Starter Kit. Idea 71 of 500. Cluster 4
Evening cultural performances on a fixed nightly schedule
The mechanism, from the book
An app that tells people what is happening tonight converts a day visit into a 2-night stay.
The first step
Book a hall or courtyard for four evenings and ask a local dance troupe to perform at the same time each night. Put a printed schedule with a ticket price in every guesthouse in town. Count attendance each night, and ask guesthouse owners whether any guests stayed an extra night for it. Rising attendance is the proof.
- Who pays first
- Visitors staying in town with nothing to do after dark, and guesthouse owners who want a reason to sell a second night.
- What leaves today
- Without an evening worth staying for, visitors leave by nightfall; a fixed nightly show turns a day trip into a stay.
Ask first
- Department of Cultural Affairs. Ask which dance troupes they work with and whether they perform for visitors.
- the local council (Municipal Council, Urban Council or Pradeshiya Sabha). Ask what approval a nightly performance with sound needs.
Check before you spend
That the venue is safe for an audience, that music at night is allowed there, and that performers are paid fairly and on time.
Find out these three numbers
- What will visitors pay for an evening performance ticket?
- How many hotel guests nearby have nothing booked after dark?
- What do performers, lights and seating cost per night?
A comparison from the book
Sigiriya. Chapter Five
"A Kandyan dance performance every evening, at a fixed time, that everybody"
A fixed time that everybody knows is what fills the seats every evening.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.