When the lobby becomes part of the performance

At the North American premiere of Coco Chanel: The Life of a Fashion Icon at Atlanta Ballet in February 2024, the audience arrived in black and white. This was not planned. Atlanta Ballet did not put a dress code in the program. But the production’s identity had telegraphed itself clearly enough in advance marketing that patrons made the decision on their own, and the company came out to find a lobby full of people dressed as though they were attending the event the ballet was describing.

What happened in the lobby that night is worth examining carefully, because it illustrates something about what is actually possible when a performing arts organization treats the entire evening as a designed experience rather than a performance with pre-show logistics attached. Atlanta dancers walked the lobby before curtain selling Chanel-themed merchandise. A DJ played. Signature cocktails were available. The effect, by most accounts, was not of a commercial transaction but of a collective atmosphere, something that was already the show before the curtain went up.

The production became Atlanta Ballet’s best-attended non-Nutcracker show since 1998. There are multiple reasons for that: the subject matter, the choreographer, a strong marketing campaign. But the lobby experience was not incidental. It was part of what made the evening feel like an event worth dressing for, worth bringing people to, worth talking about afterward. The merchandise in that lobby was not a revenue line. It was a prop in an atmosphere.

This is different from how most performing arts organizations think about merchandise. The conventional model treats merchandise as a secondary revenue stream: logo items in a case near the box office, programs available for sale, maybe a branded tote or scarf during the subscription campaign. These things exist at a remove from the performance itself. You buy them before or after; they do not touch the experience.

What Atlanta Ballet did, deliberately or not, was collapse that distance. The objects in the lobby were continuous with what was happening on stage. They were not souvenirs of a performance that had not yet occurred; they were part of the event as it was already unfolding. That is a meaningfully different thing.

Other companies have noticed. The question being asked in a number of performing arts marketing and development offices right now is some version of: can we replicate this, and if so, how? The honest answer is that the Coco Chanel case was partly a function of specific circumstances: a subject matter with a strong visual identity, an audience already primed to engage with fashion as a theme, a city that, as Atlanta Ballet’s executive director put it, loves to dress up. Not every production offers the same invitation.

But the underlying principle does not depend on those circumstances. It depends on taking seriously the question of what the lobby is for. If the answer is “a place for people to mill around before the show,” the lobby will be organized accordingly. If the answer is “the first act of the evening,” it will be organized differently. Merchandise, when it is thought about in that second register, becomes a set piece rather than a retail fixture. That shift in orientation is available to any company that wants to make it.