Urban Theatre Projects
Urban Theatre Projects is one of the first companies to experiment with the crowd-funding platform, Fundbreak.
A UTP performance of The Football Diaries. Photo: Ahilan Ratnamohan.
For more than 29 years, Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) has been creating distinctive new theatre works for Australian and international audiences. Based in Bankstown, New South Wales, it was awarded the Sidney Myer Award in 2002 in recognition of its outstanding contribution to Australian theatre.
Artsupport Australia has been mentoring UTP for several years and last year decided to try the online platform Fundbreak (www.fundbreak.com.au) to raise funds to tour its successful production, The Football Diaries to South Africa as part of the 2010 World Cup.
‘The idea of crowd funding appealed to us,’ explains Executive Producer, Michelle Kotevski. ‘There’s something very democratic about the idea of strangers funding your work because they like the idea. Similar sites in the US are very successful in raising extraordinary amounts of financial support for projects.’
The team set a target of $3,000 (less than three per cent of its total tour budget) and ran a six-week campaign.
‘We held our breath until the very last minute - if you don’t reach your target by the deadline, then you do not get access to any of the funds that have been pledged. In the end we reached our target, but we’d do it differently next time. As the site was relatively new, there wasn’t the critical mass of strangers supporting good ideas as there is in the US. Almost everyone that supported the tour through the service was known to our company. If they’d donated directly to the company, they would have been eligible for a tax deduction, which Fundbreak does not provide,’ adds Michelle.
Published 2011
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