“Is it a sense of magic, or the feeling that perhaps a higher power does exist and bestows talent upon the chosen? Is … Is it the victory of nurture over nature, like a tamed tiger at Siegfried and Roy’s? To be able to juggle, all you need is excellent physical coordination. The spectacle of a child playing a Scarlatti sonata is more than that – it can be seen as a kind of acculturation to a specific, Western tradition. A kid playing adult music is performing adult emotions. She is concentrated and well-dressed, not wild and silly.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Jacob Weisberg Explains The Corrupting Influence Of the Attention Economy
The old cliché about advertising was, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The new cliché is, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” In an attention economy, you pay for free content and services with your time. The compensation isn’t very good.
Study: Reading Literature Can Bridge Political Divide
The linguist Roman Jakobson once contrasted political conventions with literary ones: the problem with political conventions, he said, is that they encourage people to “mindlessly agree” with slogans, which in turn, create unnecessary antagonism between different groups of people. Literary conventions, on the other hand, where individuals get together to read and talk about books, were different.”
Cameron Mackintosh: Weakened Pound Sterling Is Boosting West End Theatre Ticket Sales
He highlighted how surprised he was to see so many people in the West End on a Monday night, and added: “It’s the best September I can remember across my theatres.”
Report: Streaming Theatre Performances Don’t Threaten Live Audience Attendance
“Of 243 companies surveyed, 38% said the advent of live-to-digital has had a positive impact, compared with only 13% who said it had had a negative impact. In fact, an audience preference for live shows over the recorded alternative was found to be the biggest barrier to attendance of theatre broadcasts at cinemas. Just over half of those surveyed said their preference for live theatre put them off event cinema.”
Indie Films Are Increasingly Video-On-Demand. That’s A Problem When We Don’t Know How Many People See Them
“Because neither indie distributors nor streaming services release audience numbers for VOD movies, our hands are tied: We have no idea what constitutes a hit or a flop on VOD — how many thousands, or maybe it’s tens of thousands, or maybe it’s hundreds of thousands — of people will watch a movie during its VOD run.”
Theatre Festival Bars Audience From Play; Audience Shows Up Anyway And Demands, Politely, To Be Let In
“Hours before the performance Sunday night, the MESS festival announced it would allow only the festival jury to see “Our Violence and Your Violence” by Croatian director Oliver Frljić, an award-winning director whose provocative plays often criticize nationalism and spark protests. The play, which has a fairly abstract plot, contains scenes of nudity and rape.” But the ticketholders weren’t having it.
Number Of Visitors Literally Overwhelms DC’s New African-American Museum
“More people want to get in than can be accommodated, even though timed passes are being used to manage the crowds. In the museum’s first 10 days, some 103,000 people visited the history, culture and community exhibitions, officials said. It’s unclear how many more were unable to get passes.”
London Doesn’t Need Any More Theatres, So Stop Building Them
Mark Shenton: “I saw it argued on Twitter that, with London’s ever-expanding population, there’s a need to expand theatrical provision to meet the possible demand; but we’re nowhere near reaching capacity on the venues we already have. And surely the more venues there are, the more it will dissipate the existing audience. … I suspect a lot of the new theatre ‘builds’ (conversions of pop-ups) are driven by something else.”
What The Goodman Theatre Is Finding Out With Its Audience Engagement Experiments
Engagement isn’t just a simple matter of making more information available. It’s a mindset. “What if a person pays $50 for a show they end up hating? Or what if a person is organizing a night out with friends, or a date, or a family gathering—and everyone has a poor experience? Our goal is to show them that a new play is exciting because it’s untested, not in spite of its lack of production history. Who wouldn’t want to be part of something new? Letting the audience learn more about process allows them to share in our excitement.”