THEATRON

•The Greek name for theatre – theatron – stems from theasthai, which means ‘to regard’ or ‘to look’. Theatron therefore is the ‘place from where you look’, stressing the importance of a creative dialogue between performers and their audiences. This is what we intend to do again in this project.

IDEA

•Writing a report for the Danish ministry for culture on the future of the performing arts I realized that the ticket sales had dropped 30 % over the last 30 years and that the average member of the audience is a 60+ well educated and well situated woman.

THREATHS & OPPORTUNITIES

• In the words of Bertolt Brecht ‘a theatre without an audience makes no sense’. Unfortunately, too few young, not many new ethnic representatives and not many men are waiting for the curtains to rise. This threatens not only the financial future of theatres, but also the legitimacy of the performing arts in society. We all know of the important role theatre can play in our lives and have set out to explore & develop methods of (1) creative community engagement and (2) integrated audience development to ensure that theatre remains where it belongs – right at the heart of European society.

WHY THEATRE?

• Tony Kushner, playwright.

• All one has to do is sit in a theatre, to be an actor on a stage or to work in the theatre and see the way that human beings within a microsecond of the house lights going down coalesce into a society, into a discrete entity that didn’t exist before. People have a great innate genius for communalising, for collectivising. There’s no better illustration that I know of in the world than watching an audience describe its personality almost instantly, enter into a complicated relationship with the thing on stage and develop it along the course of the evening. And then dissolve afterwards but not completely, because what everybody takes from the theatre is not their own individual experience of the play but something that’s been profoundly shaped by that collective beast. The audience and the actor and the play, it’s an instant community. Theatre is an irreducibly communal event, and it’s proof, I think, of what Marx says: that the smallest human unit is not one but two people, that one person is a fiction; there’s never been – and there never will be anywhere in time – one person.

WHAT KIND OF THEATRE?

• Robert Lepage, actor, playwright, director.

• First of all we have to acknowledge the intelligence of the audience. We’re confronted with audiences whose narrative vocabulary has evolved in the past twenty to thirty years. The audience that we’re performing to today have been challenged by the film vocabulary of storytelling, rock videos, commercials on television, the Internet. They read stories backwards now and jump cut and flash forward.

What would you say to somebody who says that theatre will be dead in twenty-five years?

• I think that I have to agree and disagree with that person. If the definition of theatre is what we see on stage nowadays in general: yes, that will continue to weaken and eventually die. But if we have a larger vision of what theatre is and really try to understand its profound essence, I think that theatre will always be there. In the next four or five years we’ll be amazed how theatre and film will have to live together, because film cannot continue in the form it is, in the way it’s presented. People want direct life, three dimensional interaction, and that’s something that belongs to the theatre. I think that the theatre will still continue to be the mother art, and it will with the time have been enriched by so many aesthetic, technical, ideological revolutions that it will be even richer and even more alive. And even more ephemeral.

PARTNERS:

• ODENSE TEATER• THÉÂTRE DE GENNEVILLIERS• SADLER’S WELLS• STAATSSCHAUSPIEL DRESDEN• DIVADLO ARCHA• UPPSALA STADSTEATER• AALBORG TEATER• FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN• SHEFFIELD THEATRES• HELLERAU – EUROPEAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS DRESDEN• AARHUS TEATER• FONDAZIONE ROMAEUROPAARTE E CULTURA

• TONEELHUIS ANTWERPEN

FOCUSES

•Audience research and marketing •Artistic creation and collaboration•Community outreach

OBJECTIVES

•Optimizing existing research and research data

•Fully engaging existing audiences•Starting various forms of reaching out to

new audiences•Theatron mindset – engaging all areas of

the houses in Theatron

TOOLS AND METHODS

•Learning from each others best practice•Getting expert advice•Developing new tools and standards•Creating new forms of expressions

MONITORING AND EVALUATION

•The theatres in collaboration with ZAD (Zentrum für Audience Development at Frei Universität, Berlin), Have Communication, DK and Copenhagen Business School.

VISION

•In 2020 the performing arts in Europe will reach out in a more dynamic, relevant and diverse way on an international level to all parts of the population.

www.theatron-network.eu