Leading role to play

By BOB PEARCE

Theatre legend has youthful members of the chorus line stepping out to become stars overnight.

Helen Bartle came through a different route and she has not ended up a star, but she still has an important role in theatre. She began her career as an usherette, but there has been plenty of hard work and training before her recent appointment as marketing manager for the Auckland Theatre Company.

"I started usheretting for my local theatre, the Watford Palace Theatre in England when I was 18, so I had quite a lot of experience in the box office, the bar, selling ice creams, and being a runner backstage while I was studying A levels at college.

"I then went on to communication studies and a sociology degree at Goldmith's College, which is part of the University of London, and I continued working in my local theatre.

"After I graduated, I was a temporary marketing assistant for the Watford Palace, which boiled down to me lugging great big boxes of theatre brochures around in my mum's Citroen 2CV and delivering posters on the street.

"I was able to monitor increasing sales by me going out there and giving out vouchers and I found it very rewarding, and wanted to learn more about arts marketing."

The first stepping stone was a job at the well-respected Oxford Playhouse. While there, she attended a course run by the Arts Marketing Association in a remote part of Wales, which involved all the gurus of the industry offering guidance on mapping, audience profiling, marketing strategy, campaign building and all the specific skills required.

"That course was extremely pivotal in teaching me not only the hands-on experience but the formal theory."

Ms Bartle also worked for the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, and came to New Zealand on a contract to market the recent TV2 International Laugh Festival in Auckland.

From that experience she is convinced that more effort should be made to reach for a broader arts audience, with comedy, opera, theatre and live music not just tapping into their own circles, but reaching out across their specialties.

Ms Bartle has experience of making live arts more accessible to different sections of the community.

"I set up audio-description for the visually-impaired at the Oxford Playhouse which meant that sections of the blind community could enjoy live theatre.

"They had headphones on and while the action was taking place someone was talking to them telling them what was happening on stage and the set and costumes. It was very objective and let the individual's imagination take over."

Reaching out to younger audiences and schools will be part of her focus in Auckland to expand the Auckland Theatre Company's audience base. Funding decisions will determine the company's ability to expand its role in reaching out to schools and encourage a younger audience.

Any initiatives would not be at the expense of the existing subscriber base, which needs to be nurtured and consolidated. A third strand of company expansion would be its ability to tour productions, which is dependant on funding.

"There are audiences, in Northland for example, that we certainly don't tap into. It would be great to give them the opportunity to experience our work in their own centres."