PETER CRAWLEYon crowds calling the shots
WHERE DO angels come from? The simplest answer is that they were first conceived by theatre producers, who needed to believe in something – namely, that somebody, somewhere would give them money to get their shows off the ground. And lo, “angel investors” did appear, and said unto the producers: “Can we get above-title credits and points on the gross?”
The Irish organisation Business to Arts recently launched Fundit.ie, a crowd-funding website for creative ideas that may have implications for how theatre is made in the future. Basically, now we can all be angels. Inspired by crowd-funding websites such as Kickstarter and
Pledge Music, this is the logical culmination of social networking, people power, PayPal accounts and one-click philanthropy.
Each project has a stated financial target, playful rewards, tiered contributions (from €5 to €500) and strict deadlines: if the full amount isn’t raised in time, the project gets nothing.
It’s a great idea at a time when corporate sponsors are thin on the ground and government subsidies are contracting. But there may be benefits beyond cashflow. Crowds, unlike weight- throwing producers or criteria- led funding bodies, don’t have agendas. There may be strength in numbers, but when it comes to crowd-funding there’s also a dilution of influence.
Do crowds make better backers then? Both of the theatre projects on Fundit (Thisispopbaby's production of Neil Watkins's The Year of Magical Wankingand the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival's workshop development of Brokentalkers' The Blue Boy) must hope so. Their investors won't take a share in the profits (unlikely as profits are) or exert an influence upon the art.
What’s in it for the crowd? There’s a real pleasure in enabling creation or buying into a good idea, but the reward of crowd- funding is that of charity.
Still, tangible incentives go a long way. Watkins, for instance, is supplying a magical hug to donors of €5 and above (“redeemable at any performance”) and even the Abbey, which accepts charitable donations, offers wonderfully surreal illustrations of where your money goes (“€15 will rent a moustache for a week”).
The problem with crowd- funding performance, though, is that micro-patrons respond less favourably to the unfamiliar. Moustaches and hugs don’t come for free, we’re learning, but nor does the development of new ideas. If Kickstarter’s record on film-making is anything to go by, remakes and adaptations generate more interest than original works. Crowd-funding might have worked for Hamlet Part II, then, but not Hamlet.
We'll discover if crowd- funding is as faddish as flash mobbing or a viable mechanism if Godspellgets $5m to become Broadway's first ever "community funded" musical, or by the end of this month, when Fundit's theatre projects will have reached their deadlines after promising starts.
If it works, the theatre will believe in angels. If it doesn’t, it’s back to the devil they know.
pcrawley@irishtimes.com
