Fan Culture

by 99 Seats

Well, since I'm talking now, I might as well keep talking, right?

I've been on a run of seeing rock shows lately. I've seen about three in the last month, month and half, which is a lot for me. I love rock and roll and I love live shows, but I never see them. It takes too much advance planning for me, or at least I think it does. But in the last few weeks, there were shows I was excited enough about to make the plans. Or the tickets fell in my lap. Either way, I've been rocking out.

I've also been on a little tear of seeing theatre (both readings and productions), too. Which has allowed for some interesting comparisons. I don't think most of this stuff is new, really, but it's hitting home. Maybe because the differences are so stark.

Every rock band is different and every interaction with their fans is different. The Mountain Goats fans want to hear the obscure things and are insistent about it, they want John to interact with them directly. I saw The Hold Steady on Friday and their fans are...just freaking crazy. From the second they hit the stage, the place exploded into a hot sweaty mess and pogoed through every song. I've seen them a few times now and their shows are always great, high energy and high octane...and yet, they're almost always exactly the same. The fans don't need to call out songs because they're guaranteed to play your favorite songs. Because all of the fans have the same favorite songs. Craig Finn's patter is almost always the same, but it's always genuine and heartfelt. It's a terrific experience.

One thing that remains the same, though, no matter who I see is this: a sense of gratitude towards the fans. The fans are invited in, served happily by the artists, recognized as important. At the end of nearly every Hold Steady show, Craig says, "We are, you are, we all are The Hold Steady." That's the vibe of a band. They know and appreciate that, without the dedication of the fans, they don't have jobs. And they appreciate that. Sure, it's a feedback loop: we give them our love and money, but they return it by acknowledging our love and money. They play the songs they know we want to hear. It's not pandering to make their audience happy. That's the point. And, as fans, we sign on to go with them on their journey. The Mountain Goats started out as one guy in his bedroom with a tape machine and a guitar. Now he makes music with a full band. Yeah, some folks don't like the new stuff as much as the old, but they still love the band and come out and see them.

Why? Why do we buy the bad albums of our favorite bands? Why do we still go see their shows? That's the question we hit upon here, in this thread. Because we're fans and we love what they do. And they love us.

I had a reading of a short play of mine at a new New Play Festival at my alma mater over the weekend. A fellow alum who is now an adjunct professor led the talkbalks after the readings and when he started them, he said, "The audience is the most important part of this process." A theatre professional friend of mine with me leaned over and rolled her eyes at that. That's our attitude. We treat our audiences so poorly, really. We aim to shock, insult, annoy, defy their expectations as good things. There is a long tradition in theatre of looking down our noses at what our audience wants.

Again, it's the weird contradiction in how we think about our field. We say that theatre is this universal, natural impulse that makes us human. But you need years and years of arts education and probably a B.A. to actually understand it and enjoy it properly. We judge our audiences as being insuffciently educated to really grasp what we do and then complain that all we're playing to are upper class white folks. What we have are patrons not fans. They're in the room, not because they love us or what we do, but because it's the right, classy thing to do to support the arts. And we resent them for it. We're stuck in this teenage mindset of being surly at our parents when we ask for our allowances. No, no, no, we don't want to go get an after-school job and have money of our own, but we don't want the lecture we get when we ask for money to go to the movies. We just want to do what we want.

If theatre is going to thrive, really thrive in this new century and stop its slide into being a curio or an upper-class entertainment, we have to look at building fan culture, look at connecting with our audience more directly, more honestly and, frankly, with more love. One of the shows I've seen recently is The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G by Vampire Cowboys. Good luck getting in; it's sold out. They're always selling out. They have fans. And they do fan service. This show is flat-out amazing and further cements Qui as one of the best, bravest, smartest writers working today, but it's also different and challenging and heartbreaking in a way that their shows haven't been before. There's still fan service, still the fights we can expect, the geek references, the sly winks. But they're winks that let us know we're all in on the joke, not that the joke's on us.

This isn't about attracting young audience, or millenials, or whatever cock-a-mamie marketing idea being put out there now. It's about changing the way we look at our missions, our interactions. Patron culture has its end. It's time for a change.

Comments

[Gwydion Suilebhan]

This is brilliant stuff.

[Mac]

This is a great, great post. That giddy feeling I get of going to a Vampire Cowboys show, all that excitement, it always comes with this queasy flip-side: Do I make my audience feel the way I feel right now when they're coming to my show? Or are they thinking, "You know what, I really have to get my ass up and go to this, 'cause I'll probably run into Mac later and it'll be awkward if I didn't see his show, and I guess I can catch this episode of 'Parks and Recreation' on Hulu tomorrow anyway"?

[99]

That's exactly the challenge. What is that Qui and Robert (and their company) have built that makes people excited about the work? How do you export that to other kinds of work? I don't mean to imply that all work *should* be fun or easy or even popular. But you should be able to find fans and build a fan-base and the steps undertaken should be similar, no matter what kind of work you're doing.

[Rob Ready]

Nailed it.

[cgeye]

One word, dudes: Buntport.

I thought I'd be against whatever hipness vibe they'd be putting out, to get the youth engaged and present at every performance, but really that vibe comes down to niceness.

Not clustering with their cronies after a performance, but taking five minutes before cleaning up their own performance space, to talk with their audience -- and not in a deadly talkback structured to serve fundraising or dramaturgical goals -- just talking, checking in, saying hello.

I can't tell you how many times I feel unwanted waiting where I'm supposed to wait, while some rent-a-guard assesses my terrorist threat level, to just tell an actor in a big theatre play that he did a good job. I don't want to have to get on a special contributors' list, or get in with the in-crowd, before I can ask *how* they did that thing they did -- but with the protective bureaucracy we've placed around theatre as a patronized art form, it's the ambition of theatres to have that lovely, lucrative cordon sanitaire. Isn't that a bit backwards?

[Mariah MacCarthy]

This is my fuckin jam, J.

Now that I'm totally eyeballs-deep in the producing side of things with Purple Rep, "patron culture" makes even less sense to me. I love my audience and I need them and I'm terrified that they won't show up and when they do I want to make them feel as loved as possible. And I don't think I'm alone among indie theatremakers in this. At what point does this attitude get lost?

I like my audience. They've been good to me. I hope they don't end up becoming something I resent or look down on. I hope I still want to ply them with hugs and beer and face time in ten years.

[Nicole LaBonde]

Agreed! This is a great jumping in point for theaters concerned with their audience development.

[Nicole LaBonde]

Actually rethinking my last comment. Audience development is precisely the kind of term that gets us to the place where we dislike our audience. It implies something is lacking in them. When really it's us. What would be a better way to refer to this????

[club tel aviv]

What is the opposite subculture of the anime culture?