PAY AS YOU FEEL
MANCHESTER has no shortage of fantastic theatre groups and venues, but pay-as-you-feel performances? They’re few and far between. But theatre and festival curators Word of Warning are offering just that – putting on a whole season of shows where the audience decides how much they’d like to pay at the end of the performance.
Tamsin Drury, director of Word of Warning said: “We know performance work that’s a little bit ‘out-there’ or experimental might be seen as ‘difficult’ but we really want people to come along and try it; and we’ve always worked hard to make that it accessible to as many people as possible – showing in both arts and non-arts spaces and trying to keep pricing truly affordable.”
“Pay What You Feel is relatively new to us. It’s turning out to be a really good leveller in allowing people control to choose what they are comfortable with paying.
“It has been experimented with by venues for a while now as a way of encouraging audiences to take more risks in their choices.
“In my mind it works best for venues who have regular access to their audiences – which is why, when The Lowry suggested doing Pay What You Decide as part of the experimental WTF Wednesdays programme (in The Aldridge Studio) it seemed to make perfect sense.”
To date, Word of Warning have done three WTF events with Massive Owl, Proto-type Theater and Stephanie Ridings – and in the coming season they have two more: Jo Bannon’s Alba (Wednesday, September 27) and Two Destination Language’s Declining Solo (Wednesday, November 8).
Dury continues: “When we put together the Word of Warning autumn/winter programme this year, it just seemed to right to extend the Pay What You Decide offer to the whole season.”
Upcoming shows include the live art and performance festival Emergency 2017 (Saturday, September 30); Akeim Toussaint Buck’s Windows of Displacement (Thursday, October 19); and the most ground-breaking of the lot – Darren Pritchard Dance’s Rent Party (Friday and Saturday, November 10 and 11). Rent Party looks at growing up poor in today’s Britain and takes place in a tower block in Salford.
Here, viewers can pay what they decide – be that in cash or in food – which will be donated to a local food bank.
For more information visit wordofwarning.org