The Swan Lake Bath Ballet brought it home - how lockdown, the closure of performing spaces and loss of live audience contact has been so devastating to our cultural life, that artists have been forced into entirely unforeseen outlets for their creativity. Here was something beautiful that simply wouldn't have existed in any other circumstances.
This month, indoor live performances were supposed to resume, under tight restrictions, but this has been postponed. Still, the first major music venues are hoping to stage concerts soon - including Snape Maltings and Wigmore Hall. With reduced audiences and limited duration, it's a long way from normal, but it's a start and it's hopeful.
And it's being watched anxiously by the thousands of musicians whose working lives have been convulsed. Hopefully, they will benefit from the Government's £1.57bn arts package, indirectly at least. In the meantime, let's not forget to encourage all those who have picked themselves up and found an innovative responses, especially if they don't have a big organisation behind them.
For me, running a small and entirely self-funding chamber music series, the difficulties faced by professional music venues are unimaginable. I don't rely on external income and don't have bills to pay. But I've been able to facilitate a little of this innovation, and learnt a few lessons along the way - primarily, I've learnt that there's a huge value in doing something live, even if it can be rather scary.
Following the example of performers who turned their homes into venues for online concerts, I invited some local professional musicians to present a short recital over a video conference (Zoom webinar), which I would promote as part of a little series. Because of the vaguaries of internet quality and the level of technology risk we were prepared to accept, I decided that the performances would be recorded in advance and also hosted on Vimeo for reliability, but the event was still live on Zoom, with a conversation between me and the performers to introduce the music, and the opportunity for the audience to type in comments and to donate.
Zoom is quite well designed for this, and it's nowadays a familiar tool for most of our audience, but critically it required use of one of Zoom's paid-for accounts to give presenters an active role separate from the audience. We used the 'pro' account, which allows up to 100 participants - so you can see that our ambitions are modest.
Still, the response has been overwhelming. Admittedly, there haven't been lots of people watching: our four events were watched by dozens of people not hundreds, and views of the recordings number a few hundred. But people have been so generous and enthusiastic to see a local initiative up and running, while the players have also been cheered on by friends and family, pleased to see them back performing.
For a properly professional version of what I've been doing, take a look at (and do support) Stage-Hub.
Is this the way forward now? When our little series returns to the church that gives it its name, we could broadcast from there instead of having a live audience - or as well as having a socially-distanced one. It's hardly a new idea, as many venues have streamed concerts online before this crisis, but it could easily become the norm.
And of course that allows for people to attend from all over the world. Even we had viewers from America, Italy and South Korea.
It's given me a lot of satisfaction to dabble in concert promotion and in new ways of doing things through necessity. I'm enormously impressed by the tenacity and enthusiasm of the performers, who have had to overcome a number of technological difficulties. Our audience has generously responded to an invitaton to donate. It's been a fun project for us together.
But it is very, very far from a sustainable model for earning a living.
No comments:
Post a Comment