Conference
This year´s conference, The Audience in focus?, is about the audience and the possibilities and challenges it involves working with the audience in focus. The Festival Conference is located at Stora Teatern in Gothenburg.
Thursday 23/8 at 11.00 – Friday 24/8 at 12.30
Location: Stora Teatern, Gothenburg
Buy tickets to the Festival Conference.
This year’s conference, The Audience in Focus?, is about the audience and the possibilities and challenges it involves working with the audience in focus. To welcome a broader group of people, from different backgrounds and conditions, often mean that we have to question our habitual models and structures.
Among the presenters are Heather Maitland, one of the most renowned consultants in Audience Development in Europe who will talk about what cultural institutions and practitioners can gain from working audience focused. Alan Brown is a researcher and consultant and will talk about the relation between what we present and the setting we present it in. Dawn Walton, Artistic Director and founder of Eclipse Theatre in Sheffield will discuss their work with a diverse led approach. Andrew McIntyre, co-founder of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, one of the worlds leading organizations in cultural segmentation, will present and launch the study Kultursegment Sverige, which is the largest comprehensive study of the Swedish arts and culture market ever.
The Conference is held in Swedish and in English.
Schedule
Thursday 23 august
11.00 AM–12.15 PM
Heather Maitland
12.15 PM–1.15 PM
Lunch and mingle
1.15 PM–3.00 PM
Alan Brown
Dawn Walton
3.30 PM–5.00 PM
Qaisar Mahmood
Tasso Stafilidis
Friday 24 august
9.30 AM–10.45 AM
Andrew McIntyre
11.05 AM–12.30 PM
Niels Righolt
Stina Oscarson
Participants
Heather Maitland
”Why bother being audience focused?” Heather Maitland, one of Europe’s leading consultants in audience development, asks the question. She will be illuminating the advantages for cultural institutions and individual artists to be gained by working audience focused.
Alan Brown
With increasing frequency, artists and cultural institutions are presenting art in new contexts and environments that revitalize the work and capture audiences in new ways. Brown is a researcher and consultant based in Detroit. He will address the relationship between the art work presented and the site of presentation.
Dawn Walton
Walton is the artistic leader and founder of Eclipse Theatre, Sheffield. Despite budget cuts in public cultural funding, Eclipse Theatre succeeds, through their work with multiplicity, in attracting ever broader and larger audiences. Walton will concentrate her presentation on this aspect of their work.
Qaisar Mahmood
Mahmood is a writer and debater. He reflects on the reasons for our preference for similarities rather than differences, and on how we can improve our ability to work against our instincts in societies characterized by multiplicity and change.
Tasso Stafilidis
Tasso Stafilidis is accountable manager for the Gothenburg Culture Festival, one of the Nordic region’s largest. He has worked specifically with inclusion and managed to broaden an already quite broad target population. How do we reach new target groups and make our work significant for larger numbers?
Andrew McIntyre
Mclntyre will launch and present Kultursegment Sverige (“Sweden the Cultural Segment”), the largest study to date spanning all art fields in the Swedish cultural sector.
Niels Righolt
Righolt is executive manager of CKI – Center for Kunst og Interkultur (”The Center for Art and Interculture”) in Copenhagen and has long experience of European projects with social and inclusion dimensions. Righolt explores how work with audience development in Scandinavia differs from the European norm. What can we learn from each other?
Stina Oscarson
Stina Oscarson is a playwright, director and cultural debater. How can we – and how should we – relate to the concept of audience development? Is it a means to reach a utopia or is it a buzz word in today’s cultural politics? Oscarson will offer thought-provoking and argumentative reflections on the discussions generated at the conference.
Moderator Johanna Koljonen – author, experiential designer and critic.
Read more at RePublik´s website or follow them on Facebook.
The conference program was arranged by Nils Wiklander and Johanna Hagerius – RePublik/ Kultur i Väst, Malin Enberg and Dag Rosenqvist – Producentbyrån (The Producers’ Bureau), and Malin Schiller – Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival.
RePublik is Kultur i Västs (Culture in Western Sweden’s) national centre for audience development with focus on questions of leadership within the publicly financed sector of the cultural field.
