live show draws, but a completely different experience. I use this here as a key example of formal – rather than content-driven – innovation. Formally inventive; that’s what I propose to bring to [x organisation].

And indeed, in terms of relating the live experience as well as the flavour of a piece of work (what we might without the baggage of previous context call ‘broadcast’) – the live documentation involved in my work with Third Angel doesn’t create a standalone version of the show, but rather weaves the content-delivery mechanism into the show itself; taking the documenter into full view and performing as bridge between online audience and ‘real life’ one. This wouldn’t always be appropriate, but it shows possible a formally inventive approach to the brief ‘document’ or ‘broadcast’ which I would likewise be eager to implement.

And then, with regards to the [organisation] in particular, it’s incredibly important to pick up on the ‘festival’ model on which it lays strong emphasis, and the drive in the artistic programme towards learning and participation. I propose that the digital output should lean towards a game-studio approach – one which starts by asking the ‘why’ questions, and it doing so investigates the approaches and influences of ARGs, pervasive gaming, flash mobs and other carnivalesque models, all of which drive people into conjunction with one another. Because digital is not ‘the web’. What all these digitally triggered forms have in common is that they bring people together in a live, unusual and (metaphorically speaking) electric context. Digital is fundamentally a way of processing information, but socio-politically it is a new way of being that is changing how we communicate. The basic unit of the digital revolution is the human being. As such I believe all experiences, where possible should have real-life residues, because what social media in particular represents is the urge to reach out; connect to one another.

New community arts models that would draw new audiences, and connect in new ways to old, can be derived from digital and games-inspired practices. I have personally been involved in large-scale community-storytelling-led digital works such as the Umbrella Project, which translated the stories of a city (York) into three discreet interactive sound experiences, and more recently Northern Big Board – which collected the stories of the users and staff at a communal pool just outside of Leeds, and produced 7 digital installation pieces as part of a weekend-long festival and gala celebrating the place of the pool in its community. Such community-driven models represent an approach to diversity and participation that isn’t ‘representative’ but generative. So too I propose open culture (in terms of permissions, sharing, remixing) from process to product to enable ongoing online and physical participation and co-creation.

(by-the-by, this site-reactive [not specific] approach is also a fascinating model for new touring practices, developing along the ‘hyperlocalism’ trend in the digital world, but in a manner that isn’t flippant or exploitative).

My approach to setting up a games-studio approach would also involve looking to invite close work with leading innovative technology partners, such as BERG, and the Pervasive Media Studio; Caper’s Culture Hacks, Hide and Seek’s carefully crafted playful experiences; Coney’s anarchic and generous live play. But learning, too, from the cultural sphere of indie gaming; work such as Sword and Sworcery (Capybara games) and Bientot l’ete (Tale of Tales) as well as large revolutionary studios such as Thatgamecompany and Team ICO, and other art forms flourishing at the end of the age of broadcast; DIY musicians, board game designers, zine-makers, parkour artists, youtube film makers, bloggers.

The learning and participation potential of game and interaction forms is well documented (from Homo Ludens, on), but their forms as culture in their own right should not be dismissed. As such I propose the [organisation] might also open itself as a community hackspace. A hub for local creatives and digital-folk interested in interaction design and digital storytelling, a space for R&D driven by the [organisation], but also a space for outside ideas; a place for their coming together. I would not come with a fully formed programme of action, but a series of starting points, and the intention to build the [organisation] as a crucible for digital innovation.

This, of course, would go alongside producing content for mobile, web, and more traditional ‘broadcast’ forms. But as a leading thread I propose that the [digital position to which I applied] should investigate these convivial, space-interested and large-scale playful and interactive possibilities of the word ‘digital’.

And then there was a final paragraph about how I was well situated to lead it. But which I sort of agree probably didn’t include the profile and experience they were looking for/needed. I’m still quite ‘early career’, after all.

A really quick update to announce proper a couple of exciting additions to the A Conversation With My Father working process. I’m delighted to announce a fourth week in residence – at the brilliant Theatre in the Mill. They’re being extremely supportive and I’m really happy to be adding that extra week on just after the week in Sheffield – Yorkshire ‘r’ us, and also, 2 weeks solid feels properly productive to get the show tied up at the end. The showing at that week will be fully public, and pay-what-you-can, so if you’re in the area, you should definitely come along.

Also, I will be running a workshop at ARC in Stockton on the 6th of February. A bit of blurb here:

A short 2 hour workshop with time for discussion afterwards. Looking at autobiographical performance as a manner of addressing the wider political questions of contemporary life; from personal relationships, everyday encounters, to conflict and large-scale historical events from the point of view of the individual.

More info and booking on their website.

So, just to round up, here’s how the next couple of months looks:

Residencies:

4th-8th Feb – ARC, Stockton
25th Feb-1st Mar – The Crucible
4th-8th Mar - Theatre in the Mill

Showings:

February 8th 2013 – ARC Stockton (mid-process work in progress) — 4.30pm in the Studio – contact me for tickets
March 1st 2013 – The Crucible, Sheffield (invited showcase) – 6pm in the rehearsal room – contact me for tickets
March 8th 2013 – Theatre in the Mill  (open showcase) 6.30pm in the main studio pwyc tickets from their website

 Workshops: 

ARC 6-8:30pm Weds 6th Feb book here.
Theatre in the Mill - Weds 6th Mar – Studio space. Booking and content tbc (contact me if interested)

image by Natalie Walter, logo by Alex Kelly

So, in a couple of weeks, Performance in the Pub (the DIY performance night I’ve been running in Leicester) will be a year old.

I wish I had time for a big, reflective blog post on every little thing I’ve learnt from it, and every little thing that might be useful for others to learn from, if they want, but I don’t at the moment. However I do have something up my sleeve for sometime in the near future… Bear with me while I do try and find the time for that.

In the meantime, here’s what I’m going to do, just out of interest for anyone thinking about running this kind of thing on a very simply monetary basis – you can download all of my expenditure and income from over the first year (7 events – at the bottom of the post). One of the most-asked questions I receive is about how Pay-What-You-Can ticketing works. Well, so far as I can see, it works on a margin that the majority of subsidised theatre work. I’d love subsidised traditionally-ticketed venues to let me know if their events strike a better break-even point than mine.

It’s also worth noting, that since I started, the lovely Cookie Jar/Crumblin’ Cookie venue have stopped charging me a deposit, and have fed me and my artists – as well as occasionally writing off a bar tab. That kind of support money can’t buy. Likewise, both me and my artists all work for free. That’s just a thing. If I did pay ITC minimum, I’d have to go for ACE funding, and then, frankly, I think it would be a vastly different show. Not least because of the generosity that all those artists offering something for the audience in that context represents, but also because of the deal I strike up as a testing ground for work-in-progress stuff – I have to make sure I’m offering something if I can’t offer money. Also it would be a big FU to all of the underground DIY music scene folk putting on gigs that would never be able to approach the arts council to do similar. If I had time to raise local sponsorship, I definitely would. But solidarity with an art form that is half of my life, and that I properly love, is important too.

I’ve learnt an awful, awful lot, but the things that stand out the most in terms of money that I’ve learnt as I went: you will always need more flyers and fewer posters than you think. Flyers and posters are important - make it easy to share online, but remember that online on twitter is not half so good as on facebook – twitter is full of brilliant people not near you, whereas facebook allows word of mouth to spread (ideally) between locals. Good design is worth investing in – and good design for your target audience, too – I’ve mostly used band poster designers. Local radio and press exposure is priceless (well, results in roughly 4x the pre-sales), and, most importantly for me, you have to have a conversation about pay what you can. I post the same figures you can download here on the door at every show. I explain what the break even figure is (£5, usually [though at capacity, which I haven't hit yet] and I’ve yet to have a show where I’ve received less than that, average), I talk about worth, and try and chat to everyone on the door, remember names, say hello. I also play with reward systems which borrow a little from the merch world of music; all donators get a sticker featuring a bit of the poster art, and there’s usually something extra for people who donate over £5 – mince pies, cookies, pin badges, that kind of thing.

I can’t remember especially setting out any particular aims for the event when I started it – beyond ‘there’s none of the kind of small scale DIY performance I love happening here, so how about I stop complaining and do something about it’. I did, though, come up with the idea of aiming it at all the people in Leicester/the East Midlands who go to its thriving gig scene (well, semi-thriving, it’s been a tough couple of years) but would never and have never think of going into Curve. There are several people who have taken the time to talk to me and tell me they hadn’t seen theatre since school, and they didn’t know it could be like this. That it could talk to you. That it could be there with you, like good music is.

So in those terms, for a loss of ~£900, over 7 events? I’m glad I paid that.

As a little ‘anniversary’ thing at the event last Thursday I played a little game at the beginning, and did the whole ‘stand up’ and then ‘sit down if’ thing to find out who had been to the most events. About 7 people had been to all but one, so as a tie breaker I asked who could show me the most stickers. A guy called Andy showed me all 6 of his stuck to the back of his phone. I bought him a drink as his prize. Before Performance in the Pub he had been to the theatre once since school and the odd musical.

And this is a quote from a couple of tweets around about event 5, from a regular gig go-er who I sometimes saw at post-rock shows:

“I’m not a theatre goer *at all* and it’d normally be something I find intimidating, but @performancepub proved…that there’s more to theatre than stuffy pantomime and shakespeare and it can be all kinds of entertaining & provocative =)” – @frivolousshrig

*cough greatartforeveryone cough*

Anyway, here’s that money stuff:

download (pdf)
download (excel)

right click save as, or click to view in-browser (pdf)

Thanks to the audiences for coming, for donating, and for telling people about it. Thanks to Dave and Natalie who have taken pictures. Tinny and all at the Cookie. Thanks to brilliant illustrators and designers Cameron Stewart, Tom Humberstone, and Lee Keith Innes for working way under what they were worth. Thanks to my mum, for buying me food and slipping me the odd £100 when money gets really dire, also for the small loan which I could run the first event with (paid her back and everything). And thanks to all the following acts for coming along and giving me their time. It would have been nothing without any of them.

Thank you, Tassos Stevens, Ira Brand, Daniel Bye, Laura Mugridge (with Tom Adams), Jodean Sumner, Alex Kelly (Third Angel), Chris Thorpe, Hannah Jane Walker, Sam Halmarack, Sylvia Rimat, Kieran Hurley (with Julia Taudevin), Victoria Melody, Ross Sutherland and Fergus Evans (with Jennifer Gaskell).

See you at the next one?