Thursday, February 07, 2013
Providence theater experiments with 'tweet seats'
EarthLink - U.S. News: Sarah Bertness slipped into her seat at a recent staging of the musical "Million Dollar Quartet" and, when the lights dimmed, started doing something that's long been taboo inside theaters: typing away at her iPhone.
The 26-year-old freelance writer from Providence wasn't being rude. She had a spot in the "tweet seat" section at the Providence Performing Arts Center.
The downtown theater is now setting aside a small number of seats — in the back — for those who promise to live-tweet from the performance using a special hash tag. They might offer impressions of the set, music or costumes, lines of dialogue that resonate with them or anything else that strikes them, really.
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3 comments:
This is an interesting concept. Recently, we used tweeting on stage to convey the story, but using it to engage the/an audience is a funny idea. On one hand, the extra advertisement can't be bad, and the data can be used to figure better the interactions between audience and action. However, it disengages the tweeting audience and performers, and could possibly reveal to much about the show, ruining the appeal to new audiences. I see several more scientific studies regarding technology in theaters in the future.
There are three main functions that tweets can provide as a part of a theatrical experience: they can (a) provide in-character engagement/immersion with the storyline, they can (b) provide a behind-the-scenes look at the show to enrich the experience of watching, or they can (c) distract/annoy everyone around the tweeter. For most shows, such as Million Dollar Quartet, they are not written with (a) in mind, and (b) turns out to only cause (c). IMHO, for a tweet seat to really WORK, the active engagement with the play in real-time has to be motivated by the story being told and the experience intended by the playwrights and directors. I'll present a positive example: Next To Normal livetweeted during a production once, with the characters sharing their inner thoughts and the motivations behind their lyrics. That fundamentally WORKED, because it provided a factor that wasn't there, but added to the appreciation of the play itself.
I actually like the Twittermissions idea for engaging in function (b). Rather than distracting from the storytelling experience going on currently, getting to ask questions during a period specifically intended for debriefing is a great way to get that user involvement the theatre's looking for. Just keep those pesky phones out of the seats of the theatre! Don't Be Function (c)!
This is interesting, as I've seen many shows at PPAC before. I don't really see this as becoming something that is a widespread practice. It's rather gimmicky, and doesn't really accomplish much for the tweeter or the theater. At over 3500 seats, the theater can definitely afford to be giving a couple away for free to try out this program, and I applaud them for that. As Brian says, perhaps in the future tweets can actually become a more integral part of the show, and in that case, I am all for the idea.
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