We had already announced. This period is all about positive framing by the arts sector. Good news needs to be spread, although people don't really know why. After all, there are no shareholders to be kept happy, only concerned art lovers.
Enfin. On Wednesday, September 9, NRC journalist Daan van Lent presented the result of a survey on attendance figures in the performing arts. He had done this partly in his spare time, partly in the boss's time, and the results were mostly confusing. On Thursday, September 10 (today), it will appear more extensively in the paper, and confusion will prevail there too.
Namely, what emerges? No reliable figures can be obtained with which to give an overall picture of the state of the performing arts. There are general attendance figures, for example, but they do not say much if they cannot be related to the place where they were obtained. During the presentation, and the subsequent Great Performing Arts Debate, it turned out, for instance, that performances at travelling festival De Parade were recently included in the figures. And at the Parade, performances often play six times in one day, for relatively small audience numbers. Hence, the total number of spectators counted over the huge number of performances yields such a small average: 64 visitors per performance. That is suspiciously close to the 15 the VVD once used to screen in order to be able to turn off the subsidy tap.
You won't find these kinds of dramatic averages in the hilarious infographic which the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors published on Tuesday. Indeed, that infographic contains a lot of figures, but brought so totally chaotic that the meaning escapes any viewer. All that remains are the totally out-of-the-blue comments "BRAVO!" and "APPLAUS" at the bottom.
Actually quite a shame, from that VSCD. In the past, the club already grossed in double functions and fog curtains around figures, and I hoped that with a new management, the juggling would finally be done. But no. Today's infographic actually beats everything.
Fortunately, then, there are Daan van Lent's figures, although they are thus not all-important either, as he has not been able to uncover many essential data. Main conclusion, which can also be gleaned from the VSCD figures, but with a lot of effort: the audience for traditional, subsidised theatre is fairly constant, although the flush is getting thinner. Where the decline is really dramatic is in musicals and commercial productions. There, the crisis has hit hard, and the theatres that have to cut back because of reductions made in The Hague mainly pass on these cuts to the often expensive 'free' productions. This is a side effect of the cuts that the VVD had probably not counted on.
There is also a big side note to the decline in audiences for musicals. The VSCD's figures do not include a very large provider: Fred Boot and Robin De Levita, who have been running sold-out Soldaat van Oranje in the theatre hangar for almost 100 years now, do not share their figures with the VSCD. We noted earlier that that performance draws 1,500 people a night away from the regular offerings. Meppel cannot compete with that.
So numbers don't mean anything. What remains are people. They say a lot. But even that remains difficult to interpret. Marc van Warmerdam told me after the debate in which everyone agreed that he can tell two stories: 'A positive story, and a negative story. And the funny thing is, they are both true.' The positive story is that Orkater still attracts a lot of audiences in the province, if the theatre shrugs its shoulders. When I inquired further, he explained that the negative story worried him more. 'We can take less and less risk with productions. We still have a reserve we can draw on, but one day that will run out.'
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
