A few years ago, a performing arts manager and I were talking about the kinds of productions producers liked having on their books from a financial point of view.
Given the choice between a six-week season of a 2000-seater theatre show and a one-night-only 60,000-seat stadium Beyoncé-scale concert – which was the better pick?
My colleague responded without flinching. “I’d pick the one night stadium concert. The audience is in and out and the cost margins are better if the show has sold well.”
Their answer was a sharp reminder of why some producers choose to ‘go big’, while at the same time it revealed how there is no singular (or simple!) path to making huge profits in the performing arts.
Yet recently, many artists and producers have felt pressure to scale up their ambitions wherever possible. Funding bodies are increasingly keen on quantitative (rather than qualitative) results, and there is a feeling that everyone is being pushed to produce more with less.
But as at least two proudly ‘tiny’ arts programs attest, the impetus to super-size projects ignores the crucial role smaller-scale programming plays in feeding the wider sector.
Big impacts of ‘tiny’ festivals on artists and audiences
Since launching in 2019 in Aotearoa New Zealand, a small, but beautiful arts organisation called Tiny Fest (Ōtautahi/Christchurch) has engaged over 150 artists, and has supported them to develop new small-scale works for local audiences.
As Tiny Fest artistic director Janaína Moraes explains, the power of the festival’s micro model lies in its ability to embed itself within the local community and forge strong connections between artists and local audiences.
“I am very interested in ideas of cross-pollination,” Moraes tells ArtsHub.
“What we are doing through Tiny Fest is really about working as a collective and using collaborative processes to allow cross-pollination of ideas and resources to feed the local community,” she says.
At its core, Tiny Fest is about engaging independent artists to create small-scale, site specific performances which are developed over time in collaboration with a different community venue every festival.
Tiny Fest’s unique rotating cycle of venue partners is crucial to its program, as they become vital creative hubs for Tiny Fest artists to work in throughout the year, and then act as the performance space for the festival itself.
“The best way to explain how we work is to look at our most recent festival [in 2024] where we partnered with Tūranga library [Ōtautahi/ Christchurch’s main city library],” Moraes says.
“This partnership meant that over a year we could work with our local library and exchange services, knowledge and build relationships with the library staff and community.
“It is important that artists were able to have a sustained curatorial support and opportunities to engage with that community over that time,” she adds.
These creative developments culminated in an ‘art marathon’ of small-scale performances, involving over 40 artists, which were presented over a single weekend at Tūranga Library.
“Last year’s festival was the best we have ever had in terms of audience engagement,” Moraes says, citing over 600 paying attendees, and countless more participants to the festival’s free events over the weekend.
“We are really proud of that, but we’re equally proud of our year-round model we are working with,” she adds. “By defining a festival as an ongoing platform, our pop-up community activations in the lead-up to the festival weekend gives us more flexibility and opportunity to experiment with formats beyond our usual program.
“We can see how nourishing these local exchanges are for the artists in allowing them to make new works over time in this very cross-disciplinary, collaborative way,” she continues.
“The model is also important for building audiences, because we are breaking the mould a little bit in taking art beyond conventional art spaces like theatres and galleries.”
Sustaining a festival for audiences of one (at a time): is it possible?
Before there was Tiny Fest, located many kilometres away from Ōtautahi/Christchurch (across the ditch and the Great Australian Bight) there was another deliberately small-scale festival that was scoring big wins of its own.
Proximity Festival was based in Boorloo/Perth from 2012 to 2017, and when it first burst onto the already-vibrant independent arts scene in Western Australia, it too created important new pathways for artists and allowed audiences to forge new connections with performance work.
Co-founded by then Boorloo/Perth-based artists James Berlyn, Sarah Rowbottam and Kelli McCluskey, Proximity Festival was, in simple terms, an artist-led performing arts festival for audiences of one.
Each year it commissioned around 12 artists to make new site-responsive performance works for intimate audiences, which the artists developed in collaboration with Proximity and then presented over its 10-day annual festival program.
Within five years, Proximity was attracting artist applications from all over the world and seeing important national producers routinely attend. It was also engaging excited audiences who knew they had to get in quickly to buy their tickets before the program inevitably sold out.
So why, after making such huge impacts and having such amazing reach, did the Proximity co-founders decide to wind things up?
As McCluskey explains, while Proximity’s business model was itself a sustainable one, the bigger picture funding system it was operating within eventually took its toll.
“Proximity was attracting local, state and federal funding, which was great,” McCluskey says.
“But because it was always project funding grants, which only covered one festival at a time, there was a constant need to apply for new money, or to reapply for another project grant and, after five years of that instability, we were utterly exhausted.”
Aside from being completely worn out, McCluskey says the decision to wind up Proximity was difficult because the team realised the momentum the platform was building for artists and local audiences alike.
“There were big expectations that had been built up around Proximity from our community,” McCluskey tells ArtsHub.
“But we couldn’t keep applying for funding support within that short-term cycle, which didn’t give us a chance to plan beyond what was directly in front of us.
“I really wish it hadn’t gone that way,” McCluskey adds. “Because even now we can see the impact Proximity has had on the careers of the artists, and how it allowed their practices to evolve and go in exciting new directions.”
Over its five years, Proximity commissioned 57 artists (approximately 12 artists per festival) to make intimate-scale new works for audiences of one, while offering them creative development ‘labs’ throughout the year to support them in the creation of the works.
Like Tiny Fest, Proximity’s year-round program encouraged artistic experimentation while fostering important exchange between artists and producers over a sustained period of time.
“Proximity created very fertile ground for artists to exchange ideas and connect with each other’s practices,” fellow Proximity co-founder Rowbottam tells ArtsHub.
“It was also important in allowing artists to think strategically about creating works that were scalable and tourable.
“That’s something many people don’t realise about Proximity,” she adds. “While our festival program may have been for audiences of one, that doesn’t mean the works didn’t go on to find larger audiences after that.”
Rowbottam cites the work of artist Mish Grigor as an example of a work created for Proximity in 2015 (Sex Talk) that went on to be further developed by the artist as The Talk and played to larger audiences across the country.
Another thing achieved by Proximity by way of its small-scale model was that it could nurture emerging artists by supporting them to work with more established artists during their creative developments.
“That aspect was especially important to the artists’ development,” Rowbottam says.
“In some cases conversations between artists [during Proximity labs] profoundly influenced their trajectories and future collaborations, such as Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer who went onto form Pony Express.”
But now, as Rowbottam reflects on current prospects for independents developing small-scale works, she can see how difficult it is for them to find the kind of solidarity, exchange and momentum Proximity provided.
“Independent artists are having to produce, deliver and apply for funds all at the same time – which is totally exhausting,” she says.
A recent survey by Theatre Network Australia (TNA) all but confirms this trend, with data showing that while mid-career and established independents are now working on the same number of projects they were before the pandemic, emerging creatives are working on fewer.
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The survey also finds that 79% of independent artists maintain jobs outside of their creative practice, which is not so surprising, but the fact that there has been a steady increase in artists working in part-time and full-time jobs that are sometimes outside of the arts, is a concerning finding.
As Rowbottam says, “There are so few opportunities for smaller, independent projects to attract funding to work over longer periods of time and work in a more sustained way.
“I think this is contributing to knock-on effects in the wider sector, because it is diminishing the diversity of the arts landscape, while at the same time shrinking the pipeline that leads artists to go on to work on larger projects and build their careers.”
