Issue: if it aint outdoors or on the street, it aint worth a fuck

Convener(s): jon B, Desperate Men

 Participants: Catherine Pinhorn, Josh dary, louise platt, dan koop, laura cubit, neil filby, martina v horn, chris gage, raymond, mandy

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

 Theatre has to connect. It has to engage and then perhaps it can ‘educate’. Indoor theatre is limited-in audiences it reaches and the possibilities of interaction, participation, form and structure.

Outdoor street theatre and street arts is better possibilities for wider connections with wider audiences, in wider context and for better developments of new forms and structures 

• Audiences can leave
• Street artists are confined to funding…still have to prove themselves…how do you start?
• Strategies to market yourself; ipods! Downloads…sound or film files and or use it as performance, “audio guided tours” and download stuff for audiences.
• How to crack the shopping centre? People are hostile because they don’t want to stop shopping; local churches have held congregations in shopping centres.
• Theatre needs to be reinvigorated, have balls in the twenty first century. People want spectacle. The sudden rise in firework displays and the big finale. Take it out of the buildings and grab the people\
• How do you make people stop – techniques of keeping the audience, the challenge of the streets – audiences can walk away
• The elephant-change the way the big people think
• A big shared communal experience
• Taking it really out to the people who may not be interested in theatre
• Getting the art back to where it belongs –mystery plays of old
• Taking someone on the adventure they didn’t know they were gong to have
• Inherently political and dynamic relationships with audiences-egalitarian
• Not funded non box office economically tricky but politically important
• Discussed training
• Psychology of it you can only learn by doing it
• General perception: everybody can do it – this is not the case
• The audience is part of the thinking process right from the beginning of the making; design, performance, traffic flow, building, all considered EARLY.