Out of funds? Just ask the crowd
Image: Giles Gartrell-Mills, David Ryan Kinsman and Katherine Moss from Shopping and F**king
“We need your money.”
This is the subtext when requests for rent, bills, food or charity donations are made. Now it is the message directed at Sydneysiders in the name of personal ambition.
Karly Pisano, producer of Shopping and F**king, says that when funds became an issue, she turned to the crowd.
“With any indie production there can be difficulties in budget, just because a lot of us are starting out in our careers in the arts. A lot of us have to fund our projects ourselves or find avenues to get it up and running,” she says.
Ms Pisano and the Sly Rat Theatre Company went through crowd funding website, Pozible, to raise $600 to help cover production costs.
“Most of our budget has come from crowd funding, we also held a fundraiser a few weeks ago to get the initial funds,” says Ms Pisano. “Pozible takes their 5 per cent – but then the raised money goes towards sets, costumes, props, lighting equipment, catering and all of those production costs.”
Crowd funding, or crowd sourced fundraising, is where networked individuals pool their money together to fund goals or causes. Groups or individuals set a goal and deadline, and wait for people to donate. This fundraising is usually done over the Internet, through sites such as Kickstarter and GoFundMe.
Pozible is an Australian crowd funding website, catering for a wide variety of causes, from artistic to technological to community-based initiatives. Last year Pozible funded another theatre company, Melbourne-based Present Tense, with $12,000. Popular Australian band, Eskimo Joe, raised over $60,000 through Pozible to record their sixth studio album.
25-year-old Benita de Wit is another that has set ambitious targets for her Pozible campaign. A lifelong fan of theatre and a budding director, Ms de Wit was accepted into the prestigious Columbia University in New York, but she lacked the financial support to take her there and cover living expenses. She made a video detailing her need for financial backing, and shared it on Facebook and Pozible.
“A lot of people were really supportive and donated,” says Ms de Wit. “One thing that I didn’t expect is that a lot of people shared it with other friends and I started getting donations from people I didn’t even know, from all over.”
She raised half of her $5,000 target in the first three days of fundraising.
“It started off as just friends but now it’s people from all over the world,” she says. “I think people just liked it [the video]; we took a risk and it’s quite personal. I think people just responded to that and its worked really well.”
Ms Pisano from Shopping and F**king says that crowd funding is a great tool for the arts sector.
“I’m really glad that crowd funding is kicking off and its giving people the opportunity to create. It has pumped a lot of life back into the indie scene in Australia,” she says.
The 1990s iconic theatrical play, Shopping and F**king, isn’t for the faint of heart.
The black comedy drama by English playwright Mark Ravenhill covers drug addiction, rampant consumerism, explicit sexual encounters, and a quest for love. The opening night is on June 24 at NIDA Parade Theatres, and director Alan Chambers is busy with the final preparations. He’s excited to share the provocative play in Sydney.
“It is one of the most striking plays of the ’90s, of the ‘In-Yer-Face’ movement,” says Mr Ravenhill. “There’s lots of graphic sex scenes and nudity and hardcore violence and it’s basically balls-out, it doesn’t hold anything back.”
Giles Gartrell-Mills, who plays the main character Mark, is enjoying his role.
“Mark is a recovering drug addict with a slightly warped sense of the world,” he says. “He is a very caring person and he falls in love with somebody he shouldn’t, and spends the rest of the play trying to deal with his mistakes.”
The play is produced by the Sly Rat Theatre Company, a small, tight-knit group founded late last year by director Alan Chambers and sound designer Andy Harmsen. Their previous show, The Martyrs, debuted in Melbourne in March this year on a tight budget.
But now if the budget gets tight, there is another option.
