Community Arts
ACHF Arts Access
These funds will allow us to produce Kid Simple: a radio play in the flesh at the Southern Theater in 2016 and will hopefully lead to an increase in attendance of 10% from our 2015 production of Defying Gravity. We will evaluate our outcomes by measuring our actual income and expense costs relative to budget, by reviewing attendance numbers from this production vs. our 2015 production, by a post mortem with our artists to review the process of creating the work, and through audience surveys that provide demographics and anecdotal evidence.
We successfully produced Kid-Simple: a radio play in the flesh by Jordan Harrison in May. We were able to successfully execute the video and sound elements integral to the script. We have a limited working knowledge of video/projection and this proved to be a challenge, but we were able to work with a talented designer and assistant designer for these aspects and overcame that challenge together. Our design team was extremely strong, especially our sound designer/foley artist. He was in the rehearsal process with us from the beginning which proved to be a huge strength to the artistic process. The one aspect we would change is the rehearsal period. We would have liked to have an additional 1-2 weeks of rehearsal before tech. While we saw no decrease we were unsuccessful in our goal of increasing our audience attendance by 10%. We are still trying to determine the cause, however, Swandive had the opening production of the ARTshare program at the Southern Theater in 2015, it is possible that this inflated our numbers. Some other possible reasons include time of year (the run of our show occurred during the first few weeks of nice weather of the summer season), show selection, show title and market saturation. We ran a very successful marketing campaign and saw a slight uptick in community diversity. We will continue in that vein and use feedback from audience surveys to help shape future marketing. We were able to offer a pay what you can night, encouraging people of all economic backgrounds to participate and we still believe the ARTshare model, offered at The Southern Theater, provides some of the best accessibility options to audience members as well. Swandive Theatre produced 11 productions of Jordan Harrison's "Kid-Simple: a radio play in the flesh", these productions were seen by 393 people, an average of 36 people a night, with our largest night hosting 77 people. We were reviewed six times by both media publications (Southside Pride and Twin Cities Daily Planet), as well as independent bloggers for theater community.
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