Thursday, January 24, 2013

Reimaging performance venues

In my mind break even is the holy grail of arts management (here in Cape Town). How do we continue to provide the services and bring about the change we want and still pay the bills. Surely living out your passion shouldn't be soul destroying? Hence I am always interested in articles about generating income in the arts and pushing the boundaries of service delivery. An invaluable resource for this is ArtsJournal. which provides a weekly summary of articles from around the world. Brilliant!

The article from the LA Times "Grand Park holds grand potential for Music Centre" is interesting in how the managers of the Music Centre developed new strategies to increase the use of the centre and the surrounding area to increase both the revenue and audience size. The Centre management moved from landlord to impressario with huge benefits to the centre and the local performing arts community. Performances were taken out of the auditoria and performed in the recreational space in the surrounding park - sounds like Cape Town's "Infecting the City". They introduced Active Arts a free grassroots arts development programme. That would be wonderful for our own emerging artists - many of whom are absolutely fantastic performers.


It is a great article with much food for thought.

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Our thoughts and comments on performances and the performing arts in the Western Cape, South Africa.