THE THEATRE-GOING PUBLIC
A CONSTANT REVOLUTION

By Frédérique Doyon

Art is defined in the movement between the artist, his work, and an audience. Within this golden triangle, the audience component is of crucial importance in this day and age when booming new technologies, coupled with cultural democracy, are radically changing cultural habits, especially when it comes to traditional performing arts. Where then, does this leave theatre? Has this art form – a great favourite of Canadian adepts of the live arts – lost its flock? If the answer is yes, what can be done to win them back?

Steve Laplante (Interprétation, 1996) and Évelyne Gélinas (Interprétation, 2002) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Denise Guilbault (Mise en scène, 1986), Michel Lemieux (Production, 1979), and Victor Pilon, a 2005 4D art production. © Victor Pilon

THEATRE... FOR WHOM?
While the performing arts have seen a major boom over the past 25 years, theatre, for its part, has only managed to maintain its overall audience. In Canada, 22% of the population went to the theatre in 20051, a 2% decrease compared to 19922.
 
Kelly Hill of the firm Hill Strategies Research Inc. explains this slight drop in attendance: “There are more and more forms of media, entertainment options,” which fragment audiences. Popular music, which followed closely behind theatre in terms of attendance, has recently taken a slight lead (1%) over Shakespeare’s art3. That being said, in absolute terms, theatre attendance has just about followed the overall growth of the Canadian population.
 
Has the theatre-going public really undergone so little change? In Quebec, as in Canada, just about as many men as women attend theatrical performances, with a slight preponderance of women since 1983. Theatre still draws a mostly highly educated crowd. However, Rosaire Garon, a sociologist and ex-civil servant of the Quebec Ministry of Culture, points out that audience inversion phenomena are apparent. “Gains have been made among an older and less schooled public, and there has been a loss of audience members who are more highly schooled and younger,” Garon stated.
 
Theatre lovers have aged. For example, in Quebec, the number of spectators aged 55 years and older leaped from 22% to 33% between 1979 and 20044. “Part of the explanation lies in the fact that baby boomers are reaching retirement age. They are more highly educated than older people were 25 years ago. They also have more time on their hands and are wealthier.” This trend will become more pronounced, according to the sociologist, and deserves greater attention. “This can have both positive and less positive effects (for example, tension between younger and older people on the cultural marketplace, over cultural power, on the control of arts and culture organizations by older people, and on the marginalization of youth culture...)”.
 
As for younger people and students, little by little, they are abandoning theatre. In Quebec, only 27% of 15 to 25 year olds went to the theatre in 2004, compared to 42% in 19795. The good news: an increasing number of the less educated public is going the theatre. In 2004, 23% of people with less than eight years of schooling attended theatrical performances, compared to 13% in 1979 6. Gradual at first, the progression has made a leap of six percentage points since 1999. This trend can also be seen on a pan Canadian scale: “... theatre, classical music, and dance are reaching a greater proportion of Canadians of all educational levels than is popular music.”

A FEW EXPLANATIONS
These shifts are explained in part by the winds of cultural democracy that have swept across the country since the 1960s. “Among the less highly educated public, there is less resistance to frequenting artistic institutions, and younger and more educated people are diversifying their cultural experiences” (entertainment, comedy, videos, DVDs), the sociologist summed up.
 
Finally, the volatility of the young and adult theatre-going public is also attributable to a more recent upheaval. The spread of the Internet and a wave of new technologies have led arts and culture audiences to seek out “flexibility in their experiences in terms of time, listening and viewing periods, and products” notes Mr. Garon. Set in a specific place and on precise dates, performing arts are characterised by a certain amount of rigidity, “while other cultural products are priming us to have instant access.” These profound changes globally affect our relationship with art and culture. Quick and instantaneous consumption does not work in favour of sustained intellectual effort and the slowness sometimes involved in a theatrical performance.
 
Although Mr. Hill’s statistical analysis concerns performing arts in general, it underscores a fact that could also shed some light on the drop in the country’s theatre-going public: the difficulty that arts organizations experience in reaching people from various cultural backgrounds. At the end of the 1990s, only 22% of Canadians whose mother tongue was neither French nor English claimed to have been to the theatre, versus 39% of Francophone and Anglophone respondents. This statistic comes as a challenge to the milieu. “Performing arts organizations must clearly take up the challenge of attracting a following among a public that speaks neither English nor French at home – basically, recent immigrants.”
 
Nevertheless, Mr. Garon plays for time: “There’s no call for alarm, even if it is true that the audience is getting older. Live performance must be looked at in two dimensions: its ‘artistic dimension’ – which must be watched over and protected, even if it will only ever be of interest to a small portion of society – and its ‘entertainment dimension’.”

 FACING CHANGES
Within such a context, how do we maintain and renew the theatre-going audience? How do we face up to such a radical change of paradigms?
 
At odds with a rapidly aging audience, the Stratford Festival has deployed a whole range of multimedia tools to reach out to people under the age of 35. “We have blogs and video logs posted by actors or members of the Festival, as well as video-clips of our productions. And we have recently accessed the Flickr and YouTube sites where we will be able to post photos and videos of behind-the-scenes goings-on at our events” explains spokesperson Rachel Hilton.

Quick and instantaneous consumption does not work in favour of sustained intellectual effort and the slowness sometimes involved
in a theatrical performance.

 
An educational web portal has also been created, which includes video games and exercises based on the plays being presented at Stratford this season. And the on-line expansion is not over, Ms. Hilton tells us. This has not, however, prevented the festival from adopting more traditional incentive measures, such as $20 tickets for anyone under the age of 30, offered all season long.
 
Moreover, regarding the matter of traditional methods, Rosaire Garon reminds us of the extreme importance of imparting a love for the arts within the family unit. “It is the first outreach component for arts”, he says. It is in the best interests of community and educational circles to combine their actions with those of the family. “It is through a plurality of aesthetic experiences that one is able to come to naturally appreciate an art form,” believes Mr. Garon. “By only occasionally exposing youth to cultural outings, habits are not developed...”
 
This is exactly what has been understood by the Théâtre des Bouches Décousues, a theatre company for young audiences, that puts together its productions in close relation with the school milieu. Seeing a play is not enough, young people must also take part. “It has become our way of working: including the children in the creative process” relates writer Jasmine Dubé. “And we see the difference; children are moved and become involved. They are creators and not simply consumers of art.”
 
Through preparatory workshops, classes of schoolchildren have worked on drawings and projects on the theme of their recently produced play, Les Flaques, and have met the production team prior to the first performance. What better indicator of success for an outreach activity, than the passion awakened in “a child who decides to write a sequel to the play or to read others?” asks Ms. Dubé.
 
To go from this to saying that plays are written for young audiences, is a step she is not willing to take. “One must begin with one’s own set of immediate concerns. My goal is not to educate but to encounter an audience through this sentiment and to say whatever I feel like saying.”

“The high degree of crossover attendance indicates that arts marketing strategies should target attendees of other types of events” – Kelly Hill

THE CROSSING OF DISCIPLINES
“For us, it is important that there be this mutation with new technologies” explains Richard Gagnon, General Director of the company 4D art. “First and foremost, because the Artistic Directors [Victor Pilon and Michel Lemieux] are interested in the relationship between virtual reality and stage arts. To reach out to a young audience isn’t our main objective but we certainly are concerned with this.”
 
He does not hide the fact that 4D art’s next production, Norman, a tribute to animated film maker Norman McLaren, hopes to stir up a bit of the passion for cinema or the stage in a younger audience. But the technique must “serve the magic, the emotion.”
 
Kelly Hill also sees the crossing of disciplines as a way of developing new audiences. The largest consumers of the performing arts are also those who most often go to museums or participate in a sport. “The high degree of crossover attendance indicates that arts marketing strategies should target attendees of other types of events” notes Hill in his report.
 
He cites the success of the Canadian Opera Company, which invites prominent artists from other artistic fields to collaborate on opera productions. “From the moment they hired artists like Atom Egoyan and François Girard, they found a new audience. People went to the opera for the first time because of this. It’s an interesting case of audience renewal.”
 
However, he ultimately concludes that what counts in the balance is “quality above all.” “What still moves me, are two tables and a piece of fabric” adds Jasmine Dubé. “Because theatre is a living art form. We’ll make it through [the current changes], as we have done for thousands of years. Theatre has been in existence for such a long time...” “Theatre is an intimate, communal experience,” insists Rachel Hilton. “There is nothing than can replicate that on the web, the big screen or otherwise.”  

Students participate at a pre-show demonstration at the Stratford Festival of Canada. © Richard Bain

1. These recent statistics, still under analysis at the time of this writing, are taken from A Profile of the Cultural and Heritage Activities of Canadians in 2005 (working title), Hill Strategies Research Inc., March 2007.
2. Performing Arts Attendance in Canada and the Provinces, Hill Strategies Research Inc., 2003
3. Hill Strategies, 2007
4. Special compilations, Inquiries on the Cultural Practices of Quebeckers, R. Garon
5. Idem
6. Idem
7. Hill Strategies, 2003

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