Tour Whore, October 7, 2012

Booking (The Process)
by Cameryn Moore

A lot of Fringers, both audience members and other performers, are kind of amazed by my touring itinerary outside of the Fringe. I tell them about TLoTH, that I’m barely getting by, and sometimes it’s just more of a pain in the ass than it’s worth, but they still are impressed. “Do you have an agent?” they ask. “How do you find your venues? Who handles your bookings?”

I don't, obviously. A professional agent wouldn’t make so many mistakes.

I make fewer mistakes than I did at the beginning, or at least have learned how to research so that my misadventures are at least well-educated ones. But holy shit, y’all, YES I BOOK MY OWN SHOWS AND QUITE FRANKLY I WOULD LIKE TO BE DONE WITH IT.

“How do you find your venues?” is the next question that comes, even if I’ve tried to head it off  by rolling my eyes, screaming, and/or frothing at the mouth in response to the first inquiry.

I see where this is going. You wanna know the whole process, don’t you? You think you’re going to do that for yourself, right?

Sigh. Okay, I will give you all of it.

any place in Alabama that is willing to host the Tranny Roadshow would probably be okay with Phone Whore

How do I find the venues? I dick around on the Internet. Really. I go to the newspaper sites of whatever town I want to go to, look around in the theater listings, see which theaters are playing shows in the same vein, or at least on the same scale (Fringe, that is), and find their web sites and look up their rental or co-production policies.

Because my shows are so… special, content-wise, you understand me, I will frequently stalk other sex-positive or queer or woman-positive shows touring around the country, check out their performing calendars and hit up the venues and colleges where they’ve appeared. After all, I figure, any place in Alabama that is willing to host the Tranny Roadshow, for example, would probably be okay with Phone Whore and any other shit I might want to bring to their stage. Any college that has included “Fellatio 101” in their Sex Ed Week already has a slut revolution happening on campus; they can probably handle my version.

And then? I send the pitch. I follow up two weeks later. If I really want that venue, I email again. If I’ve had the time, and laid my cards right, I’ve also already dug around in the area for potential collaborators, both individuals and groups:

• special-interest organizations at the university
• sex educators
• sex-positive/erotica/sex-worker-positive performers
• potential sponsors (business and media)
• alternative theater troupes and other spaces
• regional groups on Fetlife (it’s kinda like Facebook for kinksters)

Sometimes if I’m touring, deadlines pass and emails slip between the cracks, and I look up two months before I’m coming to a city and I’m all like, FUCK, WHY DON’T I HAVE A VENUE YET. And then I remember that it’s my fault, because I didn’t follow up back in July when I was in Winnipeg. I need to get better at juggling timelines, because that’s what being your own booker is all about.

HAHAHAHAH. Shit.

Okay, timelines and being nitpicky. Because even when you’ve secured the gig, you think yes, this is done, you might think that it should be obvious that the technician should be able to turn out the houselights from their booth, that the houselights should NOT be located across the venue, the only way to turn them off is to actually GO ON STAGE, but that is how it happens sometimes (hello, Covington, KY!), and you don’t actually know until you ask. That is not the sort of thing that you want to walk into the day of the show, believe me. … Oh, crap. I’m writing all this like, yes, this is a lesson I’ve learned, but then I realized that I don’t actually know where the house lights are for tonight’s show in Austin. HAHAHAHAH. Shit.

Yes, don’t assume that ANYTHING comes with the venue. Ask about EVERYTHING: how much do they promote, if at all. Who supplies the technician? The front-of-house? The box office? What do they have for a changing area? What are acceptable production and promotion expenses and who’s paying them? Who is contacting the media? Everything, everything, EVERY FUCKING THING that goes into making a production run, from signage out front to bottles of water backstage—what do you mean, there is no backstage?—everything you need to ask for. You might not get it, but then at least you won’t be expecting it, and you can take steps to take care of it yourself, if it’s something your show absolutely must have in order to run.

And then you have a letter of agreement ready to go, because most places don’t have them for themselves, and you want it all down in writing. And you ride them hard about signing it, because they also don’t have money to hire people to do the things that need doing, so it’s all volunteer and if you don’t get on them to get the contract back to you, it will sit in their inbox and biodegrade.

And then you make back-up plans, you scramble for your own FOH volunteers, you put up the event listings, you send out your own press releases even if they say they will, because you’ve learned, oh yes, you’ve learned in the past, that what they say they will do just doesn’t always match up. If you arrive early to the town, you cruise around with extra posters, you carry a little stack of cards that you’ve stickered for this little venue in this tiny town, because you really don’t know who is going to ask you what you’re doing in these parts (because you’re not from around here, is the implication, and they’re right). And that’s what you do: stay just as obsessive as out on the Fringe, but with a lot lower potential payout. When are you going to EVER hear that again: “Stick with Fringe, it’s a lot more lucrative.”

Doesn’t sound so good now, does it?

I’m looking into a more organized push to universities, and I’m exploring some producer/agent options in Montreal. But for right now, this is how I book, knowing full well that there is probably no support on the other end, but knowing just as well that whatever town I go to, there will be a few people happy to see what I do.

camerynmoore.com