I am beginning to worry that people are losing a sense of curiosity and are becoming more risk averse about things with which they are not completely familiar.
I went to see a sumo tournament yesterday and really loved it. The matches progressed surprisingly quickly for all the ritual involved (40 men in single elimination in under three hours, including intermission, and two trophy presentations.) The sense of theatre was appealing to me as well. There was none of the outrageous boasting you find in professional televised wrestling. Except for one man, there wasn’t much flexing and scowling.
Most of the intimidation was accomplished by steely glares, little gestures when slapping oneself and the amount of salt thrown into the ring. None of this was too subtle for the audience which ooohed, aaahed and applauded in approval at the gestures. It is rather amusing to conclude a wrestler did not make good on his boastful salt tossing when he is quickly ejected from the ring.
My concern about the degradation of curiosity was based on the low attendance at both days of the tournament. Even though I wasn’t involved in the effort at all, true to my background, I worried about how much money the businessman who spearheaded the effort might have been losing. They attributed the low attendance to the fact that there were no men from the state wrestling. I will say that despite the fact there are a lot of Japanese here, they only comprised about half the audience with Caucasians, Polynesians, Filipinos and some Mongolians (a number of the wrestlers were Mongolian) making up the rest.
Even though I often grumble that people are more interested in sports than the arts, I was rather dismayed by the attendance. Posters for the tournament went up 6 months ago. I was actually relieved to find out the contest was in June because our performance schedule was so busy back then. Three months ago a local man who had attained the pinnacle rank of Yokozuna returned to promote the event and has been talking it up all over the place.
Of course, last week there were all sorts of stories in the media about the event. I was excited to be attending and read up about the sport on the event website which included a short introductory video. The result was that I actually spent more on tickets than I had intended because I wanted to be closer to the action.
As you might imagine the real source of my dismay isn’t my empathy for the event producers. It is that attendance was so low despite all the media promotion, the personal support of a man who is viewed locally as a hero and the readily available background information that has some bad implications for my programming which isn’t backed with the resources to provide all that.
Part of my surprise is derived from the fact that sumo has had no place in my life. Though it isn’t as big as soccer, baseball and football, there are a few clubs in the state. I would have expected a more general familiarity to pose less of a barrier to attendance.
It has been about 13 years since the last tournament was here, but with the Yokozuna making a lot of public appearances, I would have expected a buzz of people reminiscing about attending or missing out the last time. Perhaps what I saw this weekend was the best of what the local environment can generate. Perhaps even fewer would have attended had the event happened on the East Coast.
I being to see why some organizations are casting local celebrities in shows. Even though most people wouldn’t have personally known a local sumo competitor, the fact that one shared common experiences and knowledge with a wrestler can be enough motivation to participate in an unfamiliar experience. All it takes is a handful of other people who have also never met the local person either sitting near you clapping and shouting his name to validate the experience as an enjoyable one. This is another example of why word of mouth is so powerful.
If this represents a growing trend it means that programming will not only need to be relevant to the interests and lives of my local audience, but also may need to have a more direct association with which they can identify. Over the next year I have three shows possessing local connections to varying degrees. I will have to observe them closely to see if interest increases as the less apparently connections are revealed.