AMT Lab @ CMU: The year has come full circle for me and tweet seats. From my first conversation about them last summer at the Theatre Communications Group Annual Conference to the CMU School of Music’s tweet seat initiative this past spring, the last twelve months provided an opportunity to play with this still new (and at times, controversial) audience engagement tool. If you missed my first two articles, you can read them here and here to get caught up on the action.
5 comments:
This is actually a pretty cool idea. I just wouldn't approve of it for a dance or theatrical performance. Those two require people to pay attention to what they are seeing as well as what they are hearing. It would just be too distracting for the audience.
However, it is perfect for music performances! A lot of people go to concerts without really knowing any background on the songs that they will be hearing or the composers. This is a neat way for people to learn while they are hearing the music. My only concern will be that the audience won't be watching the band/orchestra, so they might as well just record the performance and play it back if no one is going to be watching them. There will be no need for a live performance. One of the fun aspects of a live performance is that it is live, meaning you can see the people actually making the music right in front of you. You can see each performer and all of the work they put into learning the really fast part.
Last year, I had the opportunity to sit in the Tweet Seats, and they were actually really fun. It was almost like there watching a movie with director commentary, except you could interact back with them. Personally, I think that live music concerts are a great place for this to happen. Many people have discussed instituting Tweet Seats in theatre settings, but I completely disagree. While there is definitely an aspect of performance with live music, a show relies more on audience participation and audience reactions than a piece of music might. This is not saying that music isn't emotional, but that so much of theatre is extremely emotional. If I were an actor, I would feel out of touch with my audience if they were tweeting along with the show.
On a side note, the color of this font is horrendous and difficult to read. I copy/pasted this article into word.
I think the Tweet Seats are very interesting for music concerts. Music is a type of art that you just need to listen to and not really watch as much. People are able to listen and be on twitter at the same time without missing anything. I do not think Tweet Seats would be good for theatre. If people were stuck looking at their phones the entire time, then they would miss the action happening on stage. I personally look at my phone too much and often miss what is happening around me when I look at my phone. During a theatre performance it is important that everyone is off their phones and fully engaged in the show.
This is the first time I had heard about tweet seats, and I think my first knee-jerk response to it was something akin to shock, because how could you condone cell phone use in a show? After reading the article, things made a bit more sense. A lot of people seem still vehemently opposed to translating Tweet Seat use to the theatre, and while I agree that it would never work for shows as they exist now, I think it would be entirely possible for people to create an experimental style of theatre that is designed to be accompanied by some similar form of social media involvement. It wouldn't be a debasement of current theatre, it would be in its own category.
I was also thinking about what the benefits of using Twitter as the medium, rather than making their own app just for audience commentary, which I would have expected. I would guess that it is due to convenience, but I wonder if a devoted app would change the experience much.
I like the idea of tweet seats, it is an interesting way to utilize the crowd for advertising and conversation, as well as feedback. I disagree with Kristen about the distraction factor, as I think that by segregating the sections to tweetseats and non tweetseats, you gather the group that is expecting to be distracted in one place. I think it would be cool to see displays built in to the seats themselves that show the stream of tweets relating to the show to the participants in the tweet seat program as well, it would allow people to read through the tweets without actively having their phone out to distract them.
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