102 Social networking systems as a marketing tool

Convener: David Johnston

Participants: David and Lindsey Hope Pearlman

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Very brief session-both agreed that we needed to get more exercise and have a stretch, rather than talk too much

David runs Tangere Arts in Derbyshire, a small theatre company, mainly presenting shows and workshops for children and families,

With a very small budget-

(company operates out of David’s back office in the village of Tansley, near Matlock, and survives on unpredictable project grants)

Tangere, however, has had remarkable success, with some of its plays, mostly by recently deceased playwright, Noel Greig, being performed nationally and internationally at festivals and in well-known theatres, from the Meyerhold in Moscow to the Unicorn in London

The problem for Tangere remains how to spread the word re our work even further abroad, with even further reduced administration and marketing budgets, and a growing portfolio of excellent work

Lindsey’s company in New York, Horse Trade, faces similar, if different problems, being unfunded and comprised of young performers and artists

They have solved this in a range of ways using networking systems, especially Facebook

Recommendations

1 use a page on Facebook -upload photos, company information, plans events, audition information etc

2 organise events on Facebook to advertise coming performances

3 enroll interns/volunteers who understand the technology and want to support

E.g. Tangere has a relationship with Derby University students of performing arts, which currently consists of sharing our work with them, but could be taken much further

4 invite people to become a fan of Tangere, and offer them something special

5 get a small number of regular fans to champion the company and keep reminding the network

Keep the fans updated

Lindsey had a number of other recommendations from the New York experience

Which we will now try out in deepest Derbyshire

I will update the ning etc on any interesting developments

David Johnston

dj at tangere-arts.co.uk

www.tangere-arts.co.uk

Tel 0845 3298013

032 How can we move beyond novelty in the use of pervasive media technology in theatre?

Convener: Katie Day

Participants: Amongst others… Mark Morren, Jasmine Pajdak, Peter Mumford, Sian Rees, Allen O’Leary, Leslie Goosey, Neil Keating, Aaron Minnigin, Dee Evans,

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

I convened the session because I’m producing a new scheme called Theatre Sandbox, which will commission 6 new theatre projects that engage with pervasive media. Check www.theatresandbox.co.uk or twitter.com/theatresandbox for updates.

We started with a discussion about what pervasive media actually was.

Here’s a potential definition:

‘As computers and phones get smaller, more powerful, and stay connected to the internet almost all of the time, Pervasive Media sits at the intersection of mobile computers, media technology, networks and sensors.
From gaming to outdoor displays, performance to public transport, pervasive media is delivered into the fabric of everyday life: sensors and networks use context-rich information (like location) to deliver experiences that are designed to fit the needs of people, delivering the right thing in the moment, wherever they are.’

Notes:

A story delivered geographically.

Miss out on energy? If its just you, and no other audience.
Can we use the tech to widen not close?

Silent Disco

Providing a slightly different experience for each person can be exciting. Could watch the same thing – but with a different soundtrack.

How can you extend the experience to the unknowing audience?

People are wary of Bluetooth etc, as its already been hijacked by advertisers.

Foreground the narrative. Choose the right conduit – its only a conduit.

Can be useful for engaging people in advance of the story event.

You have to know WHY you want to use the tech. OR you just want to play with it to see what you could do.

Where is this just television delivered by pervasive media, and when is this theatre?

In terms of informing people about the technological possibilities – how can we do this.
Could we have one-to-ones with the technologists, to push and see where our ideas could go?
We can learn from what other people have made before.
We could have a one-to-one with an artist and a technologist – on stage for everyone to watch – where they push and explore their ideas and what they can do. Or something along these lines.

022 How can we use web technologies to help generate communities that love theatre?

Convener: Gavin O’Carroll

Participants: Greg Wohead, Caroline Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Jennifer Peary-Edwards, Sharon Seager, Matthew Uayd, Rachel McGill, Amanda Kelleher.

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

We talked about whether or not theatre can use online tech to enable audiences to find the theatre they know they’ll like more easily. Frustrated by the blanket emailing promotion that currently exists. We wondered if a more targeted promotion from theatre companies could be done, or indeed if audiences could use online channels to ‘pull’ recommendations for shows they’d like to see to them.

We wondered if the audience of a show were in fact a interest community. And thinking about Last.fm as a model (where people with the same musical ‘taste’ could easily connect and recommend each other music). Would this work in theatre?

We discussed how recommendations from people who don’t have a vested interest in a show were so much more powerful in getting people to go. In other industries people are find people online via Twitter etc and finding people who’s taste they trust, and then trust their recommendations for things to do, see, go and experience.

We talked about what were the best tools for theatre companies to use to market themselves and create communities around their work. Rather than the tools, it was more important to explain the point of their work, so that people who had an emotional connection to that mission would then congregate around whatever tools they used to promote with work. Explaining this point being the core requirement to generating a community and cutting through the information overload that audiences experience in the web.

We discussed the need to compliment a kind of last.fm for theatre with real life meetups, so that people could congregate around shared interests (that the theatre companies organizing the drinks might be exploring) face to face. We had examples of where this worked well in other industries such as the design world (‘Service design drinks’ were mentioned as a meetup example – very vibrant).

We wondered though it people really cared enough about theatre to tell other people?

We discussed how the properties of the internet were pro transparency and authenticity – we then wondered it the fear of technology that many theatre companies display was actually a fear of being found out? Was this justified? It was asked – in the current method of promotion – were theatre companies being dishonest in raising expectations before many shows are even finished rehearsing? Should theatre companies use video more, and not as a trailer, but as a film of aspects of performance – members of the groups felt it was hard to hide behind video. If they could move audiences with a 3 min video against a white wall then they would come to the show. Examples of where companies are involving audiences in early rehearsal footage etc already. Management of expectations was an important element.

We spoke about the possibility of having an online community for theatre audiences, where it’s ok to say they liked a show or didn’t like it and to give permission to discuss it. And give a space for the family element of celebration of when something was really good.

We felt the heart of our conversation so far was that we felt there was no support for audiences. That we needed to give audiences a focussed support network. A place where they could validate in a non-intimidating way, their thoughts of ‘that was shit wasn’t it? Am I mad for thinking that?’ or ‘the critics said that was shit, but I though it was the best thing I’ve ever seen. Am I mad? Or do I have shit taste?’ A place where they would find out they are part of a group of people who felt the same. We discussed the possibility of laptops outside shows where people should vote thumbs up and thumbs down about the show they’d just seen, and a place for them to vote again in a month once they’ve reflected on it. Awesome info for arts council funding applications for the company no? (possibly!).

015 Does experimentation depend on access to technology?

Convener: Alex Eisenberg

Participants: Cob, Alex

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

A starting point might be something like:

What if as theatre/performance makers/live artists we were able to get our hands on the sort of technology that created a film such as Avatar? How would this affect our ability to experiment?

That technological advances are not easily accessible (largely because of money) to experimental performance makers when perhaps it is precisely those people who might be able to expand, harness and reshape the use of these sorts of technologies in the most progressive and innovative ways.

What are you going to do with this technology?

Open Source:
• Free software
• Free hardware
• Open Source Movement
• How is Open Source similar to Open Space?

Virtual communication devices such as Facebook mediate communication in profound and political ways.

It seems that it could be easy to ignore this.

So perhaps what is needed is a “constant vigilance” – an attention towards the ways in which communication might or might not be impeded in virtual space.

Things to look out for(!):
• Barriers put in place by corporations to protect themselves
• Motivation for the creation of ‘social spaces’
• Deceptive appearances of ‘sophistication’ – i.e. facebook is actually a very very very simplified version of communication. Game: Compare an exchange in real space with one in virtual space – what are the differences?

Differences between virtual and physical space:
• THEY ARE VERY DIFFERENT
• i.e. do not assume that there is a need to replicate what happens in physical space with what happens in virtual space.

“But – why should there be a difference?”

“Maybe because we have not got it ‘right’ in physical space and the POTENTIAL of virtual space could provide us with the most wonderful possibilities?! – maybe…”

[Is it too soon to be talking about these ideas?]

[How about just working with what you have got?]

So – what about theatre – how does theatre fit into all of this? Because it is all (life?) about communication, about how we RELATE to one another. And it is clear that technology is having profound implication on this.

Consider the THEATRE as (THE) one of the best places to examine, interrogate and shape COMMUNICATION.

Consider the THEATRE as the place where humans go to watch (relate, feel, experience….) OTHER HUMANS.

In the ‘THEATRE’ the potential for discovery, experimentation in this space is immense. (NB: by theatre we don’t mean just theatre spaces!)

So as theatre/performance makers – as people who are in the (privileged) position of being able to construct social situations, encounters, behavior etc. we should be able to and perhaps have a responsibility to make performance based explorations that INTERFACE Communication and technology and quite often our access to technologies is restricted.

The importance of communication technologies – is it a HUMAN RIGHT?

POLITICS of technology – in terms of nations, wealth, class, race, gender, sexuality etc….

Attempt at definition:
What we mean by technology in this discussion is the current ‘cutting edge technology’. Some examples might be 3D television, holographic projection and all the other things that we don’t know about!

These examples in particular relate to theatre because of the three-dimensionality factor!

Is it impossible to make ‘experimental theatre/performance/live work’ without addressing ‘technology’ as a fundamental/deeply integrated part of it?

What do we mean when we are talking about technology?

Because clothes, floors, furniture ARE also technology – OR perhaps they WERE once and now they have been so habituated that we don’t notice that they are in fact still ‘technology’ (in terms of human evolution…).

Thinking about a point at which we experience the things that we call ‘technology’ now (computers, phones etc.) in the same way as we consider things that are seemingly ‘not technological’.


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004 What does theatre have to do with video games?

Convener: Alex Fleetwood

Participants: Alan O’Leary, Samal Blal, Lyn Gardner, Myro Wulfr, Sam Hall, Andrew Somerville, Lindsey Hope Pearlman, Aaron Minnigin, Helen Muyridge, Ian Pugh, Joe Austin, Sharon Seager, Antonio Ferrara, Tassos Stevens, Laura Friedman, Gavin O’Carroll, Robert Wells , Caroline Pearce, Gary Campbell, Katie Day

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

This was a very hot and engaged discussion. There was a vibrant atmosphere and a high level of discourse around this topic, which I personally found so exciting that I can’t remember exactly what was said. Apologies if this is a little scattered.

Video games have traditionally occupied the living room, creating an intense relationship between an individual player and a screen-based experience. Our perception of those experiences is that they are aesthetically limited and socially backward.

The average age of a video gamer is 39. Video games are played equally by men and women. American teenager spend on average 7.5 hours day looking at a screen, in which they consume 11.5 hours of media. New gaming platforms like the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii give humans more human ways of interacting with a digital game – to do with touch, gesture, and interaction with the people or the world around you. As gamers expect greater sophistication and more human interaction, there is a colossal opportunity for theatre makers and video game producers to share skills and understanding.

There hasn’t yet been a break-out theatre / game project that defines this notion. Books had Masquerade. Cinema has spawned numerous ARGs (alternative reality game) projects which blur the boundaries between narrative and play. Theatre needs to catch up…

But won’t we alienate ourselves? Laura spoke of the experience of her brother, 18, playing Call of Duty since he was 11. Shooting, killing, dying, respawning – talking on his headset to people he doesn’t know, telling them to cover him while he takes that guy out. Tassos reminded us that if we viewed all theatre through the experience of audiences for The Mousetrap we would have a very different view. Call of Duty is only one tiny component of the world of video games. And Call of Duty online multiplayer is a live, 12 player experience that one can access at any time of the day or night, where the people you are playing with and against are fellow experts, having logged hundreds if not thousands of hours of playing time. If we divorce that experience from the content for a minute, one has to regard it as a huge achievement on the part of the game’s creators.

Another way of thinking about video games is articulated in the book Casual Revolution by the ludologist Jesper Juul.

PLAYER SPACE / PLAY SPACE

Immersive games like Call of Duty create a detailed play space (a 3D world) that negates meaningful agency in the player space. Conversely, Wii Sports creates a flat, shallow play space that allows for greater agency to be located in the player space. Does this model translate to proscenium arch theatre?

Games design posits the existence of a player – or group of players – or vast panoply of potential players, each with a different set of expectations and attributes – and conducts a series of iterative design processes to shape an experience in which the player can move through the experience. Can a piece of theatre do this? Can a theatre create a space in which stories can be told?

Coney’s project A Small Town Anywhere attempted to do this very thing. Rather than a computer brain tracking the players’ inputs, a team of theatre-makers responded to the live social play of a group of 30 people. We discussed whether there is a live interface limit to the number of players for whom a single gamerunner can facilitate a meaningful experience – the general sense is that 12 is the upper limit.

Lyn reflected on whether video games offered new models for the distribution of theatre experiences. Can the old model of uniting audience and performers in a physical space at a fixed point in time be supplanted with a model that enables groups to come together digitally, to experience interaction and involvement with a theatrical work?

Can we create theatre-on-demand?

Rotozaza’s piece Etiquette and Duncan Speakman’s subtlemobs both use downloadable MP3 tracks (part story, part instruction set) to create a distributable participatory theatre experience). They share a narrative sophistication and a radical simplicity of technology – perhaps both instruments of their success.

There is also a question of whether ease of access = A GOOD THING. The act of bringing people together for an experience which is happening now and only now, is an essential part of theatre. But video games are a form of distributed live experience too. Every time you play, it’s different.

I asked the question of whether there was anything video games and theatre couldn’t do together. Andrew raised the question of survival versus nuance – games tend to be about living or dying, husbanding your resources to survive. A theatre piece can be about a subtle change in the way a person sees the world. Can game experiences manage that? I would argue that they can, but don’t – often – yet. Google Every Day the Same Dream and play that. See what you think.

It’s also true that games, especially live games of the kind playtested at Hide&Seek events, tap into some fundamental tribal instincts – we are bonded together against the enemy, we must work together to win, you are now my friend. The physical rush of playing together dissolves London’s social barriers without recourse to our traditional drugs of choice – that rush is something that theatre makers could learn to harness.

And the way that theatre is divorced from marketing and learning and participation – the idea that a theatre maker makes a work and it is up to others to interpret, deliver and bring an audience together with it – games offer a range of tools to rethink that model. If the moment you get your ticket, you are rewarded with an experience, one that leads you closer to the live event, and from that experience there are a number of paths that you can follow, and there’s one that suits you, and ultimately that path leads you to the show with a vastly enriched understanding of the work – that’s a way of thinking about a theatre that markets itself and educates its audience as it does so.

A tiny plug – my company, Hide&Seek, makes work at the intersection of play, performance and public space (or ‘games’), and we curate a monthly night called The Sandpit, which invites artists from any discipline, game designers, and interested people to try out game ideas on a friendly group of players. If you’d like to do that, please drop us a line at hello at hideandseekfest.co.uk or call me on 07900 692150. We have exciting plans for International Sandpits coming very soon.