Dynamic Pricing
ARC’s policy is to set ticket prices based on demand, like budget airlines, which means we set a price when the event goes on sale and then sometimes put the price up or down depending on how the show is selling. Usually, the price will increase as we get closer to the event, so it is advantageous to book in advance, although sometimes we will put special offers on and reduce the price. Our website will always show the current ticket price.
ARC’s theatre and dance performances are priced on a Pay What You Decide basis, which means you don’t have to pay until after you have seen a show!
We want to encourage more people to come and see shows at ARC, more often. Pay What You Decide not only allows you to pay what you can afford, rather than a fixed ticket price, but also removes the financial risk of buying a ticket for a show in advance without knowing whether you are going to enjoy it or not.
Tickets are available to book in advance as usual, but there is no obligation for you to pay until after you have seen the show. You can then decide on a price which you think is suitable based on your experience, which means if you haven’t enjoyed it at all, you don’t have to pay anything.
All money collected will help ARC pay the artists who have performed, and we therefore hope you will give generously.
Please ensure you have arrived and collected your tickets 15 minutes before the show starts in order to secure your seats. At the end of the show, you can decide what to pay, either by cash on the door or by card at the Box Office.
General Prices: Pay What You Decide
Seating: Unreserved seated
The second of three special events for 2018, Deranged Poetesses brings together female and non-binary performers from poetry collectives across the north, and challenges them to create a new ‘pecha kucha’ performance. Five poets take to the stage with 40 timed images projected on-screen – what will they say about motherhood? You can bet it won’t be all Farley’s rusks and fontanelles!
Sky Hawkins – Smile, Say Cheese
Daughter of a mother who suffered from mental ill-health, foster-child, care-home kid, mother and now step-mother – join Sky as she flicks through the pages of her photo albums and tells the real stories behind those careful, smiling poses!
Carmen Marcus – DayMoon
The first three months of motherhood, known as the fourth trimester, is perhaps the weirdest milestone on the rollercoaster ride towards becoming a mother, when women most experience conflict between their need to return to their own body and the need to surrender it to their child.
Lisette Auton – Other Mothers
When people with disabilities are routinely sterilised, is a eugenically purified world just around the corner? How does the proverb ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ hold up today? In the era of Trump, are women’s reproductive rights regressing? Do you have to have a child to be a mother??
Sez Thomasin – Otherhood
As a queer, non-binary parent who has experienced the loss of stillbirth, Sez explores gendered semantics and assumptions around motherhood, and the reasons they will never feel able to claim the title. (Content note: this piece contains depictions and descriptions of stillbirth and child loss)
Louise Fazackerley – The Woman Who Turned Into An Eyeball
Wigan-based performer Louise plays narrator, child and very bad, smart-phone-obsessed, Northern working class mother in this darkly comic space-opera fable about the tensions between tech and ‘good parenting’.
This performance is priced on a Pay What You Decide basis, which means that tickets are available to book in advance as usual, but there is no obligation for you to pay until after you have seen the show. You can then decide on a price which you think is suitable based on your experience. Click here to find out more.
And before all of this happens, women and non-binary poets, and their poeting friends, are invited to a special afternoon of activities. Babes in arms are welcome during the afternoon, and a private space is available for feeding, changing and crashing out if needed. Join poet Carmen Marcus for We think back through our mothers, a poetry workshop that will tap into the daily rituals that mothers create in the home; watch a set of four films, Mother Tongues by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, bringing together acclaimed women poets of colour and the women who nurtured them; and poet and PhD student Katie Ailes asks Are the sisters doing it for themselves? in a round-table discussion where she will share some of her research into the work of female spoken word artists in the UK.