Sean Murphy’s Kid’s Party Confidential. Image supplied.
While festivals such as Adelaide Fringe and Perth’s Fringe World present new and emerging artists with a great opportunity to make a name for themselves, they can also be daunting for artists who lack the profile of their better-known peers.
While comedians such as Wil Anderson and established acts such as Briefs and La Soirée still have to fight for their share of the audience pie, their reputations are a considerable advantage in the crowded festival market. But for performers at the start of their careers, or who are well known at home but not in the city whose festival they’re about to visit, attracting audiences can be a real challenge.
So how do new artists get attention at Fringe, or in similar festivals?
Find the right venue
Sydney’s Mark Haslam is currently performing in CONCRETE:heartbeat as part of the Blue Room’s Summer Nights program in Fringe World. He stresses the importance of finding the right venue for your show.
‘My first thing here was getting in the right venue, and I think in general that is such a core element to it. So like here, the Blue Room season, which is a curated season, it’s got a strong support network, it’s got strong links into the audience base already; so finding the right venue that has already done a lot of the groundwork in terms of building an audience is pretty essential. Because … when you’ve got no support, no infrastructure around you it’s pretty brutal,’ he said.
Friends, family and co-workers
Sydney comedian Sean Murphy is bringing his show Kid’s Party Confidential to Adelaide Fringe this year, and has a few tricks up his sleeve to ensure that he gets an audience.
‘I guess I have at this stage in my career a really basic philosophy, which is to embrace the basics,’ he said.
‘The first is [to hit up] friends, family and co-workers; the people you already know. I sold out a season at the 2014 Sydney Fringe for my show, 90% on friends, family and co-workers and then also the friends, family and co-workers that they bought along with them.
‘And I didn’t do that just by asking a couple of people but by really not being shy, by putting it out on Facebook, inviting people individually, dropping letters in the mail to all my friends and family – and I even went to the length of doing … a small part of my show in front of the entire company at our corporate retreat, and people came up to me and said “Hey that was great, I’d love to come and see it; I’d love to come and support you”. But that really meant I wasn’t shy. Any opportunity to get it up in front of people I knew, and to just show them a little bit of what I have, I went for it. And that really, really worked for me – I had sold out shows on the basis of that,’ Murphy said.
Don’t stress about what you can’t control
Haslam says: ‘Step three for me is that I don’t get too stressed about my houses. I think you just have to make sure that the work itself is solid, and so I come in really prepared. Before I get there I don’t stress about the fact that I haven’t sold many tickets, or get obsessed with sales reports, because your product needs to be schmick. You’ve got such a short time to tech normally, so you’ve got to make sure that everything is right, so that when you get in – from the outset – you don’t have to worry about getting your show up and running. And from the very first day you can be talking to people and building connections, not having to be stressed about the fact that your set piece has just fallen over.’
Get a good image
You could just take a selfie with your iPhone to use as your show’s promo image, but it’s not going to make your show stand out in a crowded festival program.
As Sean Murphy explains: ‘If you have any budget at all … get yourself a good image, a professional image. That was where I pretty much spent all of my money setting up my current show; as soon as I did that I sent it off to various media as well as the festival organisation; and within a couple of days I was in the Sydney Morning Herald. They hadn’t even seen the show. They put that in the paper, a preview of my show, solely on the basis of my image, because it was professionally done; it looked good, and it looked good in the newspaper.
‘I could have worked my arse off to get that kind of coverage if I was just sending emails and stuff like that, and as you probably know in the media, they’re a dime a dozen, media releases and things like that. But if a great image jumps out at you, all of a sudden they’ve got a story.’
Find the right publicist
While working with a publicist can set you back a little financially, finding the right publicist can have considerable impact. Mark Haslam advises finding a good local publicist in the city you’re visiting – one with a proven track record in working with artists similar to yourself.
‘I prioritise publicists over posters and distribution,’ he said. ‘I just feel that, particularly in such a crowded marketplace, there’s just so much marketing material out there already, fliers and posters and that kind of visual stimulation everywhere, that I don’t find it an effective use of money. So I try and pump all of that into as good a publicist as I can – a local publicist who works in the space and has worked with people who are my scale in the past.
‘And so that then hopefully means you can get a review, or even the simple things like your show being listed on the appropriate message boards and websites that you don’t even know people in that city look at, like, you just wouldn’t know if you were trying to rock up and look after that kind of thing yourself,’ Haslam explained.
Leverage your show’s selling points
Anyone who lives in Melbourne will be familiar with the hordes of starving comedians stalking potential audiences outside Melbourne Town Hall during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, just waiting for the right opportunity to press a flyer into an unsuspecting punter’s hands.
In order to make this work, according to Murphy, you need to find your show’s most eye-catching selling points, and leverage the hell out of them.
‘You should be looking to pull the things out of your show that will make it appealing … and just use yourself – there’s nothing like getting out there and pressing the flesh and getting creative when it comes to the age-old practice of ‘flyering’. I really look at how people can really engage with the show if they meet me out at the Festival Hub at the Melbourne Comedy Festival or in Rundle Mall in Adelaide.
‘Offer something more than just a flyer. So for example my show is called Kid’s Party Confidential; it’s all about my humiliating experiences as a kids’ party entertainer, and so I give it a kids’ party aspect. I go out with a piñata; I’m playing pass the parcel with strangers; I’m handing out balloon swords and teaching people how to do it. All of these things play in directly to the themes of my show, give people a sense of who I am and what the show’s about, but also – hopefully – giving them the sense of wanting more, and certainly more so than just a simple flyer can do.
‘So even with stand-up comedy acts, what are the themes that you’re exploring? Is there some sort of dress-up angle, is there something that you can do in the public eye that touches on what you’re talking about, in a fun way; in a way that’s interesting and is more than just another flyer in their hand,’ Murphy said.
Network and make contacts
‘I view Fringe Festivals these days as really, as an arts market,’ said Haslam. ‘It’s a good way to try out new material and to do shows; and it’s great that you’re trying to, like, develop all the usual things that putting on shows brings to you, but really I just use them now as building connections to try and either sell the next work or the next idea; or build creative collaborations with other artists in the city.
‘If you’ve got an artist’s pass you’re getting into things so much cheaper and people are always giving away tickets. I literally just go and hang out at the bar after the show – I don’t even really drink that much – but it’s just the talking to people. Not even selling the show but just talking about who they are and what they do, and then who you are and the kind of stuff you do, and trying to build those types of connections.
‘Because if you build connections with local artists, they’ve got all of those people around them as well, and they can help support you and they bring people along to your work as well. And then you don’t live and die by reviews, which can be a nightmare in a Fringe environment,’ he said.
The top-down approach
It’s not just individual artists who are trying to get new shows noticed – the festivals themselves are keen to ensure emerging artists are new talents have the chance to stand out, as Adelaide Fringe Director, Greg Clarke explains.
His first piece of advice for new artists, however, is to do their groundwork:
‘We usually say if it’s you’re first time don’t think you’re going to make money; the way it works is you really need to come a few times and build up your audiences. And we always suggest to people to come to Adelaide Fringe first as a punter, come and experience it … There’s a huge risk, you’re up against so many other artists; the Adelaide Fringe is a big Fringe Festival. The competition is huge. So that’s usually our first bit of advice: come and check it out and experience and meet people and check out which venue you think would suit your work. Do your groundwork and then make a decision whether to come or not,’ he said.
As well as a series of marketing and publicity forums before the festival starts, Adelaide Fringe also run a series of one-on-one publicity sessions during the Fringe itself.
‘We hire a publicity company who then are there for any Fringe artist to come into the Fringe Club and have one-one sessions about what they need to do to publicise and learn how they go about it. So we not only do things before they arrive but they can also do these one-on-one sessions in the Fringe Club when they’re here,’ Clarke said.
During the festival itself, Adelaide Fringe also have a range of other strategies to assist emerging artists connect with audiences.
‘The Fringe Funhouse started as a caravan, quite a small kind of concept in Rundle Mall; we’ve upped it this year and it’s a huge big stage. Any artist can get up there and give a bit of a taste of their show. So it’s a great way to promote your show. We often try and get media down there as well and it’s just near the box office; and people can flyer, so if they’re performing on that stage at Funhouse they’re also able to flyer in Rundle Mall whereas no-one else can, unless you’re a part of the Fringe,’ Clarke explained.
‘Our other strategy is Support Act, a great program which BankSA supports. What this means is they subsidise tickets to lesser-known and emerging artists’ shows, and first-timers. So how that works is any artist who’s emerging or a first-timer can apply to be part of Support Act, and just over 90 shows were chosen by the bank this year to support.
‘And how it works is, the bank will subsidise up to 20 tickets for your first night; so it’s a great way to get bums on seats without giving away comps. And how it works is, the public can buy these support act tickets for only $10 and the bank will subsidise the difference between your original price and the $10.’
In addition to these tactics, Adelaide Fringe have emblazoned all their marketing collateral with a slogan encouraging audiences to see something new and unexpected.
‘We’ve put a tagline across everything: “experience something new”. So the posters have it, everything we’re doing – all our marketing material – has that tagline and are backed up with copy that’s all about getting out, getting audiences to go and discover the next big thing, experience something new. Everything we’re doing is about encouraging people not just to see a favourite but to see things you’ve never seen before.
‘It’s the strategy behind everything we’re doing this year, because we’ve clocked it, and as a Fringe Festival that’s what we need to be doing. We don’t need to worry about the big guys; they’ll be fine, they’ve got publicists. “Experience something new.” That’s the experience I crave; I want to experience something new every time, and I hope that’s what audiences want as well,’ Clarke concluded.
Sean Murphy’s Kid’s Party Confidential
La Boheme, Adelaide, 19-22 February
www.adelaidefringe.com.au
CONCRETE:heatbeat
Presented by The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights and kdmindustries
In association with PICA
3-12 February
www.fringeworld.com.au
Fringe World 2015
23 January – 22 February
Adelaide Fringe
13 February – 15 March
