No matter if it's black or white

Corporate sponsors are backing shows that are way outside the comfort zone of the traditional theatre-going middle classes. There's a new audience out there, they tell Simon Tait

"The challenge of Purlie," Ossie Davis wrote in 1970 about his 1961 black opera, "was whether we two [blacks and whites], separated by customs and laws and habits, could sit down and look at the same thing and laugh at it at the same time." Today, that is still the challenge. The opera, an unlikely comedy about segregation, was written when the issue was raw and bleeding in the United States. It was being revived on Broadway that year and won Grammy and Tony awards.

"The challenge of Purlie," Ossie Davis wrote in 1970 about his 1961 black opera, "was whether we two [blacks and whites], separated by customs and laws and habits, could sit down and look at the same thing and laugh at it at the same time." Today, that is still the challenge. The opera, an unlikely comedy about segregation, was written when the issue was raw and bleeding in the United States. It was being revived on Broadway that year and won Grammy and Tony awards.

Davis hit the mark in a way being sought for again today. The search in the UK - until recently a rather half-hearted one - has been for a black audience for the kind of show supported by traditional, white, middle-class British concert-hall or theatre habitués. Now, it is for an audience of all complexions for the innovative new work of black artists working in an environment in which the old barriers are fast disappearing - and at least part of the driving force behind this is corporate business.

Purlie is in rehearsal for its British premiere at the tiny 150-seat Bridewell theatre, off Fleet Street in London. The venue has a dual devotion to innovative musical theatre and to new audiences, the younger the better. The opera opens this year's Black History Month.

"It's everyone's opera," says Simon Collier, the Bridewell's executive director and the show's producer. "It's a black theme, but it's a subject that's still with us, and the bookings - which, at £7,500 one month before we open, are amazing for us - are not coming from our habitual audiences."

Three days before Purlie opens, the black actor and director Josette Bushell-Mingo, an associate at the Almeida, launches a three-week festival of black theatre and music called Push 04 - not at fringe venues, but on the main stages of Sadler's Wells and the Almeida. It includes the drama Two Step by the black playwright Rhashan Stone - receiving its world premiere at the Almeida - which "places in our mouths the contemporary British language," Bushell-Mingo says.

Also being performed is Errollyn Wallen's opera Another America: Fire, about an African female astronaut who is about to take off on the first manned expedition to Mars and finds herself having to come to terms with her ancestors as she prepares to make history. It embeds a barely futuristic scenario in a deep ethnic past that may be invisible but is far from irrelevant to the 21st century.

Dance is represented by Ben Love's ballet Awakening, created with the composer Paul Gladstone Reid; both men are classically trained and black. While the tale is black - an even more spiritual evocation of a man's quest to find his dead loves, to find his god's favour and to get release from melancholy - the dance is perceptibly not. "We're using traditional ballet movement to evoke a black story, so it's a blending - but you can only do it if you're working at the top level," says Love, a blending "which can only come off if the standard is high".

The purpose of Push 04, Bushell-Mingo says, is to create events that celebrate black artists "with as much sass as possible", but the partnership with the Almeida makes it more than that. "Push is also a bridge to audiences," she says. "It's not about how many people see the material, but who sees it. There will be people who won't go because it's black work; there will be black people who won't go because it's black work; but my contract is with the audience, whoever it is, because the arts is all our right."

Neither of these events would be happening, though, without the support of big business. In Push 04's case it is JP Morgan, the international corporate bank, and in the Bridewell's case it is KPMG, the financial management consultants.

KPMG has sponsored the Bridewell since it opened in a former public baths 10 years ago, but without its support - both financial and managerial - Purlie would be impossible to stage.

The KPMG partner responsible is Denton Djurasevich, who is in charge, among other things, of "cultural change" policy. In July, the firm gathered other corporates and possible supporters, such as Goldman Sachs and the Office of Fair Trading, at the Bridewell to talk about the possibilities of Purlie.

"Corporations tend to bring people to sport and posh opera - the same sort of people - but we've been committed to what was called community broking, and we think we can do something different with corporate evenings," Djurasevich says. "The issues [of Sixties America] are still there, and we can bring them out in a gentle way by inviting guests, who may be of non-Anglo backgrounds and who have their own different experiences."

The phrase now is "community social responsibility", and JP Morgan also is committed to it. Internal groups within the huge organisation are encouraged. One of them is called Ujima, an African word meaning (roughly) "collective satisfaction", whose senior patron in the bank is Carol Lake, the co-head of marketing for Europe.

Ujima represents JP Morgan's black executives, of whom Lake is one. They meet regularly to discuss issues and interests, and invite guests. Among them have been Michael Attenborough, the artistic director of the Almeida, and Bushell-Mingo. Push 04 was launched at the bank's City of London offices as the guests of Ujima.

"We're eager to see initiatives like Push 04 succeed," says Lake, who is also on the board of the Almeida. "The trick, as we see it, is not to get black audiences to conventional music and drama performances from which they have felt excluded, or to introduce white audiences to black work, but to give air to a new element of British culture that has traces of both traditions."

But, as Attenborough points out, the Almeida's natural Islington audience is dogmatically white, middle class and not particularly adept at managing change. So why is something that is as challenging as Bushell-Mingo would like Push 04 to be going to be right for them?

"If you look in the long term, the event will continue to influence us after Push has happened. We will have failed Push, and this phenomenal energy, if this is just a distant memory," Attenborough says. The trick is to entice a new element without alienating the existing audience. "We have to be determined, we have to be committed, we have to be dogged," he says, "but we wouldn't be able to commit to it as we do without the support of sponsors like JP Morgan."

The Royal Opera House is also part of the Push 04 mix, with Deborah Bull, the director of ROH2, which programmes contemporary work for the Linbury studio, on the Push advisory panel. Future events will be presented there. "This year, we could have had TV, musical theatre, installation performance art or anything else if it had been right. It just happens that it's theatre, opera and dance," Bushell-Mingo says. "Maybe next time."

And there has to be a next time, whether it's at small fringe venues like the Bridewell or flagships like the Royal Opera House. And Attenborough wants the Almeida on board for the whole ride.

"We don't want it to be singular," he says. "We don't want to say that this is our black play for the year. With the help of JP Morgan, the project of getting 16 to 25-year-olds into the theatre is a serious one, and that's our biggest passion - for the young of any colour or background to feel they can come in with no terror, no inhibition, because it's something they've always done. The middle class will come to anything; the trick is to make sure tickets aren't gobbled up by our traditional circle of supporters."

The search for the black audience is a false one anyway, says Carol Lake. Ujima is a group of middle-class, well-paid, successful executives who feel perfectly at home in the Coliseum and National Theatre and happen to be black, she says. They sense no barriers to them in the arts. But what Ujima is aware of is the cultural barrier of poverty and that a lot of the less well-off are black - which is why they hosted the conference at which Push 04 was launched.

"We have to get to the twentysomethings, but we think that 90 per cent of the audiences will come because it's good work, not because it's by black artists or about black culture," Bushell-Mingo says. "This isn't about black, it's about money, and - if you like - it is a mission for us. It's mission possible."

'Purlie', Bridewell Theatre, London EC4 (020-7936 3456), 2 September to 2 October; Push 04, the Almeida, London N1 (020-7539 4404) and Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (0870 737 7737), from 30 August to 18 September ( www.pushherenow.com)