The Adequate Blog

I’ve talked about the necessity of having a sign if you’re a stage act - it identifies you as, yes, an actual show, and gives your show an air of “legitimacy” (oh look he’s someone who’s performing and not some random weirdo who walked out onto the stage).

I’d like to talk about another form of signage which I don’t see too often at the short-run faires, or in fact the long-run faires either - the Advertisement.

With a short-run faire, everything goes up and comes down in a weekend. You have one and only one chance to make your potential audience aware that you have a show in the next few minutes. For most of us, this involves doing a lot of hawking - but that shouting can blend in easily to the background noise of Fare - it is a shouty place, after all.

A few years back, I decided to take some of the marketing for magicians stuff I spent a stupid amount of money on (long story) and make up signs for myself, advertising my show.   Nothing really fancy - five minutes in PowerPoint generated a simple 8.5″ x 11″ landscape format sign with my logo, the show’s name, Tobias the Adequate, and the tagline “Dangerous and More Than a Little Stupid” along with the warning “Three shows daily” and a space for the location and times for the shows.

I’ll print up a batch of these on a fairly neutral colored heavy card stock and pack them along with some thumb tacks or a staple gun, and when I get onto site and learn where and when I’m performing, I scribble that information onto the signs and then walk the site tacking them to posts and trees and the like. There. Now I have ten to twelve additional indications that I’ll be performing, along with where and when.

Some guidelines:

• Some sites don’t want you tacking signs to their trees.  Make sure you check so you don’t end up breaking this rule.
• If you’ve made nice with some of the vendors (see previous blog post), you may be able to tack a sign up on one of their posts or uprights. This has the added benefit that said vendor may well talk you up to their customers.
• You don’t have to splash out for seriously Ye Olde Parchmente style paper for these signs. Neutrals - tan, light brown, khaki - will work fine.
• Print a few more signs than you think you’ll use. Because you’ll wind up using them too.

Go forth and promote!