Themes

Programming / Communication

It’s not an easy subject for me – because I know it so well that I can only find the obvious – and so I don’t really know how to go about it.

It’s a work I’ve been doing for years for the theatre of Perpignan (which is, all the same, the 4th largest national theatre in France, even if nobody knows where Perpignan is). I carry it out afterwards, that is to say around March, when all the programming for the following year is established.

This is what I do: I have the list of all the shows, the synopses, sometimes visuals. And I make packages of about 10 – each package grouped under an idea. That’s the theme.

Once I’ve put my package together, I put my shows “in order”, remembering to vary the genres: music, theatre, dance, puppets, opera, circus. Then I rewrite the synopses, so that the spectators know what they are going to see.

Isn’t that nice?
Well obviously… it was too good to be useful.

I had done this the first year because we wanted teachers to be able to take subscriptions with their classes: if they go to see between 3 and 7 shows, they get discounts on the rates – and we have our halls full.

So, from the first year, this work was given to secondary and higher education teachers (this goes in France from 11 to 26 years old). This is my knowledge of the “young” audience.
That was in 2012.

It worked very well – too well – we have too many requests from teachers and the month of September became a complete hell, because we spend our time eliminating requests, to have places for the classic public. We even ended up asking them to explain their choices to us, to make it easier to choose between one teacher and another.

– To be concrete, it has become common to have 2000 requests too many compared to the number of places planned for the classes.

So we thought we would extend this principle of themes to everyone.
And then… it’s too complicated. That’s it.
It’s just too complicated, that’s all.
Don’t ask me why it’s too complicated.
But it’s too complicated.

In order to extend this to everyone, it would be a question of providing sales lines dedicated to these themes. And in addition, to be able to draw from the themes.
A theme with 10 shows and 3 activities should be able to be bought with: 3 shows, 1 activity at least.

And as, as you have surely seen, I may have a generous spirit sometimes, I never find a single theme – but at least five. Usually six and sometimes seven. And when I am in good shape I add “focal points”.

So we haven’t expanded it into a commercial subscription offer.

“We” said: the spectators are intelligent, they will remember what you have told them and they will create their themes all by themselves.
Obviously that doesn’t work at all.

And here we are with subscription proposals: for 10 or 7 shows, and that’s it.
And an audience that will always take the huge, ultra-known shows – cheaper – and that’s all.
This means that the subscription formula is not very useful – and especially not to fill the halls for less well-known shows.

So yes, I get it, what’s complicated is to program this in a way that makes it easy to sell.

Okay, I get it.
I hear there are some guys who came back from the space station not long ago. I’m surprised. Because it must be complicated to program this little trip, right? Well, let’s move on.

Still – to fill the theaters, you have to make people want to go see shows.
And most of the time, we have our “favorite shows” and for that, we accept to go see what we don’t know at all.

I don’t want to sort by arts – that’s the way it is.
So a sorting by themes: I mentioned here some of them: Nature (it’s totally in fashion – sorry sorry); Monsters (all Shakespeare fits monsters – sorry again); The search for joy; First loves; The time of anger etc.. In short, titles that allow us to group together shows throughout the season.

And we sell the complete or partial “package” – that means that the spectator buys all the tickets for the shows on the theme, or at least three.

– or it will be cheaper
– or it will be very well placed in the room (not both, let’s not exaggerate, I know how to count anyway)

This will save us from overbooking on big productions and underbooking on young productions (it exists, the word “underbooking ? ).

And that’s why I’m very concerned that the difficulty of programming is… outdated.

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Tomorrow, at the invitation of my new uncle (I am in the process of discovering a whole family here), I will try to find 15 little joys of living every day …