Photo: Richard Davenport

The Bridge Company is made up of recent graduates from the BRIT School of performing arts, and they have decided to offer AYT readers some tips and tricks of the trade. 

Be realistic with your time – Phoebe Wagner

In rehearsals I think we could have been more organised with our own deadlines and making promises to each other. It’s easy to set a deadline to make yourself sound on it, or to say what people want to hear, but if you miss deadlines it creates a negative atmosphere – it’s better to set realistic deadlines, and if you beat them it feels really positive. At points we became quite negative and let that affect some of the work we produced earlier on in the process.

Know your audience – Asa Haynes

When creating your own theatre, you really need to think about how you are going to sell it. This really starts from the beginning. Think about what are your major selling points: what’s the age demographic? What makes this show unique? Once that’s done, social media. It is the best way to get your product or show seen and shared by many people easily. It’s not an easy job, it take time and creativity. You can give up with social media. Especially Twitter. If you stop then your audience will stop caring.

Be interesting on social media – Gus Gordon

It seems to be a basic action, but I personally have found it really challenging to go from engaging with your target audience to actually converting it to hard ticket sales. A great way I have found to reach people is through social networking (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) and experimenting with different mediums and trying to stray away from blank messages like “come to our show!” We had a good success rate with visual marketing like adverts and tangent videos that relate to our characters: for example, we mocked up audition tapes to create a breathing and living world to our show.

Be consistent with your social networking – Phoebe Wagner

I think we could have, as a company, spent more time thinking up a social networking plan that covered the entire process. I think we could have been more selective over who were targeting our tweets etc at, then done it larger volumes. We could have participated in some good old fashioned social networking – when we were at the Brighton and Plymouth Fringes, we should have participated more in order to have a further understanding of the event as a whole, the work other people were doing and to encourage others to see the show.

Pace yourself and focus your energy  – Milly Roberts

In the early stages of rehearsals there were a lot of blocks of time that required a lot of stamina and concentration – we were still getting used to rehearsing intensely for 6 hours and by the afternoon we were becoming distracted and less productive than in the morning. So, as we started organising our warm up for the run, we incorporated a lot of mindfulness exercises to help draw the mind back and focus ourselves. Also, after our lunch break we got into the routine of doing a five minute energiser activity, which helped keep our energy up throughout the afternoon. Since we identified our blocks, rehearsals became more useful and interesting, ultimately helping to create better quality work in a positive, creative atmosphere.

Selling tickets is hard – Sophie Soanes

If I could go back and give myself a piece of advice, it would be to understand how difficult it is to sell a show and adjust my methods accordingly. There are lots of tools you can use, and you should start early and use a wide variety: social media especially, it’s important to have good Twitter campaigns, flyering is very beneficial, and use your networks: contact friends, family and industry professionals personally is a good way to sell tickets. Do it personally, don’t just post it to your general Facebook audience. However it is hard, and I am still learning that you have to push promotion until the very end. I would advise my younger self to start early, stay consistent and if you put in the work, success will follow.