Site 3 : Understanding the Audience
Audiences for the project were varied in composition and recruitment, and consisted principally of local Hillfields residents, teenage participants and ‘paying’ members of the public from elsewhere in the city and beyond (and also the research team).
Teenage participants
Eight teenage boys were identified for participation in the project, representing a variety of backgrounds. We anticipated that these teenagers would form the bulk of our longitudinal study into impact/experience/ongoing outcomes of partaking in the project. The situation by August 2006 was in fact that few of these participants were actively involved in the Trail, but that a more significant number had had an input in devising and preparing for the ‘finished’ trail. We were able to interview two teenage participants, and observe many more during the devising process.
The Hillfields community
The local Kurdish community were in many ways an accidental audience for the project: they are the majority population living in the Primrose Hill Street area of Coventry; their input was never secure and tended to take the form of incidental happenings on the street. That said, the local population began to expect and anticipate the arrival of the performers, and to accommodate any audience they brought with them within spaces that were ‘owned’ (often literally) by them.
On the Friday and Saturday dates that the research team were present, there were more than 30 people on the street and in the shops who were present for (or forced to take note of?) the CMP Soc and their activities. The majority of these spectators and participants were Kurdish, young and male. Some paid more attention to events than others, and different types of interactions were on offer – the playing of musical instruments, one-to-one interactions as performers performed on the street, playing with puppets. Notably, much of this interaction was not spoken, for many of the locals have only limited knowledge of, and comfort in, speaking English. Our Kurdish-speaking research team member interviewed 11 local Kurdish men (including two shop owners).
Alongside (and overlapping with) the Kurdish population were a whole host of other locals of mixed age, race and origin. The most evident of these were the children, who could be seen daily following and interacting with the tour. They too learnt to expect the arrival of the Trail participants, and found their own ways of making sense of and interacting with it. These people were unlikely to be present for the opening of the tour, joining normally on the procession from the church hall to the church for the ‘wedding’. The children displayed excitement at being involved, and often stayed with the tour right through until entry to the pub for Pollard’s wake – that is, for those activities that took place very openly within the community.
However, audience members within the community did not always respond positively to the CMP Soc and their activities. Open hostility was occasionally displayed – shouting on the streets and throwing things, for example. Safety became a concern – the unpredictable nature of other people’s negative interventions making for unease and genuine concern among participants.
The ‘paying’ audience
The Pollard Trail was advertised through the Museum’s various outlets, local press and radio, listings magazines and online, and through Triangle and the CMP Soc as word of mouth. It was hoped that the tour itself (as ‘culmination’ of the project) would facilitate a dialogue between the Museum and the local community by bringing the collection/stories about Pollard out into the street. Local residents would be able to join in encounters with the CMP Soc, but at the same time, Museum visitors would be able to pay to see the events and sites of Primrose Hill Street perhaps for the first time. The audience would be able to drop in and out of encounters and choose their own level of engagement, interaction and participation. [There was no ‘typical’ profile for this audience. We met students, performers’ family members and even old friends of Pollard himself.]
Triangle and the other artists
This was also a project very much about professional development, both for Triangle and the other performers with whom they worked in order to bring The Pollard Trail to fruition.
