Listening and Responding

Spring at last, and that means English Touring Opera are touring 75 artists and technicians up and down the country in 5 productions (3 on the ‘main’ stage, 1 for 4-8 year olds in schools, and 1 for people with severe autism in non-residential care centres) and several recitals. While I am trying to work on the planning of future seasons, I am by nature and by appetite drawn to the actual business of day-to-day sales (the most compelling numbers I can imagine!), and week-by-week responses from attenders.

That terrible time when anybody might write anything in the papers every day is over. Like many other people in the business, I have been encouraging people to write to me, call me, talk to me about how they feel - and believe me, that is in full swing. Mostly it’s awfully encouraging: people write to say how much they have enjoyed a show, or been surprised by it, and generally they exhort us to keep coming back to their local theatre. They remind me that we bring the only professional opera to their area, or remark on how far they had to travel to get there. They urge us to try to come to more places.

Sometimes the messages are strongly critical. These are the ones that get read and re-read, alas. Foolishly, perhaps, I can throw my whole day out of kilter working out a response. We ask the audience to speak to us, and the scary thing is that we sometimes get what we ask for. So while I have four pressing concerns I wanted to address in this blog (a. efficient storage and retrieval of marketing information for touring companies; b. sharing of marketing information between subsidised touring companies/resident companies, why we don’t do it and why we should have to do so; c. ownership of box office information, and how crazy and labour inefficient all that is and d. ambassadorial marketing, and how smaller local and touring companies need to collaborate together to get that moving before we end up putting too much pressure on a small group of people), I am going to content myself with the question that is sitting on top of these, like the letters sitting on top of my planning charts for next year: when someone who is paying for a ticket talks to you, how do you listen and how should you respond?

I won’t get ahead of this issue today. I mean, I do respond, almost every time. I tell the people in the office that each communication, whether hostile or complimentary, is an opportunity to turn someone into a friend, and maybe even a donor. It’s also an opportunity for that blessed thing, clarity. These are good things to think. But how do you address expectations that you cannot or will not meet?

Here’s an example. I get maybe 3 letters a week about captions/surtitles (most people don’t know the difference, and I don’t blame them: another issue) at live performances. Yesterday there was a very strong one, asking me to take away those imprecise, over-bright, distracting things for ever, and another pertaining to the performance the day before from someone who said they would never attend an unsurtitled performance again. Even though we perform in English by and large, many people have come to expect surtitles or captions: it’s not viewed as something extra, but something that goes with the price of entry. Going by the letters, that’s 70% love them, and 30% hate them (of course letter writers may not be typical). It is not viewed as a complex issue of presentation, but as a sort of right. If it is a right, then there must be a corresponding obligation.

Now I find the issue extremely complex, interesting, and troubling. There is little in the performing arts so brutally unsophisticated as the way in which text is projected at opera, generally. It is usually accepted as a way forward, because many people want it – and because many people want it, we have to listen. At ETO we tend to caption a number of advertised performances for the hearing disabled (about 50% of attenders at those performances, it seems), but we tend not to yield to pressure from the audience to offer an experience of immediate comprehension of sung text, maintaining that sung text offers meanings on many levels (relating to the sequence of pitches, to the frequency of repetition, to non-naturalistic duration, etc). Saying in black and white on screen above or beside the playing area ‘this is what it means’ must, in certain circumstances, be helpful – but it is not always rich, or satisfying. Text in lyric theatre means a lot more than ‘this is what she is saying right now’. Yet certainly, for reasons about which I have only untested theories, 70% of the letters are telling me that people want it, expect it, and feel they are cheated without it.

It reminds me of a show I did in New York, when my company at the time was the guest of a very prestigious – and supposedly high brow – presenting house. At the interval on the first night, the head honcho elbowed me up to the bar to meet all the critics, and asked me to explain the show to them, from the colour of the set to the provenance of a jar of turmeric. Explain it all, he urged, so that they don’t have to worry.

How do you fly the flag of complexity in the face of simple demand – or should you? Should I just ask the theatres to put a levy on ticket prices so we can afford to send someone on tour to do what they want? Do we try to raise the subject in focus groups? Do I keep writing the personal position letters back? When someone writes, are they expecting anything more than being heard, and do they have a right to that? Am I listening enough – or are they? Do we all want to hear what we invite our audience to blog, to write, to say, and are we ready to respond? Hmmm.

James Conway, Artistic Director & Chief Executive, English Touring Opera  1 April 2010