HIVE at Magnetic North: It’s a Party! And some of you are invited…
The Mother of All Theatre Parties is back. For those of you who missed the carnival known as Hive last time around, the Magnetic North Theatre Festival is giving you another chance to get shit-faced with Vancouver’s theatre intelligentsia.
Hive 2, appearing at The Center for Digital Media on Great Northern Way, promises social chaos amidst an assortment of theatrical delicacies on offer from the dozen or so companies that make up Progress Lab. Like last time, the experience starts at the bar and spills into satellite performance spaces where shows of around 10-minutes repeat for the duration of the party. And you get to take your beer with you. This year you also have the option of staying for after-show events featuring live music curated by Veda Hille and performance art curated by the Grunt Gallery.
But Hive is going to cost more than last year. If you book in advance you can get a ticket for $25. That’s a $10 jack on last year’s entry fee. If you wait, tickets at the door will sting you for $35. Is this a problem? It was almost a deal breaker. Earlier this year Progress Lab and Magnetic North locked horns over the issue. Many of the socially conscious local companies saw the $35 ticket price Mag North was suggesting as a barrier to accessibility. The higher the price the less the artists felt they would be able to attract the desired demographic—people in the same low income bracket as themselves, people with a very modest amount of disposable income. The compromise: on a $25 advance ticket.
As always, profit margins in theatre are razor-thin. Trying to pull off a national theatre festival on a budget that, believe me, doesn’t look anything like Stratford’s, is nothing less than heroic. Magnetic North’s staff is small, their vision is big, and the money is barely enough. So the need for a higher ticket price reflects the hard costs of presenting the event. But I can’t help wondering if the Magnetic North people don’t quite get the evolving ecology of the Vancouver theatre scene. The Progress Lab companies argued that a lower ticket price would attract more people, and therefore result in a higher take at the box office. We’ve seen some great successes this past season with companies that have offered their shows on a by-donation basis. Both Pi Theatre (John and Beatrice) and neworld (My Name is Rachel Corrie) packed houses with that strategy, and did great box office. Boca del Lupo has been selling out its by-donation outdoor show for years—and making more money without a fixed ticket price.
There are other values at stake. The original Hive was conceived of as a party for the theatre community (including patrons). The mini-plays were an added bonus. Magnetic North reverses the equation: from the Festival’s perspective, Hive is theatre first — with a party added on. Some have argued that a high-ticket price will distort the spirit of the event by creating expectations of polished theatrical ‘product’. David Bloom of Felix Culpa says: “The original Hive was very liberating; we could try anything. At ten minutes long, the audience could take a chance on any weird experiment and if the shows sucked, well, we could all just get drunk.” Can this spirit of risk survive a $35 gate?
As the ticket price in theatre goes up, the age and income of the patron follows suit. A Canada Council report based on Census statistics clearly illustrates this fact. And at a glance, the difference between a Playhouse audience and an audience at, say, Havana is obvious. Inevitably, theatre reflects the values of those it is made for. The more expensive it is, the more we end up with low-income artists — which is what almost all artists are—doing a song and dance for patrons who inhabit a different social sphere. The artist’s role shifts from community member to entertainment-service-provider for the wealthy.
Now, at $25-$35, Magnetic North certainly isn’t going after the moneyed classes. The Festival is in the same predicament all theatre non-profits find themselves in. Grants give them enough money to reduce ticket prices, but not enough to provide full access. (Don’t get me started on pay-what-you-can nights for the plebes). Oddly, despite the fact that everyone pays taxes in some way, funders often frown on the idea of free or by-donation shows.
The argument often made against cheap tickets is that a low price devalues the artist’s work (Ann Brophy of Magnetic North made this same argument when I interviewed her). That’s a very upper-middle-class perspective — one that equates quality with a dollar figure. In fact the connection between ticket price and production cost is tenuous. It’s true that if you remove subsidies (call it ‘government support’ if you like), prices will double, triple, quadruple and more. So hooray for subsidies. The only problem is that a $60 ticket at the Playhouse or Arts Club is out of reach for a great many people. The subsidy amounts to giving a break on the price to rich person. The notion that you can place an appropriate value on a performance by setting the ticket price at $25, $35 or $75, is abstract. It’s like saying there’s an archetypal price, say $500, that represents the true value of the work, and that anything below that is an earthly corruption of a true dollar value existing in a world of perfect forms — Plato might have liked that logic.
High prices might make sense when you’re dealing with a standardized product. If you go to a local production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. The same goes for a rock concert. But how do you factor risk into the cost when you’re talking about a performance encounter with progressive artists presenting something never before seen? One local theatre producer tells me his research shows you’ve got to keep the price down if you want spectators to take chances.
UBC professor Ernest Matthias notes that accessible pricing also allows risk to be taken all around:
“Theatre should ask itself: is it worth reducing the profit margin in favour of satisfaction, amazement, and wonder? I say yes. Audiences (wealthy patrons aside) these days only come to see what they know—as only that is a safe investment. And you can't get your money back if it's bad!! Same for cinema (well, in some video stores you actually can get a refund for a bad movie). When my fish is poorly cooked I send it back, and I will either get a better one, or something equivalent, or will not pay the full amount. Why can’t theatre do that?
“If it's free, audiences not only accept chances taken by performers; they also take chances themselves. Free stuff does not affect their aesthetic, ethical, or political sophistication of taste—they are still going to demand quality, only now they will do it with passion.”
Progress Lab and Magnetic North have had to make calculations that are both practical (“I need this much box office to pay for the show”) and speculative (“If I charge too much I deny access and diminish creative risk—what’s the right price?”). And to be fair, the “profit margin” referred to by Matthias doesn’t actually exist in small-scale theatre. I should add that, as I am currently involved in producing a complex, collaborative play for audience members who will hopefully (for political reasons) span the income spectrum, I don’t envy the bind that the Hive partners are in. I do, however, like the challenge it presents to us as theatre makers.
The companies involved in Hive are many of the best the West Coast has to offer. Last year’s work was tremendous. I expect Hive to be a great event this year too—for those who can afford to take part. But while the artists will continue to take risks, a greater gamble is being taken with the event as a whole. Will Hive 2 survive festival gentrification? Will it still be a community event in 2009? Or is this the first step toward a repackaging of the Hive party as theatre ‘product’?
Go to Hive. Party. Booze it up. See the shows. We’ll assess the quality of the hangover once we’ve done the drinking.