In the Heart of the Royal Mile

With over 3,000 shows performing in the span of just 3 weeks, the matter of getting punters to come to see your show is not insignificant. The average size of a Fringe audience is 12, which sounds horrifying when you think of Pendleton Hall, and more understandable when you learn that many venues have a maximum house capacity of about 25. Thanks to AHSTF, we'll have another American high school assigned to attend every one of our performances, just as we have been officially assigned to go see two other schools, and have un-officially assigned ourselves to a third. But the size of each school delegation varies widely, and we could have an audience of 6 kids or an audience of 35.

So off we went to the Royal Mile, to partake in the time-honored tradition of Flyering.

Since the Royal Mile is a whirl of utter chaos and noise, we knew to sidestep the trap of trying to put up any of our scenes. Voices are very hard to hear in the middle of the throng. I had devised an idea of doing dance/dream ballet/mime events, and Tim came up with the brilliant idea of having audience members push a buzzer button to select an option. The performance options were "Death," "Dancing" and "Shameless Plug," Each had its own music and sequence of actions. At the end, the "button crew" (Madison, Brian and Nathaniel) would re-set and we'd wait for another tourist to come forward and press a button.

We were given a 20 minute spot on the Central stage, which is a raised platform in the middle of a very busy street festival. When the group after us was a no-show, we were given a 15-minute extension. While Tim worked the sound, I hung out in the audience, pretending to be an Iowan Tourist named Ma Smalley.

As you can see on the right hand side of the above image, our large cast and dramatic color scheme attracted a lot of attention from men holding $5,000 cameras. As someone who loves taking pictures of Royal Mile performers, I knew that going in costume would draw a crowd. (The girls wore rehearsal skirts and left their costume skirts at the dorms.) At one point, a man with a professional video camera was filming our performance, causing a cynical American Dad who knew we were another AHSTF school to snort "one of those schools. They hired a professional cameraman to film them." I broke my Ma Smalley character and turned around. "Actually, I have no idea who that camera man is. He's not with our school."

Another guy behind me asked his friend to walk up the street, but the reply ame back: "No, I want to watch this. I love this." There were similar comments floating around as I dodged through the crowd, taking pictures. "This looks really funny!" "I love the style of it." "I'm absolutely going to this." "Get Janet! She needs to see this!" Of course my favorite comment was "This looks terrific and it's very smart. Most Univerity groups don't know what they're doing."

While the kids ran through the performances, Brian, Nathaniel, and Madison worked the crowd, handing out flyers and explaining more about the show. Lenin lent his beautiful booming voice to our "Shameless Plug" and made sure that everyone knew our Venue (Venue 45!) and that for only a "fiver," the show was a bargain price.

Although a pair of little old ladies ran away from Nathaniel's flyer because our "Skull with a Bow" graphic was deemed "too scary," we got a very positive response for our flyers. But my favorite moment came when Brian saw a group of Korean performers and asked them if they were from Korea. He explained the concept of our show to them, and had a nice chat with them. The groups exchanged flyers at the end of the conversation.

After the performance, the kids handed out more flyers and posed for a lot of pictures. Although they had been shy at first, they quickly learned how to get flyers to the people and talk up the show.

Our first performance is August 9th. We'll see if any of our work on the high street nets us some audience!

#Fringe #performance #edfringe #imflyingjack