Thomasina’s last waltz

Send in the live-twitterers

Previously on Thomasina…
“This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.”

Assuming it could be done with courtesy, why would you set out to tweet a performance in real time?

As a form of personal note-taking? – Pen and paper is actually much quicker and less disruptive to all, including the note-taker.

As a way of sharing an experience and discussing it with others? – Sure, but then why not at interval or afterwards, which is when we normally gather our ideas and share them with others.

As a form of citizen reportage? – Well… there just might be something in that.

The other day, @DarrynKing (real name, Darryn King; profession, entertainment journalist) live-tweeted the Sydney production of West Side Story (hashtag #wss). If you go look at these tweets – which is easier said than done since it was on 15 July and twitter is the most ephemeral of media – you don’t get the sense of them coming from an average Joe in the audience. At one point Darryn was talking of wearing all black and lurking in the wings, or even tweeting from the pit. (Sometimes these things boil down to where you can get decent reception.)

He was very well-prepared. And over the two-and-a-half hours the #wss feed included backstage insights, commentary on the performance, slang definitions, pop quizzes drawn from the lyrics, wry plot summaries, musical observations, witty expressions of enthusiasm, meta moments (“If Tony had Twitter he’d be like ‘Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria’”) and even some good advice (“Don’t do it, Maria. Let this endless cycle of violence and great dance numbers come to an end”).

For someone to live-tweet a show and come up with something worth following, a few things are needed: access (not everyone gets to sit in on the general rehearsal, or find a corner in an orchestra pit, or watch the performers warm up before the show); some fairly thorough knowledge and preparation; and skill in rapidly formulating an entertaining commentary that will make sense to someone who isn’t there.

You could be describing the requirements of a traditional arts critic. Or a radio sports commentator.

And what does anyone get out of it? Right now it’s novel, so there’s a public relations benefit. When (if?) live-tweeting becomes commonplace – in the way that arts criticism or cricket on the radio is commonplace – then it will simply become another way of sharing a performance beyond the doors of the auditorium and giving a taste of the event in real time to those who can’t or won’t be there. Time will tell whether twitter is a good medium for this, and whether the effort will be worth it.

What does the live-twitterer get out of it? Potentially a great deal: knowledge, awareness, access, insight, and all the benefits that come from choosing to focus on a performance with the specific purpose of communicating its details and flavour to others.

But the exercise also represents a lot of work – it’s far more than a few idle tweets from a good night out. As I said, you could be describing the experience of a critic, or the broadcast presenter, or the operator of the camera for a webstream, or the surtitle operator. The live-twitterer will, by necessity, be deeply involved in what’s going on, but they won’t necessarily be sharing in the experience the creators intend for the audience.

They’re not free to simply put down their mobile device, forget about reporting, and weep or laugh or listen in awe. They’re playing a role.

Postscript…

Darryn has posted his own reactions to the experience, which I chose not to read before writing my own post.  This was interesting: “That’s the thing. The live tweet itself turned into performance, and arguably my performance, for much of it, was more important than the performance taking place onstage. Heck, I could have written much of what I did listening to the cast recording at home (somewhat more comfortably). But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, would it? If it worked, it was the idea, of the illusion, of shared experience that made it work.”

Four things Twitter does for the performing arts

There’s a bigger question behind the #tweetseats discussion: What are the benefits of bringing twitter into performance venues?

At the moment we’re playing around, experimenting, finding our feet. (By “we” I mean presenters and tweeting audiences equally.) Right now, I think perhaps too much excited emphasis is being placed on the particular medium du jour and not enough on the value of what is actually taking place…

1. Connection
One thing at which twitter excels is enabling the connection of like-minded nerds fans. Through twitter we can share impressions with someone who might be attending on a different night or perhaps still be deciding whether to buy a ticket. But unlike a chat with friends, a tweet reaches many more people and it also allows a tweeter to get to know more fans whom they might not otherwise have met.

So you can imagine presenters being very interested in the word-of-mouth potential of that, as well as the community-building potential. And those of us who tweet just love it.

2. Broadcasting

Another thing that twitter does, although not very precisely, is provide a simple mechanism for broadcasting grabs of information to an audience of followers. The equivalent of the opera surtitle, but sent to your phone. The problem is, there’s not much control over exactly when a tweet will appear to a follower. So it would be pretty bad for actual surtitles, and not much good for music alerts of the “listen to the oboe’s entry” variety. But it’s ok for sending generic pieces of background information or pointing out things to listen/look for that are likely to hang around (“see those sheep…”).

Orchestras around the world have been trying this sort of thing, mostly at outdoor concerts. I’ve followed some of the program-notey feeds and found them either prosaic or a bit twee. But there’s scope for a really imaginative use of this strategy.

3. Open conversations
Twitter is also pretty good for opening up conversations and sharing information. Traditionally, performing arts presenters have communicated in very controlled ways: we “broadcast” information through program books, websites, marketing materials, and print and broadcast media (that is, one-to-many), and we allow people to talk to us by phone or in writing, responding in a closed dialogue (one-to-one). But active and flourishing online forums are relatively rare and don’t necessarily include presenters and performers as participants. In any case, the old-school forum environment doesn’t always seem to generate as generous a conversation as twitter does.

Presenters in the 21st century need to be bold enough to participate in many-to-many conversations, engaging the intelligence and passions of the smart people who make up the audience – and a medium like twitter allows a presenter to talk to people, respond to them, answer questions, solve problems and bask in compliments (twitter nurtures an extraordinarily positive atmosphere).

Somewhere between open conversations and spontaneous response is the use of twitter by performers and audience together as part of the creative and performance act. That’s too specific a scenario to cover here.

4. Spontaneous response

Twitter encourages spontaneity and a real-time response to the world. It’s worth remembering that twitter reached its tipping point in 2007 when a bunch of nerds South by Southwest conference attendees used it to keep in touch and to let each other know which were the good sessions and events. If that’s not real-time critiquing, then nothing is.

So it’s the most natural thing in the world to contemplate adopting that approach for a concert or an opera or ballet or in the theatre or at any other traditional performance event. Except it turns out that live-tweeting from the audience in those contexts can be difficult and unrewarding, and it compromises the experience.

In fact I’m going to come right out and say that live-tweeting (as opposed to foyer tweeting) is not going to help you engage more fully with a performance. It’s not going to enhance your appreciation, increase your understanding or blow your mind.

This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.

#tweetseats, or #foyertweets – that is the question

On Saturday night, Opera Australia used the power of comp tickets to harness the energy of some opera-mad tweeters (Mad Sceners, to be precise), endorsing a posse of nine or so to do what they usually do at the opera: tweet their impressions before and after, and during the interval.

It’s kind of unfortunate that it went under the tag #tweetseats, since no actual tweeting was taking place from their seats. I would have loved to see them sacrifice the rhyme and an extra character and opt for #foyertweets instead

Not because I’m a pedant or anything, but because, despite the Opera Australia event being accurately described in the media, the whole #tweetseats thing seems to have stirred unnecessary outrage in some quarters, with many assuming the tweeting was going on during the performance itself.

But for many of us, the last thing we want to do is tweet during [traditional] performances. The best summing up came from @primalamusica, who managed to condense the sentiment of my post from the other day into a mere 55 characters: “if it’s tweetworthy, it’s worthy of undivided attention”


But I don’t want to get bogged down in matters of etiquette. It’s pretty obvious to any remotely considerate person that there are times and places for everything. What’s outrageous in a hushed and darkened auditorium might be absolutely fine on a picnic blanket at a concert under the stars. Use your good judgement.

Archer and the ACO: A compliment misses its mark

On Tuesday the people at Bell Shakespeare sent me off to The Australian with a provocative quote: “I personally probably don’t need to see another Shakespeare.” This turned out to be from an interview with Robyn Archer. She said something else too (I’ll include the journalist’s intro for context):

Archer qualifies this by saying that enlivening the classics and preserving heritage is important: “If a great piece of Haydn or Mozart in the hands of Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra drums into you in a way that is so fresh you feel like you have never heard it before, go for it, but never at the expense of fresh ideas, because in the end, that is the heart of the creative country.”

And my instinctive reaction to that was: How I wish she’d said: “If a Haydn symphony in the hands of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the SSO drums into you in a way that is so fresh you feel like you’ve never heard it before…”’

I saw the comment as a genuine compliment, and as the expression of an unimpeachable piece of advice: go for the classics when you can find them in vital performances but don’t turn your back on new ideas.

My only gripe was the way the ACO has become the cited-orchestra-of-choice whenever it comes to summoning up an image of fresh, vital performances of the classical canon. This is not all that surprising. But the cliché skews things, as clichés do, because the ACO does not in fact have this particular corner of activity completely sewn up in a bag.

It turns out, though, that the ACO, or rather one writer responding for the ACO, doesn’t see it as a compliment at all. Archer’s comment has been held up as some kind of negative alongside a glowing concert review from Vincent Plush that appeared the day before.

First the link. http://www.aco.com.au/Default.aspx?url=/blog

And the date, which you’ll need to find the post: 14 July 2010. It’s called “Response to The Australian”.

Now I sympathise with the frustration around this newly fashionable (and indeed pernicious) idea of “heritage” art. I wholeheartedly agree that there is absolutely no justification, in principle, for setting it up as the polar opposite to anything new and fresh as if they are mutually exclusive. And it’s true the interview as reported doesn’t make the point that the ACO programs old repertoire alongside new music in admirable ways.

But I challenge anyone reading the interview to interpret Archer’s comment as lambasting preservers of heritage. She’s saying that – although she personally never needs to see another Shakespeare – the classics are important, and she then singles out the ACO, not as “guardians of the old” but as an exemplar of an ensemble that interprets those classics in ways that make you feel like you’ve never heard them before.

And in my book that’s a serious compliment.

Postscript…

Previously the ACO used the blogger service. Just this week they’ve moved their posts onto their website at the address given above. At this new location there isn’t a feed that you can subscribe to or follow; it’s no longer possible to link to a specific post url; and it’s no longer possible to comment on posts. Whatever you want to call it, the ACO is no longer blogging.

In which I get on the sat-nav soapbox

Tonight I left the CBD in a cab. The destination was a prominent intersection on a major arterial road. A good driver will simply ask if I want to take the CityWest Link or George Street/Broadway to get out of the city. Late at night there’s not much to choose between them, but it’s manners to ask.

This guy, though, began looking for the intersection on his GPS sat-nav. This did not inspire confidence; I said I’d direct him. Even then, he managed to take a totally illogical wrong turning at one point. I can see why he wanted the sat-nav.

Last year I needed to go from the ABC in Ultimo to Circular Quay – one end of the CBD to the other. No local driver should need to look that up. You’d think.

So I got in, I gave my destination: Circular Quay. The driver began looking up his sat-nav. Under S. I got out.

This is becoming more and more common. Which suggests that testing for taxi drivers is nowhere near as stringent as it used to be. But it’s more alarming than that. Instead of that mental overview of the city and all its major routes, only occasionally needing passenger directions or to consult a map when the address is obscure, taxi driver “knowledge” – such as it is – is being reduced to a bunch of linear directions from one place to another, most of which they apparently have to look up anew each time.

What’s ironic, as I learned from this fascinating New Yorker article from 2006, is that the newfangled sat-nav operates on an incredibly ancient principle.

The writer, Nick Paumgarten, presents the idea that maps developed from being fairly primitive affairs in which “navigation” basically meant following an itinerary, to the sophisticated maps we now have, where navigation means assessing space and making decisions. Here’s the essential bit:

To offer some perspective, [Jim Akerman] retrieved, from a vault within the vault, one of the library’s oldest and most precious maps, a so-called Portolan chart of the Mediterranean, dating to 1456. It showed the sea’s entire coastline, with hundreds of ports labelled in the manner of stations on a railroad map, the names neatly lined up parallel to one another, in the order in which one would encounter them if one were sailing along the coast.

“The tension between these two modes of navigating goes back to these maps,” he said. “The itinerary represents space as one experiences it on the ground. A map like this has that element, but it starts to introduce the notion that you can conceive of it as a larger unit. It’s a God’s-eye view, which puts you in charge of navigating through space. This is the origin of the notion that you can pull yourself away from the world and see it from above.”

The irony is that centuries later, when we have perfected the God’s-eye map and become conversant with it, we have, in the thrall of technology, turned back to the ancient way: the itinerary and the strip map. OnStar and MapQuest zero in on the information that’s relevant to reaching your destination. “They close down your choices and give you a route,” Akerman said.

This, I think, is why I feel so uncomfortable driving with someone who’s relying on the dulcet instructions from their GPS (especially if I’m paying them!). They’ve entrusted their knowledge, their overview and their judgement to something else. Give me a map anyday.

Theatre-goers, a comparison

Theatre-goers are younger (slightly), they seem to be more hip and often better dressed, and – this is the important part – at interval they are 96.3 per cent more likely to be talking about the actual play.

Postscript…

This is really just a prelude to me waxing lyrical about how much I loved loved loved Long Day’s Journey into Night, an act which must be postponed since it’s seven minutes to pumpkin hour.

Live-tweeting and getting into the gig

My corner of the twittersphere has been abuzz this morning. The topics fleeting by: the lamentable editorial omission of any musical representatives from the weekend’s article on twitter in the arts, the state of arts journalism generally and its apparent promotional/PR focus, and tweeting during performances.

It would take me hours to compress my thoughts on tweeting during performances into 140 characters (or even 280) and I don’t have the time. So…

First, this isn’t about the arts using twitter outside the performance time/space or using it as part of the performance – that’s another story, and at times quite an entertaining one. (#operaplot anybody?)

It’s about the matter of audience members tweeting during theatrical and concert performances.

And I’ll be honest. I actually can’t do it. Not while the performance is going on.

I do tweet during interval as well as immediately before/after performances. At concerts I’m often doing that in a vaguely official capacity as @sso_notes. Very occasionally (mostly during long stage moves) I’ve tweeted between pieces.

Here’s my rationale: I only tweet at those points in the performance where it would be undistracting, and natural, to talk.

But it’s not really good manners that motivates me so much as pure selfishness. I simply don’t want to miss anything. And if what I’m doing is likely to mildly distract someone nearby, then it’s absolutely certain that I am, myself, being distracted to be the point that I will have missed a minute or two of the performance – a minute or two that can’t be reclaimed.

As everyone is finally beginning to realise, multitasking is a furphy. Even for girls. In a concert there’s usually so much to pay attention to and to hold in memory that I’m lucky if I can scribble an illegible word on my program in the darkness. Plays/operas/ballets are much the same. If someone tells me they can look at a screen, formulate and type a concise idea for public consumption and remain fully aware of what’s going on during those 50 to 120 seconds, I will happily tell them they’re deluded. Of course, if the performance is really boring…but let’s not go there. 

Actually, let’s do go there. Because my ideal performance in the concert hall or theatre is one that's so compelling and engrossing, so riveting, that it doesn’t even occur to me to tweet while it’s taking place. If my mind is wandering in the direction of epigrammatic things to tweet about the performance then that’s a very bad sign for the performance.

I’ve also tried tweeting during verbal presentations (e.g. during TEDxSydney and during my orchestra’s pre-concert talks). This is slightly easier. Perhaps all those years of taking notes during university lectures taught me something, and a well-constructed verbal presentation usually incorporates sufficient repetition, exploration and summary of ideas that there are opportunities to “take notes” in one way or another.

But I think there’s another difference: when I tweet from a talk I’m mostly tweeting content, an idea I’ve just heard, a pithy quote. It’s more like transcription. If I were to attempt to tweet during a musical/theatrical performance I’d be tweeting my own response/reactions/assessments. That’s a more distracting activity which, in some ways, takes you out of the receptive mode that a performance demands of you and into a critical one. Criticism is a marvellous thing, but if you’re not really receiving because you’re trying to write and publish a critique in the moment then…?

In any case, it’s been my experience that people have far more interesting things to say about a performance when it’s had even a short while to sink in. For example, for (too) many years my ballet subscription placed me immediately in front of a trio of ladies who insisted on verbalising their reactions during the performances. “Hasn’t she got lovely arms,” was a typical comment. Or, my favourite, “He’s very manly looking, isn’t he?” They drove me to distraction and were the targets of more than a few glares in the darkness. But if you happened to eavesdrop on them between acts it was a different story: the level of the observations immediately jumped.

Anyhow, I’m going to leave this post with the wise words of youth. Just recently my nephew went to hear Karnivool in concert, and he wrote about it afterwards. Nice pictures too. Here’s the telling line:

I feel like I probably spent too much time taking photos and not enough time getting into the gig (you live and learn I guess), but regardless I still enjoyed myself a hell of a lot.

Substitute “live-tweeting” for “taking photos” and I think you’ve got it. You won’t enjoy yourself less, but there’s a good possibility that you won’t be “getting into the gig” to the extent you would’ve liked.