The old refrain is that there is nothing to do in the city of Yorkton. I’m beginning to have very little sympathy towards that viewpoint, largely because the city has a bad habit of scaring acts away.
This city is a strange one, in that an event is either a massive success or a bit let down, without anything in between. I expect to see either a full house or an empty room when I go to an event – either everyone has decided to support something, or nobody does. It also doesn’t seem to follow any sort of logic behind what succeeds and what fails, I’ve seen equally accomplished artists in the same field working in the same genre on both ends of the success spectrum. Some people do a better job in promotion than others, of course, but it’s a frequent head-scratcher when trying to figure out why someone has filled a room while another hasn’t managed to bring out anybody.
The problem is when you get the sparsely attended show. I recently was at an excellent concert which had fewer people in the crowd than were on stage. To the credit of the performer, our tiny private show did get the same level of effort as his sold out shows in other towns in the province, but it was still strange and a bit awkward to be in an audience of three.
He’s not likely to come back here, and I don’t blame him – I wouldn’t want to play to another room of three either. It’s not the only show to only get a couple people in the audience, low ticket sales has lead to the cancellation of a few events over the years, and once they go they’re not coming back. It’s too much effort to perform to nobody, so the people behind these events aren’t going to look to Yorkton again when they’re in the planning stages.
There’s no one factor when it comes to what works and what doesn’t to get people buying tickets, but it often seems that this city can trend towards being hermits. But then when someone complains that there’s nothing to do here, and I think about otherwise excellent events that nobody actually attended, I start to feel a bit incredulous. Of course there’s nothing to do here if nobody wants to do it.
As a result, we have a simple solution here. In these pages, you’re going to see a lot of different upcoming events written about and advertised. As a person from this city, your job is to attend them. Maybe you’re not going to like every single event, maybe you’re not going to want to go back to them a second time, but attend everything you see. If you do that, word will get around to performers, event organizers and other key people that Yorkton actually attends stuff now. If this city gets a reputation as one that attends shows in big numbers, that generates crowds at absolutely everything, we’re going to get more people who want to perform here. If we can get crowds at everything, we’ll become a regular spot for entertainment in this province.
It’s easy to put the blame on others when complaining there’s nothing to do in this city, but it’s also not really true. There’s lots to do here every week, now it’s on us to actually do it.
