NEA Barriers to Attendance

What does it mean for GableStage?

The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) recently released their Survey on Participation in the Arts report. One of their key focuses were the barriers for people who want to attend, but don’t. It is some great information for arts and theatre organizations. You can look over the full information here.

One of the most surprising and interesting pieces of information is the statistic for those who want to attend, but have no one to go with (close to 30% overall). It was a tidbit of information that has lingered with us so we wanted to do our own survey (sort of based on the NEA’s) to see how this relates to our audience and our area. We know we don’t have the capacity to do a super official survey and break it down the way they do, but we were interested in receiving feedback. We hope you will take a moment to respond.

To take our survey click here. 

Let us know your thoughts on the NEA report and perhaps what we can do to combat some of these barriers. We are the proud recipients of an NEA Artworks grant for our 2014-2015 season production of Choir Boy by Tarell Alvin McCraney, and we found these reports to be interesting and worth further discussion.