Making a rare appearance across the Brooklyn border, I met with choreographer Chase Brock and members of his company The Chase Brock Experience
(click for an excellent website) on Tuesday. One thing we all discussed
was how it’s more fun to go see your friends dance than it is to see
performances when you don’t know anyone on stage. Of course seeing
total strangers is intriguing in its own ways/shapes/forms, but prefer
it or not, the experience is more detached. I’ve written before about
how much I enjoy my clients’ performances because I know them
personally; if I had to define my job as a publicist, I would say it is
to make audiences feel they know my clients as well as I do.
How
can this be achieved? Great print and online features that reflect
interviews where the artist and writer really “get” each other. YouTube channels,
where artists can essentially speak directly to their fans. Facebook
and, now to a lesser extent, MySpace, the two great equalizers of the
music industry (if I started a band this afternoon – Amanda and The
Pitches? – I could have the same MySpace page as U2). Blogs and Twitter
feeds, through which artists – if those outlets are natural to them –
can show various sides of themselves. You know the social media hit list,
it’s using the outlets at our disposal in organic and meaningful ways that’s the
challenge.
The band Lucky Soul
used to have a fantastic website that I would always show to chamber
music ensembles. When they came to Joe’s Pub in October, I lingered around
after the concert ((creepy)) and told them how much I loved the site. Oh yeah, we changed that, they said. And I never even took a screen shot!
Basically, when you selected “About” it took you to a background photo
of the band and said “click on each band member for more information”.
Then you could do as the site said and click on a band member, and a
little box with “Name, Influences, Favorite Lucky Soul song” etc. would
pop up. It was simple and informative and I loved it; to this day, I’ve
never seen a dance company or chamber ensemble do anything similar.
In light of this conversation, Micki Weiner from The Chase Brock Experience pointed out the Hair Broadway revival website.
The homepage features rehearsal footage and interviews with cast
members (“mixed media”), so you don’t even have to go hunting around for
getting-to-know-you material:
In The Tribe section, each cast member has a video interview. My favorite is Will Swenson’s, in which he gives his hair (SPOILER ALERT: not Hair) biography. Where do I go from there, is your weary query? Well, they got their cast video blog, too.
Footage like this is so inexpensive to produce now, it’s just dreary-dreary if ensembles and dance companies don’t have it on
their sites. How can people be so heartless? Err, thoughtless?
My newest obsession is with companies that highlight their employees on their websites, rather than providing a simple staff list for contact purposes only. I was thrilled to see what I thought was a section like this on The Guggenheim website last week, but turns out they were just announcing a new curator (I had thought staff profiles on the homepage were going to be a regular feature). The Happy Corporation, where my friend works, just launched a new site that has both rotating photos of their staff on the homepage and features Tweets from all staff members throughout the day. Here’s Alex:
Potential clients literally see who they’d be working with and get a sense of the employees’ personalities. Simply having photos and bios of staff members on performing arts organizations’ sites would be good public relations. Perhaps an orchestra and staff joint photo where, Lucky Soul style, website users could click on a person and see what they’re about would be effective. All these people go into producing the orchestra concert you’re going to see tonight: learn about them! Or, rather than just having an orchestra member or dance company member featured on the homepage, rotate in people from the administration, too. Seeing a familiar face and knowing that the usher who’s taking your ticket has worked at the venue for 25 years and takes piano lessons might make the concert-going experience a little more interesting. Incorporating multiple Twitter feeds on website homepages would be especially effective for dance companies, orchestras or ensembles – backstage? on tour? in rehearsal? Rather than have to find different members’ Twitter accounts, one could basically follow each perspective from an organization’s website.
A friendly and nice sentiment, but no one is going to pay $250.00 a ticket to find out their usher took saxophone lessons and is now ripping tickets for a living. Audiences thrive on stars, not administrators. Seriously.
Groan – please, no more info in the program! I’m interested in learning something about the performer – not the administrators, the staff, and especially not the ushers – why should I care if he/she takes piano lessons? You’re introducing to the arts the ubiquitous Hi I’m Bruce and I’ll be your server, and the consequent attempt at creating a palsy & tweetsy environment. I’m in the theater to watch or hear the performers. Spare me the details about the peripheral personnel, essential though they may be to the ultimate presentation. Next will be details about the ticket PURCHASERS, who are REALLY essential to the performance!
and the award for best folding of musical lyrics into a blog post goes to…..Life’s A Pitch!
I very much like the idea of having personal tidbits about the performers, but I have to agree with the rest of the posts in saying that I don’t much care to know about the support staff. You are absolutely correct in saying a performance means much more if you feel some personal connection with the performer on stage. Whether that connection is something small, like enjoying some of the same music, or big, like graduating from the same performing arts school, it makes us all the more likely to “want” to like them. This may hinder one’s ability to view a performance with an unbiased eye, but no one ever said the world was perfect.
Interesting post Amanda, and made me think about what I now reguarly do when I’ve enjoyed a movie – I often go home and at the very least look up the Wikipedia page for that movie. From there I often click onto pages about the actors, director etc. Why don’t do I the same with live performances I’ve enjoyed? I suspect because this information is much less available, and usually less interesting because it’s often what is essentially a reproduction of the programme, whereas Wikipedia pages and the like often offer a bit more beyond the “official” version – which is what I’m looking for.
I wonder if some of these posts miss the point that all the information on a website, if it’s well laid out, is optional – if all you want to do is see performance details, you should be able to do that, but if you recognise a photo of, for example, the Duty Manager, and think “oh, I wonder about them” you can, if you care to, click on their photo. Extrapolating further, what if you read that they have the same interests as you, or grew up in the same place – aren’t you likely to feel, however slight, more of a connection to the venue or organisation?