Best of This Week’s Theatre Blogs – 4 Sep 2009
Every week our theatregoer reporter Corinne Furness trawls the web to find some of the best gems from the myriad theatre-related blogs and condense them into one easy-to-read “Best of the Blogs” round-up each Friday.
There were more reflections about Edinburgh this week as the return to life away from the Fringe began. Natasha Tripney summed up what she’d learnt during August whilst Hot Tin Roof reflected on the importance of Twitter and blogging in the promotion of the festival – and where this might lead in the future.
The role of the Internet in performance featured elsewhere as Hannah Nicklin blogged about the forthcoming live streaming of Stevie Amuzu’s White Paper as part of Talawa Theatre’s Flipping the Script at the Young Vic next week.
Meanwhile, Arts Marketing reflected on the desire for new audiences in theatre – and what might happen if theatres and practitioners forget about existing audiences. Finally, Tim Bauer on Direct Address issued a plea for theatres to adopt a system where plays react to the moment – and aren’t simply placed in development, rendering them obsolete before they’ve even been performed…
“I have learnt that one can live off coffee, wine, apples and croissants but one probably shouldn’t. I have learnt that I can see over 70 shows and still come away loving the theatre and its capability to transport and delight and fire the imagination which is, I think, a good thing.”
“We saw fantastic tools bringing together and ranking shows based on Twitter audience opinion, but will the professional reviewers feel overlooked? Is there an opportunity to aggregate the reviewers? Plenty of excellent bloggers and websites come to Edinburgh looking to cover shows, perhaps bringing these reviews together with writers from more traditional spaces such as newspapers and radio could be successful?”
“Live streaming readings provides work in development with a very cheap and instant audience, it provides a new work with feedback from all over the world (breaking down that London-only barrier of the majority of the new theatre writing world), and opens up the writing process. This allows a theatre and a writer to make new work less of a risk, and at the same time engage with potential audiences.”
“By nature, humans are attracted to what is new and hip. The grass is always greener on the other side; that is, until one reaches the other side. Don’t be sucked into a strategy because it is shiny and new. Before digging new wells, make sure that your existing ones don’t have any leaks.”
“This is what leads to situations like with my friend who wrote a play about the mortgage crisis, which would have been fantastically relevant and cool if a theatre could have gotten it up right away, like Caffe Cino might have done back in the day… Instead, the best case scenario for my friend is that his play gets into some development festival next summer.”
