Arts Activities Support
ACHF Arts Access
13 theater artists will create this play, which we estimate will be attended by approximately 750 individuals from the Twin Cities metro area. 30% of audience members will be seeing Sandbox Theatre for the first time, and 25% of them will be members of the Southern Theater's ARTshare program. Information for our evaluation will be drawn formally from our standard audience count, as well as an audience survey that will be distributed to all attendees, and less formally from direct audience feedback received through direct conversation, emails, Facebook and Twitter. We solicit feedback from our artists through a post-mortem process, in which we gather all artists involved in the project to have a moderated conversation about what worked and didn't work with the artistic process.
13 theater artists created this play, which was attended by 368 individuals from the Twin Cities metro area. 15% of the audience were members of the Southern Theater's ARTshare program. Overall, we believe we achieved the artistic goals for this project. The final product follows closely to the description originally laid out in the grant proposal. We created an all-female production in an imagined future following the fall of civilization that was very beautifully realized with movement, music and shadow puppetry. We have been honing our ensemble creation process for 12 years now, and it worked very well in generating the material for this show. Two of our performers and our stage manager had never worked on an ensemble-created piece before, and our Project Lead had never been in charge of a project before; but they were able to slip right into Sandbox's creation process with very few hitches. The biggest challenge of this process was in constructing a play without a direct reference. Our previous shows have usually been based on an older story, book or historical incident. In this case, we were more or less cutting the world of the play from whole cloth. This affected our research process by forcing us to do more speculative imagination than we would normally have liked. It also made structuring the play a bit more difficult, as there was no previous story to model the show on, and we had no one person in the ensemble who could take charge of the script with an eye toward playwriting. In future projects, we would like to have more of the design elements in place much earlier in the creation process so that the performers would have more time to create the show with them in mind. We would also like to make sure that we have more time in the performance space to work out technical elements before the show opens. We have also decided that we should have one member of the creation ensemble be someone who fulfills a role more as a playwright, so that the finished script can be as cohesive and beautiful as the design and movement elements, and so that more story beats and plot points can be decided before rehearsals begins and the cast fleshes them out. We have not yet had time to collate and process all of the audience surveys distributed during the run of the show, but, from casual observation, the age/type/ethnicity of the audience seems to have been what we expected. However, the overall number of attendees was much lower than had been planned for, despite putting extra efforts into marketing to a wider audience than we have for past shows. For all of our shows for 2016, Sandbox has made a conscious effort to diversify the artists involved in our shows, both on stage and off. For this project, we specifically sought out artists of color to fulfill roles not already being performed by the permanent members of our company. 1/3 of our performers were non-white. However, this increase in diversity on the stage does not necessarily seem to have translated into increased diversity in our audiences. From a casual observation, the racial and ethnic makeup of those audiences has not changed from previous shows. This show was also important for increasing the diversity of meaningful roles for women in theater. All of the performers on stage, as well as the director and 2/3 of the design team were women. From conversations with audience members and feedback in audience surveys, it was apparent that women in the audience were appreciative of and empowered by this presentation. Again, this does not appear to have changed the makeup of our audience. All performances were held at the Southern Theater, which is wheelchair accessible, and geographically accessible by bus, light rail and bicycle, and we provided an ASL-interpreted performance. For economic accessibility, we provided a "Pay What You Can" night, student and senior discounts and group discount rates. This show also had tickets distributed through the Hennepin County Library system's new Smartpass program, which provides free and reduced-rate tickets to library patrons. In the future, we would like to start marketing to targeted groups and organizations much earlier. Instead of focusing on marketing to a wide, general audience, we would like to identify specific groups and organizations that whose makeup and mission would lead them to be inclined toward the subject matter of the show itself. In this way, we hope to create personal relationships with these groups that will translate into increased attendance and more personal allegiance over time.
Other, local or private