Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance has moved its performance program outdoors and abolished ticket charges in order to reach audiences who don’t usually attend contemporary dance.
Hero image for The Farm's Bare Bones, presented as part of Supercell. Photo credit: Art-Work Agency.
Attracting new audiences and creating accessible and affordable entry points for the general public remains an ongoing challenge for arts festivals and organisations nationwide.
In Brisbane, the contemporary dance festival Supercell is meeting this challenge by abolishing ticket charges for performances – events at this year’s festival are free.
The festival is also stepping out of the theatre and onto the streets, taking advantage of Brisbane’s warm weather in order to provide an alfresco dance program in the city’s many public parks and plazas.
In doing so, Supercell’s Festival Director and co-founder, Kate Usher, hopes to engage people who are unfamiliar with contemporary dance instead of the usual dance-literate audience. ‘One of my big things is about dance literacy and considering all the access points into dance as artform,’ Usher explained.
She also believes it’s important to focus on ‘dance and’ in order to widen opportunities for audience engagement and connection.
‘Whether that’s dance and ideas, or dance and food, or dance and community, or dance and participation, whatever the other “and” is, for me is equally as important as performance presentation or aesthetic craft. So for me there’s no delineation between high art or low art or grassroots or community – it’s all practice. And I think it’s really important to start placing works like that side by side,’ she explained.
Programming dance works outdoors also allows people to have what Usher calls the ‘surprise and delight moment’.
‘If we can provide unintentional entertainment or beautiful moments in public spaces for a passer-by or punter, that’s great. If that is somebody’s first experiences of the artform, their first initiation point, I’m a big believer in the ideas that perhaps when they interact with contemporary dance again in another part of their life, there’ll be some memory or recollection of that first moment, and it might be just that little bit less terrifying or obtuse or scary to interact with,’ Usher told ArtsHub.
Read: Attracting new audiences to contemporary dance
Thanks to the support of Brisbane City Council, all performances in Supercell this year are free (though booking is still required for some events due to seating restrictions and requirements) – another way of ensuring the festival is accessible to audiences for whom contemporary dance may be inaccessible or esoteric.
‘A big thing that I’ve been thinking about is access and affordability, particularly if you’re trying to have a conversation with people beyond our existing audiences and people who are already dance consumers or dance literate,’ Usher said.
‘How do you take some of the risk away from trying something new? Well, in Queensland we have a big outdoor participation, health and wellness focus. We’ve also got the beautiful alfresco weather for it, so it made a lot of sense for us to line up alongside similar programs like Yoga in the Park and the free social classes on a Friday night in King George Square. We want to be in a similar allied space, and so that was our approach to having free events.’
‘How do you take some of the risk away from trying something new?’
Given that Supercell operates on project funding rather than organisational funding, developing this year’s accessible outdoor program was something of a challenge for Usher.
‘I’ve been a little grant-writing monkey,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve written so many grants across portfolios like education or health or science as well as the arts.’
Some funding bodies were initially hesitant about her intention of making the program free, Usher added.
‘They said, “We love the accessibility and we love the equity approach, but we’re a little concerned about your viability as a business if you’re not going to charge ticket sales … Funding bodies want us to demonstrate audience engagement and audience development but … there was a bit of a disconnect between that and affordability and accessibility, which I found to be really interesting.’
2021 AND BEYOND
Usher hopes to continue Supercell’s free outdoor programming in 2021, while also running a parallel ticketed program in Brisbane’s theatres and other venues.
‘I think it is incredibly important that we have this annual presence. We all know that platforms for contemporary dance in Australia are somewhat limited, so for us to present the festival every year is really, really important for us. And then looking to the future, in 2021 and beyond we want to offer up both programs together – a whole outdoor, onsite festival model with an in-theatre model as well, because we know that there is scope and there is appetite for such a vast range of contemporary dance and we feel that we can provide that.’
As the festival continues to evolve, Supercell’s focus on Queensland dance companies and international guests may potentially shift in the coming years.
‘That’s something we question every year. Do we look to Queensland? Do we have the balance right? Do we need to open up the conversations to artists across other states? I think it’s really important to have a strong Queensland voice but I don’t ever want us to feel exclusively Queensland – so I think that’s an ongoing conversation to have, particularly around who our funders and partners are and what they’re looking to see in the festival. So whilst it does always have a Queensland flavour, we like to think about works that will talk to what our audiences’ tastes are here, and where audiences are at in Queensland. At this point in time, having that local recognition is really important for our audience development.’
Supercell: Festival of Contemporary Dance runs across multiple Brisbane locations including Queens St Mall, Anzac Square and Bunyapa Park from 21-29 February. Visit the Supercell website for a complete list of sites and performances.