Sex In Real Life Evaluation
Below is the written and video evidence and evaluation for the development and performance of Sex In Real Life.
Self-Evaluation
Quantitative - tickets sold, tour-dates secured, participants engaged, audience reached
We sold 87 tickets, at first this felt disappointing but we attribute much of this in part to Barnsley’s location and the length of the evening - it finished after the last public transport to Leeds - a base for much of our audience - had terminated. Many people fed back that these factors prevented them from attending. Also we felt that the Civic had not been very proactive in promoting the show or - as became apparent - forging connections with local press, whom we found very difficult to engage.
Only 100 seats of the possible 300 were planned (from the beginning) to be made available for New Work Night, and in selling 87 tickets we broke their sales record, which indicates the historical difficulty of selling tickets for that event, and for dance, which Ian Morley had personally attested to in our first conversations, so this makes us more confident that the work we put in to market the show was effective.
We were also disappointed to find that so few venues managed to attend the show, despite us inviting many, in good time, with well-thought out invitations, often exactly as they specified preference in the Venues North “Routes In” document, created for the purpose of better communication between artists and venues. Some of these were last-minute cancellations over which we had no control. We secured 1 tour date with York Theatre Royal in their main house which was a huge achievement for us, and we are in ongoing talks with various other venues with a view to being booked to tour around the York Theatre Royal date in Autumn 2018.
Going forward we will continue to utilise our current contacts, especially with people who did see the show, and expand our networks and forge as many relationships with venue staff in person as possible, to strengthen the impact of contact made later.
We reached our target for participants with our outreach activities which was fantastic, with a diversity of race, gender and age among the groups, which was our intention.
We received huge boosts to our projected audience reach numbers by partnering with Barnsley’s POP Pride Over Prejudice festival featuring us in their brochure and on their social media feed, as well as our own social media activity and paid “boosts” for our posts and trailer, and two appearances to discuss the show and its themes on BBC Radio Sheffield which has 178,000 total listeners per week. Paulette Edwards, whose show I was featured on, tweeted about the show to her 2627 Twitter Followers providing further exposure.
The Sheffield Telegraph, with a circulation of 8092 ran an interview piece about me as an artist and Sex In Real Life ahead of the show.
We were featured in various local entertainment listings including Voice Magazine, Welcome to Yorkshire and UK Theatre Web.
Qualitative logistics - how smoothly the activities happened, what challenges, what opportunities , and
Qualitative artistic - Audience feedback, participant feedback, performer and management team feedback. Press, personal reflection on process, product and learning/artistic development.All measured against original proposed activity and achievement aims
Audience feedback was overwhelmingly positive and achieved my ambitions for how the show would be received. (See Evidence Feedback and Data attachment)
Participant feedback was very positive, and feedback they gave in person was crucial for the improvement and development of the outreach pack.
While it was not possible in the end to glean feedback from performers without interfering with rehearsals and breaks which - as the period was so intense - felt unethical, their spontaneous responses to the process and the work were very positive and one of the performers fed back:
“This has been the most fun I’ve ever had on a project”
They were committed and worked exceptionally hard with fantastic results and have all requested to be included in the future life of the project.
We aimed to expand the profile of the work going forward, and anticipated that this would be in part achieved by attracting positive reviews. However, as mentioned, while we received exposure on the radio and from the Sheffield Telegraph we struggled to attract any press to the event itself. This is something about which we are particularly concerned as it is a major drawback for future tour booking and advertisement, and denies us some insight into how the piece is critically received. We are confident that we had excellent press materials as we developed them in collaboration with our mentors and the venue, and we did everything possible in order to engage the press initially; writing, calling, social media contacting and pursuing contacts both independently and via the Civic marketing team, offering comps and interviews and using not only the Civic’s press contact lists, but also lists from Sheffield and Leeds, and were disappointed in the lack of availability for writers to attend. Having witnessed this process at other venues and receiving insight from other companies who have tried to engage press at the Civic, we feel that this is in large part a problem specific to the location, and would not be the case in a larger, more accessible city with more interaction between press and the venue. We also see that Friday nights are more difficult to attract people to work during, and new work, especially in the context of an evening of new work, requires additional attention to investing in good press relations.
However as this reluctance was so unexpected, we did not have a contingency plan in place. Going forward we will invest more time in building relations with the press at venues with lower press engagement and local bloggers, will avoid having one-night runs on Friday nights, and will set aside money to reimburse travel expenses for reviewers to encourage them to make the journey.
My personal reflection on the product is that I am very happy with the performance itself, my artistic vision was achieved and I was thrilled to converse with audience members afterwards and hear their interpretations of the ideas and their impressions of the show’s elements (See video weblink for audience feedback, film of the show and interview). The ideas evidently all came across clearly, and were energising and inspiring as I’d hoped.
On the process, it did feel very brief, but this was more out of necessity than design and the team and I rose to the challenge.
Frustratingly, the evaluation for me has been the most difficult part, and while the practical project finished on time, the evaluation has been extremely delayed. This was despite my best efforts; gathering a range of data and materials throughout the project, I had planned a fairly informal evaluation process, having had positive experiences with this model previously, but because of considerable disruptions in my personal life the process was delayed, and then as the producer’s contracted time had expired, she took work elsewhere and this delayed the evaluation process further, and it was then difficult to find availability to complete the evaluation. In future I will plan a much more formalised evaluation process and include a contingency plan should a similarly unexpected disruption happen.
I must add that this delay was greatly exacerbated by the stress induced by the user-unfriendly Grantium system; repeatedly I returned to my application to find that my data had been wiped from the income and expenditure tables, despite my saving them. Sometimes this happened within the same session. This set me back a lot and made the task feel completely impossible and overwhelming. The process and requirements are not clear and many of the supplementary guidelines are difficult to find and navigate, and missing important information, meaning that sessions spent working on the form required unnecessarily prolonged periods of research. As a freelancer who has to spend a lot of time travelling, working away from home and doing erratic hours, and as someone going through emotional difficulty, I found this system very poor and in fact actively obstructive to my trying to complete what should be a simple task - while it absolutely did not need to, I feel it presents an access issue.
My challenges for the future are the difficulty I experienced with the videographer, which is a hiring and team management issue. I have previously had such positive experiences with specialist collaborators that I was trusting, and have learned that this is a mistake if I have not worked with the person previously, despite him coming highly recommended and having an impressive portfolio.
Other challenges are the difficulties with attracting press and venues as detailed above.
These factors had the effect of changing the requirements of the tour booking role which was a frustrating development, but ultimately has allowed us more time to develop the idea of becoming a company - FlightRisk - and plan brand identity and strategy for the future, and create high quality supplementary documents for venues which will increase our likelihood of success with tourbooking (See show-pack attachment - not full quality for size reasons).
Budget review - safe and appropriate spending
While we were disappointed to fall short of our income targets, we were able to manage our expenditure carefully. We saved money in some places and our contingency covered reasonable unforeseen eventualities as intended.
Below are the Audience feedback and development interviews and my interview featuring clips of the show.
My Channel
Here's Looking at UKIP, a short film
Marketing Analytics Reports
The marketing campaign for the premiere of Sex in Real Life at Barnsley Civic on February 17th was delivered successfully and on time. We had the capacity to test different online engagement activities including; scheduled tweets, interactive Facebook posts, creating a page specifically on the website for Sex in Real Life engagement, as well as publicly advertising the posters and flyers throughout Sheffield, Barnsley and Leeds.
We have measured the success through the engagement that we received on our online profiles, that transpired to physical ticket sales. The Civic was impressed to see so many tickets sold for New Work Weekend. Ian Morley (Programmer) even commented on our box office reports that, “And yes a great success, I was very happy with it. I have to say the work that Madeline and yourself [Melanie Purdie, Producer] put in really assisted with the audiences, you are a shining example to all new companies.
Here is a copy of our box office reports, where you can see we sold 87 tickets, which is breaks the box office record for the most tickets sold for the Civic’s New Work Weekend.
Facebook Posts
To reach new audiences we invested in Facebook ‘Boost’ post advertising. The posts allowed us to target audiences in Yorkshire who haven’t heard about the show or the artist before. You can see from the results below that we reached new audiences and received more engagement with the profile and the show.
Twitter
We posted once a day for two-months and received 25.1k impressions over a 59-day period.
Paulette Edwards, whose show I was featured on, tweeted about the show to her 2627 Twitter Followers providing further exposure.
Following the show we received a lot of positive social media responses, including from Ian McMillan who has 12.9k followers, providing invaluable exposure.
Ian McMillan @IMcMillan Feb 17
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Very much enjoyed the show Sex in Real Life by @madelinedances as part of @BarnsleyCivic New Work Weekend! Fine ensemble work!
James Whittle @JWW_composes Feb 18
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Great to see @madelinedances #SexIRL last night @BarnsleyCivic. Genuine, candid & FUNNY! Performed so naturally & engagingly too.
Kayleigh @KayleighPrice91 Feb 18
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A great show last night by choreographer @madelinedances 'Sex in real life' Full of truth!
Hannah Courtney @hannah_cee Feb 18
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What a brilliant and thoughtful show!!! Sex in Real Life by @madelinedances
We were disappointed to find that fewer people than we had hoped used our Hashtag, which would have made data capture for explicit interaction a lot clearer and more straightforward, but are confident that this can be improved in future when the show and marketing is available over a longer time in more locations and with more high-profile partners such as venues collaborating, as will be the case on tour. Going forward we are looking at expanding the reach of our social media output with a targeted attempt to brand-focus our output and increase our number of followers, including those who in turn have more followers and greater reach.
Website
We linked the website regularly on our social media posts, which encouraged new visitors to the website. Since we began marketing the show in January, we received 591 new page views with 80.6% of those sessions being new visitors to the website.
We have to thank the Civic, Theatre Delicatessen and POP Festival for their contribution to our marketing strategy and encouraging new audiences to see the work.
Audience Feedback
Show:
“I enjoyed the performance and thought it was very entertaining, engaging and informative”
“I really enjoyed the show! I have never seen anything like it, I found it really interesting and felt you got some very important messages across”
“I don’t usually like pieces that include interpretive dance but I really enjoyed it and I think it fit well with the subject matter. I feel you got a lot of good messages across around all things about sex, including things that are not usually raised.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed this as a 27-year-old but I can imagine the 13 year old version would have loved and needed this in 2003!”
“From a parent/carer professional Sex Educator perspective it was joyous to see the subject covered in such an informative but HAPPY way that was so accessible on so many levels. Relaxed and funny but full of information and vigorous.”
“A brilliant show, that everyone should watch. Very informative but also very entertaining and funny. Would be brilliant for all kind of people and backgrounds – very accessible.”
“Great combination of dance, music, movement, colour, speak and recorded sounds!”
“So fun! Touched on some brilliant messages with great music, physicality and humour.”
“Excellent, really enjoyed it. Very funny at times, thought-provoking at others. Very good use of dance and movement.”
“I enjoyed learning about stuff I hadn’t thought of before, e.g. (consent and what’s not consent). I enjoyed all the movements and how some were in since and others were unique to certain characters”
“There is a lot of research into the subject of sex and it educated me a lot.”
“I enjoyed the piece. I learnt things I didn’t know before.”
“It was a really good show, lots of energy. A lot of information that was made entertaining. Enjoyed the colour, very imaginative.”
Vox pops:
Wieke Eringa (Yorkshire Dance):
“This charming, dynamic and very witty show makes the best of all the choreographic and physical options of exploring our attitudes towards sexual intimacy. It is wonderful to see such a thorny subject tackled with guts, playfulness and humour; leaving us with a wonderful after-glow of joy and connections.”
Outreach
Peter Lawton, Barnsley College:
Madeline Shann delivered a workshop in which our student actors were able to develop an awareness of physicality and space through accessible and engaging exercises. Students explored new ways of creating physical and visual theatre for performance, as well as establishing a more focused and disciplined approach. Our students are encouraged to develop as creative artists and Madeline’s main aim was to allow the students to make their own discoveries – to give them not only some immediately applicable performance skills but also a stimulus to continue experimenting on their own creative path and were able to ask Madeline for advice and ideas to help them on their creative journey. This was particularly useful as the students are currently creating their own devised show based on the miners’ strike.
The workshop was fun but also very useful in getting the students to release their own physicality, giving them ideas as to how they can present text in an innovative and original form, which ultimately will be more interesting for an audience.
They also received valuable advice on setting up and developing their own theatre company.
Peter
Peter LawtonHE Pathway Leader Acting for Touring Theatre Media, Music and Performing Arts
Students workshop feedback:
What did you learn?
I learned different aspects and perceptions of sex and how it affects many different situations and people.
I learnt the importance of using your body to make text work.
I learnt how hard working from ensemble can be
Creating a piece from a few words
That text can be interpreted in physical movement. That you need high energy and stamina
6. To let go and try stuff out. To push yourself out of your comfort zone
More about the stages of companies and how to progress
How to pick at text and find different ways to perform the text.
I learned about using text to create physical theatre and using physicality from text
What I have learnt from this workshop was that you can sometimes use different techniques in performing with physicality
I learnt that text can be explained using physical theatre
To let go and be free of control when it comes to turning text into movement, plus a few tips on writing.
What (if anything) would you like more of?
More research and definitions on the various sexualities as transgender was only briefly touched upon.
Maybe some in depth work that makes you question why?
Writing technique
Give more stimuli to do and practice. Maybe show some examples of yourself
Vocal techniques. Warm-up exercises because they were fun.
Movement/dance
Nothing, everything was good.
I would like more teamwork for physical theatre and more movement tasks
What (if anything) would you change?
Nothing
Nothing
Slightly less physical stuff. Focus on some vocal techniques as well.
The heat of the room and being exhausted
Add some examples of how you would develop the text
I would put more group work in as a lot of people who aren’t confident with physical work alone didn’t want to show their work
Nothing
8. I wouldn’t change anything
Any other comments?
I adored the many different action sequences going on all at once.
Thank you!
Very good.
Good fun workshop to get myself out of my comfort zone
Overall very fun and informative
I enjoyed the workshop
Creatives workshop feedback, Theatre Deli Sheffield, as part of Lets Talk About Sex festival
1 Comments: “Lovely open structure and atmosphere” When did you last visit the theatre?: “Yesterday”
2. Comments: “Really nice to use images and not just words, great to move!” When did you last visit the theatre? “3 days ago” Age: 24
3. Comments: “Madeline was a fantastic workshop leader, created a really friendly, comfortable environment” When did you last go to the theatre? “(7 months ago) Age: 29
4: Comments: “Useful ways into movement/theatre work. Great to experiment.” When did you last go to the theatre? “Last month” Age: 58
