This week: How do you keep the immersive experience “art”?… Screens are killing dance (unless they’re not)… A Music store that’s figured out community… The Louisville Symphony tries a new community model… Now audio is beating video – who knew?
- Inside The Immersive Experience: Data suggest that more and more, people are looking for experiences over “merely” intellectual or emotional stimulation. Thus all those traditional orchestras, dancers and theatres taking their work out to non-traditional settings. But how do you make your immersive theatre piece from feeling like a glorified theme party?“[Director/designer Michael Counts] prefers to throw his audience into the action cold, toying with their minds, blurring the line between the actual and the merely apparent. ‘Reality doesn’t give you a lot of information,’ he said. ‘Often you sit in a place of wonder and mystery, and you’re trying to figure it out. And that actually enhances your agency.’ In an escape room, it also enhances your fear factor, which is fine by him. He wants people to feel like the danger is real.”
- Heads In Screens: It’s What’s Killing Dance (Unless It’s Saving It): Our constant preoccupation with our screens has narrowed our world. We don’t see what we don’t want to see or get exposed to random adventures. It’s “largely responsible for the loss of casual contact with the unfamiliar and the weird, with that which we did not choose, and it doesn’t help bring anyone into contact with dance who wasn’t already interested in it. But then, surprisingly, it does; the screen also emerges as a vehicle that can introduce casual viewers to concert dance.”
- A Music Store As Model For Building Community: There’s a music store in Missouri that has mastered the art of community engagement, and in an unaffected surprisingly sophisticated way. So maybe this is a model for theatres to think about when they’re trying to build communities for their own? “For theatre to become a “front porch” space that welcomes diverse perspectives, we as theatre professionals must trust our communities to engage with challenging material, and we must trust ourselves to hear and act upon opinions that challenge our ideas.”
- Is The Louisville Symphony Reinventing The Audience Model? “[Teddy] Abrams has been the music director of the Louisville Orchestra for two years and by his own measure has had real success engaging the local community. He’s relentlessly tried new things, both in the way he goes out into the community and in programming … He’s approached his ‘mission,’ with the conviction that in Louisville he’s got to start from scratch, he’s got to find a way to make the lifestyle of a classical musician echo the excitement of being a sports star.”
- Wait… They’ve Been Telling Us Audiences Mostly Want Video… And yet, for the first time, audio streaming is beating video streaming. Audio stream growth is staggering – up 58% for the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year. “Services like Apple Music and Spotify delivered 114 billion streams in the first six months of 2016, with video platforms serving 95 billion. So what’s accounting for the spurt? Audio delivery is finally shifting from downloads to streaming. And audio is something you can listen to in the background, whereas video demands your attention.
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