When an audience becomes part of the wider world

It’s Slung Low’s live radio project – I’m the artistic director of Slung Low, a Leeds-based theatre company.

For each event we commission five writers to write new plays for voices and perform them with a live band and foley sound – like they used to do on the Goon Show, if you remember that.

We perform them in front of an audience but we also record the show and then share it with a new audience; on the internet, or on community radio or burn them on to CDs and drop them off at homes for the elderly.

That means that the audience who turn up to see the recording are also in the recordings, their laughter and gasps become part of the soundtrack for the new audience.

People seem to really enjoy that element of the show, an audience becoming part of a future audience.

We try to make sure everything we do at Slung Low is focused on the audience experience, about finding ways for audiences to be re-excited and enthused about theatre.

15 Minutes Live was originally created with Jane Earnshaw of the I Love West Leeds festival, the desire to create a theatre event that could play on a Sunday afternoon when audiences have the time to come to a leisurely, comfortable experience.

You sit all afternoon listening to the plays knowing that every one will be different from the last – it encourages people to try something different, hear a different voice, a different take on their city. People are often surprised by a type of writing that they thought they might not have liked.

In between plays you can go off and buy some food from our guest caterers, this time it’s Manjit’s Kitchen with gorgeous vegetarian Indian food.

Or buy a slice of cake, a cup of tea, a bottle of beer. Someone once said that 15 Minutes Live was the theatrical equivalent of reading the Sunday newspaper all afternoon and I really like that sense of the event.

For me one of the really exciting things about 15 Minutes Live is that it allows us to engage with Leeds.

There is a growing catalogue of plays – from a brilliant and diverse group of writers – about, around and on the subject of what it means to be alive here in this place now.

We’ve found that has already formed a dedicated core of 15 Minutes Live fans who come to each event – because we normally move around so much as a company we rarely get the chance to build an audience like this – I get really excited when I see at the beginning of the event some familiar faces returning along with audiences we’ve never met before.

The one we’re doing this weekend is going to be special because it’s at our home, The Holbeck Underground Ballroom – railway arches on Bath Road, south of Leeds city centre.

All our shows at the HUB this year are going to be “pay what you decide”– which means you pay what you decide to after the show is finished. We’re hoping that takes the risk out of coming to something different, it’s certainly working so far – lots of different people are coming down to the HUB.

The Holbeck Underground Ballroom, 67-71 Bath Road, 2pm, February 24. Tickets www.slunglow.org