The Power of Live

This is my blog at the end of my Trailblazer funded research. During this period, I said that I would:

... undertake research into how to best capture and distribute live performance in a way that captures the essence of the work and the live experience, but also has the potential for greatest reach. 

This will give an overview of how it went and what we did. ‘We’ are Maria Santelices (researcher/producer), Dan Canham (theatre/filmmaker), Oliver Samways (sound artist/musician), Aayush Dudhiya (360 & documentary filmmaker) and me, Nick Young, (theatre maker/youth & community arts leader).

It is worth starting by saying that I am a passionate believer in the power of the live experience. The tangible connection to skill, risk, and effort fused with the sense of communion and celebration is when done well, a transformative experience. Over the past couple of years, there has been, by necessity, a big push to bring live performances to remote audiences. Whilst there are incredible experiences that fuse the potential of live and tech/screen and great advances and experiments in bringing the live to remote audiences, I believethat we are many years off from it being a fulfilling proxy for the live experience. There’s something about liveness that connects us with the human performers and we get a sense of the person behind the character, however subtle. Screens provide a kind of filter that gives much greater precedence to the character (unless you’re watching bad acting - think Orlando Bloom in…anything).

So the ambition that we set out with was to try and capture something of the essence of liveness, whatever that means. We decided to see how different kinds of new tech would influence and change not only the audience experience but how we work with and within the live environment. Often at the back of my mind was a blog post I read ages ago by Sleepdog’s Tanuja Amarasuriya on how ‘Immersive' has to be more than a technical concept. It has to be first and foremost about the magic of the story you’re telling and the world that you’re wrapping your audience in. I find Immersive more complete and satisfying when there are gaps for me to contribute my imagination or see the human cracks in the making/performance process. It is why I am struggling to get onboard with rendered environments for theatrical purposes - they’re just too complete visually and aurally (although I do appreciate the scale and ambition of live events in virtual worlds such as Travis Scott’s gig in Fortnite). Where is the hum of the PA & lights; the sweat on the performers; the sparks between performers discovering new moments in old material?

Another driver for this project was the (in my opinion) missed opportunity for the Great Digitisation of the past couple of years to connect more effectively with the next potential generation of live art makers, producers, and wider workforce. The Culture in Crisis report by AHRC showed that despite venues and companies putting their work online, and sometimes making work in innovative ways remotely using platforms like Zoom, this did not diversify audiences at all. Why? It’s possible that the work being packaged up and put out does not talk to that target demographic in visual/cultural languages they speak or on channels that they are on. In other words the feeling that ‘that’s not for me’ continues despite lower ticket prices and no venue threshold to cross etc.

So we set out to try and understand more about how to create ‘content’ (do we like that word?) from filmed live performance, including the world before, after, and around it, sliced and packaged in various ways to see how different pieces would test with younger (16-30) non-theatre going audiences.

We started by sharing and exploring examples of content that either does or doesn’t create the sense of space, communion, skills, and joy that the live experience can. We tried to build an understanding and the beginnings of a shared language that we could take forwards into the next stages.

I then had a series of conversations with people from our target demographic where I showed them some of our researched content. This included dance, parkour, vlogs, 360 film & sound, rap battles and much more. Each response was measured against 3 metrics: “Would you: ‘like’, ‘share’, and ‘seek’” content like this if you stumbled across it? When I got replies that largely indicated a positive or negative response I would ask them to explain their answer.

“There’s no accounting for taste” is a saying my Grandfather used to use, and so it was with this. A wide array of subjective answers came back. But from that we were able to start to build a picture of things that are mostly received positively; elements that work better for different age groups; and (the beginnings) of an understanding around the difference between liking something because it’s a new experience (e.g. VR headsets) and because it’s great content. We also asked them to share examples of videos, games, sounds, and other content that they like to broaden our references. A lot of it was great. Some of it was baffling.

An example of one of the videos that helped us shape the next stage:

This video is just brimming with life, energy, skill, and sense of community. The sound quality is sketchy at best and awful at worst. He messes up countless times. Continuity doesn’t exist. And yet what you have is a totally compelling live performance that places you right in the middle of the action. It’s human, it’s skillful, it’s raw.

We were now equipped with a bunch of words, concepts, and intuitive responses with themes and descriptors such as ‘showing the mechanics’; ‘artifice vs ‘reality’; and ‘perspective’ that we needed to translate into actual material. We set up a day-long lab at The Mount Without with a cohort of actors and dancers to try and turn the theory behind concepts we were starting to identify like ‘Becoming’ and ‘Perfume’ into some kind of tangible reality. We asked everyone to bring prepared performance material. We only had the roughest of ideas about what and how we were going to do, but we knew that we needed to be able to get right in there and direct the performers in a way that a normal documenting of a show perhaps doesn’t. There are pros and cons to this. It gives us more control and a repeatable methodology/toolkit but means that the ask of people’s time is greater - which is never easy. We then went into post-production from the lab and were really encouraged with what we got out of it. However, we realised that we needed some makers/editors who were fluent with content created by and for platforms like TikTok, so we approached Boom Satsuma and nabbed a couple of young people from their Film Making course, handed them a bunch of raw footage and gave them free rein. Early tests with some of our initial focus groups were positive.

One video from the lab:

Our first attempt at our ‘Becoming’ approach. This is based on the idea of a boxer or ‘stage warrior’ and their journey from civilian to hero.

We decided that we needed to apply the emerging toolkit in a real-world environment. The Lab at The Mount Without had been great, but could we replicate the synergy and outputs working cold with a new company and less time? Brook Tate and company from his show Birthmarked at Bristol Old Vic kindly agreed to a couple of hours before a performance one afternoon. It wasn’t easy. We felt clumsy and at times either slightly forced or at odds creatively. We made a number of (un)fortunate errors but were largely happy with the learning curve and what came out - it validated some of our working decisions and approaches, and allowed us to both expand and refine our embryonic methodology. What we ended up with was a series of content from super-short form TikTok-friendly silliness, through recognisable video content, up to some rough experiments with 360 filming.

A 360 trailer for the show. The idea was to use the technology to take the stage show content back out into the real world and place it in the context of the character and part of their story (disclaimer - we only had 20 mins for concept development and shoot)

We are nearly finished with testing the new materials with the focus groups. The work is largely landing well, although there are clearly areas on the fringes of the spectrum of work (the super-short form and the 360/virtual work), where we need to do more to develop a solid understanding of both what works with our target audiences and how to use the hardware & software to achieve this. Bringing in and supporting the development of young makers will be central to achieving some of that.

The stage beyond that is to fully explore where and what we can do with this learning to try and help the industry connect with these groups in a more sustainable way. Hopefully, this will contribute to a perception shift about who and what these buildings, organisations, and professions are for. A diverse and future-looking audience and workforce are critical to the sustainability of the live and performing arts sector.