Perth Voice Interactive

A ONE-ON-ONE theatre festival has turned to crowdfunding to raise cash for its productions.

Crowdfunding through sites like Pozible or Kickstarter let supporters donate cash to see a project get off the ground, providing a bolster for artists usually surviving on government grants and two-minute noodles. Plays, movies and books have been funded through the platforms.

The upcoming Proximity Festival has embraced it in a big way, with seven of its 12 artists using Pozible to fundraise for their shows, bringing in $10,000 in donations all up.

The cash raised was matched by Creative Partnerships Australia, and organiser Sarah Rowbottam says “what it means for our artists is they have a really solid budget to be able to use for materials for props, to pay a sound designer … their work will have a higher production value”.

Proximity’s the only one-on-one theatre festival in Australia, and it’s a medium with pretty high costs with only one ticket-holder at a time.

The first time the festival was run it crowd-funded a more modest $1500, “but it was enough funding for us to start,” Rowbottam says. It’s now in its fourth year.

If a stated funding  target isn’t met the money collected is automatically refunded. Just under half the ideas posted on Pozible don’t meet their mark, and that makes for a nervous wait as the counter fills up.

Artist Emily Parsons-Lord says during the fundraising period “I got so obsessed with money! I was checking all the time!”

Her work Different Kinds of Air is a tour through time, exhibiting air from different ages throughout Earth’s history. She needed $3000 to buy airplants and gasses (half from crowdfunding, half from Creative Partnerships’ donation-matching).

“It’s all or nothing. We had to make our target, otherwise we got nothing,” Parsons-Lord says.

Friends were quick to donate, along with people who knew her previous works, but there were also a few strangers who took a liking to her idea and threw in a few lazy bucks.

“That blew me away,” Parsons-Lord says.

Once she reached her target “I felt amazing, and then it kept growing,” filling up another $315 past the target.

“I was overwhelmed with gratitude, I was so touched by the people who donated, I want to repay it somehow.”

For the Proximity artists, they’ve got until October to hone their works.

by DAVID BELL