October Archive Highlight - “Pay Up Continues; "Updates from Management”

This month’s Archive Highlight is from a work very much in process - which is to say, it’s been 12 months since I ran the numbers on Undersigned as part of my ongoing payment study “Pay Up,” and over a year since I started looking at payment systems across my current works and seriously considering what outcomes they were producing. I’m in the remarkably slow process of converting that first research into a journal for hopeful eventual publication (the pace at which I write is one of many reasons keeping me at arm’s length from academia), but you could consider this month’s writing as another station en route.

And if you didn’t catch Pay Up in its first draft, you can find the numbers-heavy work up of that aggregated research attached below.

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In the year since I first analyzed the Down-Payment system for Undersigned, we’ve nearly doubled the number of total performances, going from 49 performances (with one standby) to 96 full-price performances*. In the first 49 shows, when presented with an envelope of cash after the performance, this is what the participant behavior looked like:

Number of — (lowered contribution)

2.04%

Number of + (raised contribution)

42.86%

Number of +/- 0 (lowered contribution)

55.10%

*full price meaning this examines only guests who paid a full downpayment, not standby participants. This also doesn’t include a fair amount of private commissions, playtests, and other guests at various alternate, discount, or pre-paid rates.

When looking at the full 96, we can see those patterns hold remarkably steady

Number of — (lowered contribution)

2.08%

Number of + (raised contribution)

41.67%

Number of +/- 0 (lowered contribution)

56.25%

Looking at the amounts of adjustments and payments, we see a similar story:

First 49

average ticket price after adjustment: $67.87.
Return - 116.49% of Down Payments

Full 96

average ticket price after adjustment: $69.34

Return - 113.40% of Down Payments

Nearly identical. Why is the return slightly lower if the average is higher? Because at the Overlook Film Festival, we ran about 20 shows at $65, so the base average without contributions is also higher. In my previous writing, I had speculated as to what effect an increased cost to $70 would have on contributions. While those 20 runs aren’t enough to declare a pattern, I do note that at the higher ticket cost, we actually saw slightly elevated contributions ( average price of $80.47, with a return of 117.62%). As we move toward touring Undersigned this coming winter and spring, I plan to experiment with a few price points to see if I can’t find new and better balances between the worth of the labor involved and the up-front risks and accessibility for participants. Will increasing the base ticket price lead to increases in how participants value the piece? Will it change how they respond to the downpayment?

As I continue to mull over these questions of payment and access, top of mind is a challenge I received from a peer when discussing the average contributions for Telelibrary sessions ($37.67 in 2022). They were concerned that this rate was too low, and that offering the option to pay as you wish may depress value for other creators;” if that’s what you’re charging as a senior designer, what is someone just starting out supposed to charge?”

Aside from scheduling extra therapy after being called “senior”, I take their point, and I think there’s an argument to be made for setting expectations for audiences to help spread information about the cost of producing work. That said, I also think there are many artists (at many points in their career) who can benefit from breaking or challenging expectations around payment amounts, particularly for new or innovative works, and  that a strength of these flexible systems is that a well-established show and a brand new show could have the same approach and not get the same outcomes. Again, the tension here emerges as we explore what the aims of these payment systems are, and how we balance the multiple outcomes. I’m certainly not making as much as I could from Telelibrary shows, but am I meeting my needs? Am I achieving my other goals? And if so, to what extent?

On the topic of other goals; in keeping with my ongoing fixation, one of you sent me a few really excellent articles from other artists or institutions looking at payment systems (shoutout to Brett). At the Barbican, their reflection on the impact of a year (2021-2022) selling all their shows as Pay What You Decide tickets was mostly focused on their success in increasing audience attendance in demographics of interest; “Our data shows 61% new audiences who are the holy grail of under 35s non-arts attendees!”

In a separate article, Barbican Theatre’s CEO and Artistic Director Laura Kriefman says

“We’re fuelling a new consistent audience, with shows selling extraordinarily well and with our ‘small’ venue achieving a reach of over 2 million people in the last two years.

Our passion has been about creating new routes into seeing ‘culture’ and that means we have to rethink everything from price, value, how you talk about money, coded and biased language and advertising, what copy and images actually say to totally new techniques to reach different audiences.”

While I think the Barbican goes a bit far when they claim that the average £9 ticket price means “The Barbican now know that the average price people can actually afford to take a risk on seeing a show is just over £9 a ticket,” I do think a finding like that can be a starting place for some pretty radical and exciting conversations about what work a theater makes, how they make it, and how they consider distributing it.

Meanwhile, at a very different point on the “institutional to individual” spectrum, actor Brendan Bradley wrote a reflection in 2021 about the results from hosting a web-browser-based one-act play festival. I was interested in his experiments in “tiers” of interactivity being sold as different tickets, and interested to note that once again a focal point is the potential for new audiences;

“Audience surveys revealed over half our audience reported OnBoardXR as their first live VR performance and one of our attendees noted it was their first ever VR experience. We were especially surprised to discover that 100% of our audience opted to pay something for their Pay-What-You-Want ticket, averaging $11.00 per ticket while 1/4th of our audience felt comfortable paying over $20 for their ticket.” 

In these two different case studies, I’d say you’re seeing an institution pursue payment structure as a way of expanding audiences for existing work, and a smaller collection of artists using payment systems to assess the interest in new works. Neither of these case studies suggest a model you can rest a full institution on, but both demonstrate that new and surprising outcomes and explorations are possible when we change how we pay for theater.