English National Ballet School

Credit: Holly Clarke Photography

4 May 2017

Private Drama’s immersive evening for the corporate sponsor of English National Ballet School was a “roaring success” at Banqueting House.

The association between arts and business is a fascinating and mutually rewarding one. As champions of the art of performance we work on behalf of businesses who want to promote creativity and innovation. Over the past year, we have been involved in organising events that showcase this valuable relationship between clients and art exhibitions, special gallery openings, opera performances, ballet training and immersive theatre.

What all these artistic endeavours share is daring ambition, excellence and imagination and our clients want to align their company’s core values and culture with these and keep their message on point.

The things that are uppermost in our creative thinking when producing these events are storytelling and emotional engagement. We want our client’s guests to witness the marriage between business and art or their ‘story’ up close, to understand why they have chosen to support this artistic endeavour.

Often, we use our expertise and as our client put it our “boundless creativity” to curate the performance in a totally unexpected location, so guests not only have the surprise of encountering a recognised artistic company in an entirely different place but also of discovering our client’s support of it. For another client, guests opened a hidden door in central London to discover a bijoux production of Carmen from The Royal Opera House.

We also want our audience to be emotionally engaged, not only does that provide the host with opportunities to network but with a shared narrative that they can take away with them. If we can get the audience to feel something then they are going to remember it and be able to recall it for a long time. The emotion becomes the trigger for the following day’s water cooler moment when guests are discussing the event.

It could be a beautiful piece of music, a simple water colour, a dance solo, a gravity defying circus performance. Private Drama’s job is to enable that moment of engagement between the audience and the artist and to allow the powerful trigger for an association between the art and the business.