When you go to the theatre why don’t you see trailers?
This question’s been bugging me for a few weeks now. After all, when was the last time you went to the cinema and didn’t see trailers? Why the difference? In both cases you’ve got a captive audience of a few hundred (or maybe even a couple of thousand) people all facing the same direction and open to being entertained.
It’s not just the theatre either (and I’ll include plays, musicals, opera, dance and comedy in that). There’s rarely anything at concerts or gigs where the crowd is left standing around for 30-45mins waiting for the next band to set up.
Content
Actually, ‘trailers’ is probably a bit misleading. I get that a noisy video trailer for an upcoming show might not hit the the right tone, but there are all sorts of things that can be put on a screen.
How about a (silent) slideshow of upcoming events? That wouldn’t be so invasive, would probably do the job and needn’t be too time-consuming or expensive to pull together.
Or you could put up:
info about fundraising campaigns (perhaps with a JustTextGiving code) or educational/outreach projects the venue is involved in.
mentions of social media channels people could subscribe to – many of them will be sat there with mobiles on them, after all.
links to extra info about the show. You could even put up a big QR code if you thought you could handle that much ugly all at once (not that many people would know what to do with it).
commercial adverts – sorry to get all money-grabbing, but why not?
I’m sure that, given five minutes thought, you could come up with all sorts of creative/fun/useful alternatives for those screens.
Feasibility
Setting up a screen (or projecting on to something else) temporarily can’t be that difficult – after all, I’ve seen more impressive things done on stage. At the Hippodrome alone I can think of three different ways I’ve seen screens used recently:
I saw Carlos Acosta there a few weeks back and at one point in the show there was a massive video piece projected on to a screen that filled the stage.
For my sins, I saw Strictly Come Dancing last year and that featured video contributions from one of the judges, with a screen wheeled on stage quickly each time it was needed.
The Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Royal Gala Performance I saw last year (I know, get me) featured large TV screens placed all around the theatre.
Come to think of it, the NME used to bring screens to the O2 Academy for their tours. Between bands they showed promos for the magazine, the tour sponsor and the bands.
What I’m saying is it can be done and in various ways. Of course I’ve really not got much of an idea of the cost/logistics involved so am ready and willing to be shot down mercilessly in the comments.
Finances
I remember when we were offered the unit in the Bullring for the Created in Birmingham shop, the alternative was for the shopping centre to sell the window space to a display advertising company who would serve up adverts to the passing crowds. Those screens would have paid for themselves very quickly indeed.
Would the same be true for theatre screens? There might be a direct financial benefit in terms of tickets sold and funds raised. I’ve no idea about the logistics involved, there are some happily established cinema advertising networks out there. I wonder what it would take to tap into those.
What’s the obstacle?
Is it artistic? Financial? Logistical? Is there some indication that audiences would object?
Inside auditorium I haven’t met a director that would allow. In foyer I guess it’s a resource (lack of) thing
Which was interesting because, come to think of it, I can think of a few larger arts centres that use screens in and around their foyers, making their absence from auditoriums that bit more glaring.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t an amazingly revolutionary idea – someone must have looked into this before. Or someone must be doing it. I realise I don’t know much about the practicalities involved here and it’s been bugging me, so if anyone could shed any light I’d be grateful.
Typical. I hit publish and minutes later find this post from LondonDance.com about Sadler’s Wells (a client, no less) trying out cinema-style trailers of upcoming shows in 2009. I wonder how it went. Are there any more examples?
Last month I went over to Boston to go and see Cirque Eloize perform iD – a show that’s being brought over to the UK for a short tour later in the year. It’s a great show and definitely worth catching.
I was sent over there by the theatres that will be putting on the show over here. They wanted me to interview some of the performers, speak to the artistic team and have a go at a few circus skills. I’d then provide some written copy and, ideally, some video content that they could use to sell the show.
They sent me because, as well as being able to do a reasonable job on the traditional written stuff, I have a sense of the social media content too. Not that I’ve done that much video work before. I was game for trying some circus tomfoolery too. So, I chatted to people, recorded an interview on video and recorded some rehearsal footage to provide for some cutaways.
I went for lunch with a few of the company – the tour director, stage manager and Thibault, the trial cyclist. There’s a bit in the show where a volunteer is plucked from the audience and he jumps back and forth over them while they lie on the stage. It’s very impressive.
We chatted over noodles about what I was going to do – they were going to let me have a go at juggling, trampolining and anything else I fancied. I said that it’d be great if he could do that routine on video and use me as the volunteer. He said sure, no problem.
So that’s what we did.
It was a bit worrying – I’d seen him do the routine once without any problems and seen him doing other tricks too, so I was pretty confident I’d be fine. On the other hand, the performers with Cirque Eloize are still only human and mistakes are made…
The reaction to the video’s been fun. It’s had more views than expected and, from a work point of view, it’s always fascinating to see how something makes its way through the networks. Especially when something gets picked up by something like The Daily What or the Huffington Post and you see it picked up on the comet-trail of spam blogs that follow behind.
The video’s been up for just shy of a week and has had 150,000 views so far. That’s good going. I’ve collected together a few of the mentions the video has had with links to the bigger sites that have picked up on it:
Some of my favourite comments:
BALLS OF STEEL!
I don’t care how pro he is. I wouldn’t do that, and I don’t even have balls.
Balls of Steel! I’m in love.
With balls that big, I’m surprised they didn’t get clipped from that bike tread.
Nutsack of the year right here…
Brave, beautiful motherf*cker.
Kinda disappointed he didn’t get hit in the face.
This is so full of badassery it hurts.
Trust me when I say it feels odd to have so many people commenting on your testicles.
I’m collecting links and so on using delicious using the tag ceidbike.
This was the busiest week and the one in which my jaw hit the ground more often than medical advice recommends (metaphorically speaking, obv).
Tuesday 27 April
Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Magia de la Danza is selection of the company’s greatest hits, starting with a scene from Giselle that simultaneously made me look forward to Friday and reminded me of just how scary a flock of ballerinas can be.
The show was good – nicely paced, although a few dancers didn’t seem quite on their A game; there was nearly quite a bad drop and one of the ballerinas was quite noticeably straining during her solo. For all that, it’d be unfair not to mention that another dancer received gasps and applause for the length of time she held a particularly difficult position.
Carlos Acosta paid a visit during this performance too. I gather that some people weren’t best pleased that he only put in a short cameo but he didn’t need long to prove his chops. I’ve not got the vocab or level of appreciation to spot what was better about his dancing, he just seemed better.
For all that, perhaps the most impressive performance of the night was put in by Alicia Alonso, the company’s octogenarian founder, receiving the crowd’s applause at the end before going on to conduct a series of interviews and (if reports are true) stay up and put away her fair share of rum.
Wednesday 28 April
This was the one that I’d been looking forward to most – the teenage boy in me drawn to the Shaolin monks of Sutra before anything else.
It was a great show too with ingenious use of props. If there’s a gripe then it was that I’d like to have seen more martial art tomfoolery and less furniture shifting. There was a sense that the monks were performing within themselves a certain amount – the way they lined up to cartwheel and showboat across the stage at the end showed they had some spare energy to expend. It was great to see some personality in amongst that showboating too.
This was also the night that I had the strongest sense that the festival was a major event. At a reception just before the show, David Massingham pointed out that the Hippodrome and REP were both sold out, with a good crowd at the Patrick Centre too. More than 3000 people watching dance in Birmingham on a Wednesday night. Epic.
Thursday 29 April
I didn’t get to see much of the Outspoken programme of dance from the Arab world but I made a point of catching the first event – a screening of a work in progress documentary, Dancing Under Crossfire, which tells the story of an Iraqi dance group made up of dancers now living in Europe. It was good to get another perspective – while we were enjoying a deluge of dance in Birmingham, Baghdad’s contemporary dance scene is apparently just about non-existent.
After Tuesday’s sneak peek it was back to the Hippodrome for Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Giselle. None of the shakiness of the other evening, everything ran smoothly. The first half was pretty but felt a little over-long (I’ve discovered very traditional ballet isn’t really my thing) but things picked up after the interval, with a darker mood and astoundingly regimented ballerinas dancing in tight formation.
I can’t leave this one without saying Giselle shouldn’t have bothered to save Albrecht and Hilarion, who was drowned in a lake by the Wilis, didn’t deserve to be treated the way he was. Where’s the justice?
Saturday 1 May
In 2008 I went to watch the big public IDFB spectacle in Victoria Square – it was probably the dance performance that made me think that dance was something I could see myself getting into. This year we had Utopia taking over the same space with an international mix of folk dances and The Destroyers.
It was a great show – the band sounded ace, with Paul Murphy in his element. The rain held off (for the first performance – the evening one was cancelled) and a sizeable crowd were there to appreciate it, with the cossack dancers getting the biggest cheers.
The performers looked like they had a fantastic time too. Such was the response, it sounds like it might now be adapted for the stage. Quite right too.
Circa was on that evening at the REP. It looked interesting and had been talked up by a few people but I didn’t buy tickets until the morning of the show. By that time there were only a handful left. I was so glad I didn’t miss out on it.
I’m not sure what to say about this one. In purely descriptive terms it was a mix of circus skills, sports acrobatics, gymnastics, contemporary dance and breakdancing.
That doesn’t quite cover it though. The things those people did on stage defied belief. The audience was the noisiest I encountered but that was no-one’s fault – we’re talking gasps, squeals, laughs of disbelief, outbreaks of applause… that kind of thing.
