Embracing the outdoor audience

In the 2011 Brighton Festival, French artists Carabosse filled a much visited local park with fire, creating a magical world of flames flickering amongst the trees, illuminating copses and groves, interspersed with strange flaming mechanical structures which rotated unpredictably mixing fire and water in elemental cascades. In this extraordinary parallel universe people walked, sat, danced, picnicked and chatted to strangers and loved ones way into the night losing themselves on familiar paths and celebrating the creating of something new on old territory. Hundreds of the attenders took photos on their mobile phones and went on to share these with friends. Word of mouth is of course one of the most powerful forms of marketing and these people subsequently turned up on the second night with many others, meaning an extraordinary turnout of people and in total the attendance figures at this free event reached over 12,000.This is just one example of Brighton Festival’s work over our 45 year history as we have delivered a plethora of free outdoor work in various locations and have found that by placing this work in areas of the city that traditionally have low engagement with the arts, we can attract over 50% first time attenders to Brighton Festival outdoor events.

We have also been working with a number of organisations such as Children and the Arts, BBC Proms and Same Sky over many years to deliver free outdoor events, and many lessons have been learned along the way – lots of them infuriatingly obvious and yet representing mistakes which we all of us, thanks to our enthusiasm and optimism, are capable of making repeatedly, so here are a few for the record:

• Great art can happen anywhere, but if you want to reach a new audience, put it outside in a venue that is familiar for some other reason – a playground, a supermarket, an old church hall – because people will embrace the unexpected more readily if it comes wrapped in familiar clothes
• Audiences do love and respect free art but only if it they feel (or are made to feel) like a stakeholder
• If you are putting something on for free, then try to do it at least twice
• word of mouth is always your best ally
• Just because it’s free doesn’t mean people don’t expect quality