Access All Areas Winter Issue | Page 33

WINTER | REVIEW Conglomerate warning AIF CEO Paul Reed weighed in on the threats to independent festivals from the big players… At Congress we published our updated ownership map, showing that just under 30% of the market is owned by two companies - Live Nation & AEG. AIF now represent 19.49% of the market. Superstruct is a new entry and the second largest UK festival operator with 6.52% of the market having acquired a number of festivals earlier this year including Boardmasters, Tramlines, Victorious, and Truck Festival. We repeat our warning: Allowing a single company to dominate festivals, and the live music sector in general through vertical integration results in a stranglehold that stifles competition throughout the sector. Making stories Owen Kingston, artistic director of Parabolic Theatre discussed the concept of being ‘immersive’ We give audiences a lot of control over their journey. We don’t use decision trees because that’s very limiting for consumers, as every decision creates a wall beyond which you can’t go, and this counters the whole idea of being immersive. You can’t then learn, play and be immersed. The volunteering “The immersive art form does something conventional theatre can’t do. It’s like listening to an album compared to going to a festival. ” boom Robin Wilkinson, director at My Cause UK says: “Emotional labour is 90% of the job. You can be a great administrator but you have to be able to communicate well with your volunteers. It’s important to empower and enable a volunteer! The energy and enthusiasm an individual can bring to an event can be a powerful force to harness!” To create artificial structures breaks the idea of immersion. Instead, we bend a structure around the audience’s decisions – whatever they might be. For example in a World War II event, For King and Country: D-Day, we staged a scenario about the Nazis invading Britain. We built the drama around the Nazis possessing a superweapon, and one of the options was that the Nazis built an atomic weapon, and it would be launched at a certain point of the show. One of the participants said: “Why don’t we capture it and fire it back”. We hadn’t thought of that as an option, so we didn’t refuse the request. Instead, we improvised a scenario in which they fire it back. Adaptability is important, as we can truly achieve something special. The immersive art form does something conventional theatre can’t do. It’s like listening to an album compared to going to a festival. You have the illusion of control. By walking in someone’s shoes there’s a change that can happen inside. 33