Manchester’s Contact Theatre has a unique piece of interactive theatre starting this evening until Saturday. #follow_me as its hashtagged twitter name title implies is a show not just about social media but which uses social media.
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Manchester’s Contact Theatre has a unique piece of interactive theatre starting this evening until Saturday. #follow_me as its hashtagged twitter name title implies is a show not just about social media but which uses social media.
Digital Theatre has launched! Using up to 13 cameras to capture the performance, English Touring Theatre, RSC, Almeida, Royal Court and Young Vic content can for £8.99 be yours in HD. The papers have talked about the idea replacing the thrill of a live show, and of causing a threat to the live, and this is of course usually the nervous counter-argument against digital recording of theatre companies less comfortable with the idea of their audiences seeing their work online.
I find this argument tiresome and insulting to audiences who of course know that the live performance will be the one that makes the hairs on the back of their stand on end as they feel the collective body heat of the audience rise during a tense scene: but in the absence of the cash to pay for the ticket and the trip to London, and in order to avoid the guilt of an expanding carbon footprint due to art, I’d rather see the work from theatre companies than miss it. Audiences still understand live experiences, and the emerging experience economy that we’re seeing as a current cultural behaviour (living in the now, instead of in the future, a desires to collect as many experiences and stories as soon as possible, is addictive) is growing, not shrinking. All things live will continue to rise in value as the digital world encourages copying and sharing. The live experience is the thing that can’t be copied, the thing that has uniqueness and a one-off factor. What do you think?
My Envirodigital client, the new National Theatre Wales, are launching their opening programme on 5th November 2009. It’ll be a big bang for a number of reasons: its Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes’ Night in the UK, so there will be fireworks. There will also be a new destination website to visit where you can find out what’s on and buy tickets (the huge online community that we’ve grown organically over the past year will be just a click away, and is still growing in numbers, depth and activity daily).
The final big bang will be the style of the launch: rather than hiring an expensive venue to which the press and VIPs have to travel, NTW are instead webcasting the programme launch, hoping that journalists will NOT make the journey to Cardiff, but will watch the news unfold online and so help NTW achieve its environmentally sustainable aspirations. Don’t expect a fancy brochure either: the only paper NTW will print is a (very beautiful!) newspaper. And that will be available digitally too, so if you can’t pick it up in person, don’t expect to receive one in the post [eco choices, not post strike reasons :-))].
Read John McGrath’s blog about the launch for all the details, and HUGE congratulations to John and all the NTW team from us at Envirodigital - we’re so proud that you stuck to all your original aspirations, and thrilled that we could help you make them realities! For more details on the digital choices that I helped NTW make to ensure their digital set-up was environmentally sustainable, read the Envirodigital blog posts about the community development and the organisational development.
AmbITion Roadshow Yorkshire ran in partnership with Shift Happens 2.0 event at York Theatre Royal at the end of June this year. Shift Happens had an excellent line up of speakers and AmbITion were lucky enough to get an interview with of few! Here, we get a perspective from Lyn Gardner, Theatre critic at the Guardian. We’ll be sharing more interviews in the next few days.
Lyn Gardner, Theatre critic at The Guardian talks about changes in the use of technology creatively, engaging audiences and the power of digital tools in enticing your audience to the theatre.
Speaking to Ian Aspin and Erin Maguire at Shift Happens 2.0, the partner event to AmbITion Roadshow Yorkshire, in June 2009.