To charge or not to charge: fees, filibustering and Wise Words

Ticket sales versus donations; a real dilemma. I’m sure many festivals up and down the country share this issue. One of the most important considerations at the heart of Wise Words is the idea of making the creative arts accessible to all; affordability is key when deciding on tricky issues such as weighing artist’s fees... View Article

Ticket sales versus donations; a real dilemma. I’m sure many festivals up and down the country share this issue. One of the most important considerations at the heart of Wise Words is the idea of making the creative arts accessible to all; affordability is key when deciding on tricky issues such as weighing artist’s fees with ticket-prices to balance the books. (They never balance, let’s be honest…!) Many of our festival events are aimed at families – fostering an interest in poetry and performance is key to developing a sustainable audience, investing in readers, writer and performers of the future. But family-priced tickets can be prohibitive, as anyone who has taken two children out for the day will know.

So, in order to make our festival as appealing and affordable as possible, we try to make many events free, and endeavour to offset the loss of revenue from these events against the ticketed events for headline participants. But this is also not without problems; our ethos of ‘arts accessible to all’ still obtains with regard to the larger events.

How to resolve this ? Well, this year we have decided, where possible, still to keep events either free or attractively-priced, but to ask for donations from the audience. (This is a big step for us, and one that has caused us to sit up late into the night, debating the ethics of doing so, filibustering long past the midnight hour) . We don’t want the audience to feel obliged to put their hand in their pockets at our events; but we do need to make them realise that overheads are high, goodwill (whilst in plentiful supply) doesn’t pay performers’ fees, and we want to keep developing the festival.

There is a popular cultural perception that artists should be giving their services for free. After all, they enjoy what they do, so it can’t really count as ‘work,’ can it ? Let’s imagine you hold a party, to which you invite all your friends – some of whom are artists, some of whom are trade labourers. You wouldn’t think twice about asking your piano-playing friend to sit and play for your guests – many’s the time I’ve been accosted with ‘’Oh, so-and-so’s a singer, you wouldn’t mind just playing through the entire Sondheim Songbook for her as after-dinner entertainment for everyone, would you ?’’ But you wouldn’t dream of saying to your electrician-friend, ‘’Oh, the wiring on the ground floor has gone to pot, you couldn’t just re-wire everything for me after dinner, could you ?’’ Or your plaster-mate to re-do the master bedroom whilst they wait for the other guests to arrive ?

Artists often pursue solitary lives, devoting many hours to crafting, honing, practicing and delivering what they do; their fees stand in recognition not just of the end product they deliver, but also of the hours spent perfecting that product – be it a novel, a song-cycle by Schubert, a collection of poems, a finished canvas. It’s in recognition of all this that the donations for which we’ll be asking at the events at Wise Words next month will stand, and hopefully will allow us to invest in keeping our dynamic, creative and engaging festival open and accessible to as many people as possible.

Dan Harding is Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent, and a member of the Wise Words team. Follow Dan on Twitter.