If You Build It—and Test It and Study It and Refine It—They Will Come
Kevin Costner’s character in 1989’s Field of Dreams followed a simple precept to meet a deceased baseball player: Build a baseball diamond, and he will show up.
It worked out in the movie. Things get complicated, however, if you’re a large theater company, and the audience you seek is Denver-area millennials, not the ghosts of the Chicago White Sox.
A new article and video show how Off-Center, an experimental offshoot of the Denver Center Theatre Company, is doing more than simply producing new kinds of shows to attract younger audiences. It is studying audience reactions to each show, analyzing them and using the analysis to inform future shows. Not all shows succeed. But each step in Off-Center’s multi-year experiment helps the theater identify the sorts of shows its target audience likes and brings more of them into the theater.
These pieces are part of the Building Audiences for Sustainability Stories Project, which has also profiled Ballet Austin’s quest to create audiences for more challenging work and Seattle Symphony’s effort to woo residents new to the area. The Austin and Seattle stories also feature study guides to help practitioners learn from their experiences and apply them to their own context. A study guide for the Denver story is forthcoming.
All stories and other publications on building audiences for the arts are available free of charge, as always, at our online knowledge center.
On behalf of The Wallace Foundation,
Lucas Held
Director of Communications
Kootenay Arts E-Bulletin 