Free Thinking 2013 - Audiences
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2013
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a bid to reach new audiences, theatre is increasingly moving off the stage and the visual arts are coming out of the gallery, but is this a welcome trend? Matthew Sweet chairs the Free Thinking panel: BALTIC Curator Godfrey Worsdale, critic Sarah Kent, artist Wolfgang Weileder and Helen Marriage, director of Artichoke, the arts company responsible for a puppet elephant parading through London and Durham's Lumiere street light festival. Recorded on Sunday 27th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids |
| 0:25.5 | the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a special download from the BBC Free Thinking Festival. |
| 0:35.9 | For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.com.ukau. |
| 0:39.9 | Hello and welcome to Freethinking, Radio 3's annual gathering of brilliant minds. Some of them on the |
| 0:48.0 | panel, some of them in the audience here at Sage Gateshead. This year's events have been |
| 0:53.2 | organised around the idea of control. Who has it, |
| 0:56.8 | who's under it, who wants it. We do have a panel of guests up here on the stage. They're great, |
| 1:01.9 | all of them, really. But to be honest, this programme is about the people who turned up here |
| 1:06.7 | without being booked by my producer, who seem as a group to be more important than they ever were before, |
| 1:13.6 | and it may depend upon them whether this programme is a glorious success or a paralysingly inane failure. |
| 1:21.8 | Wagner put the audience in the dark by turning out the lights in the theatre so they would shut up and listen to his |
| 1:28.1 | Nibolungen. Now there's immersive theatre in which audience members are incorporated into the action, |
| 1:34.3 | members of the public offering themselves to stand on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London |
| 1:39.2 | under the eye of the sculptor Anthony Gormley, music and theatre coming out onto the streets and into the railway stations, |
| 1:46.5 | galleries putting on crowd-pleasing, child-friendly shows, and the funding system encouraging them to do so. |
| 1:53.1 | Online newspaper articles dwarfed by the great swathes of readers' comments. |
| 1:58.5 | So is the audience enriching culture or impoverishing it, making it more vital or just more mediocre? |
| 2:07.1 | Since there isn't time to introduce you to everybody in the audience, let me introduce you to the panel. |
| 2:12.7 | Helen Marage is co-director of Artichoke, the theatre company that brought a giant mechanical elephant |
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