Is this what Season 5 of Mad Men will be most remembered for?

A fantastic video from the TED library from Carl Bass, CEO of AutoDesk. The five trends that are affecting innovation:

1. 1. The Age of Access
2. 2. Business un -usual
3. 3. Digital Fabrication
4. 4. The Rise of Information
5. 5. Infinite Computing

So, after many months of "wondering" how to post video footage  on here, I finally persisted with the googling strategy and it paid off. Of course once I achieved it  and it all seems so simple and straightforward, I'm asking myself, what took me so long. Yes, I could've asked someone, I could've gone to a forum somewhere and initiated  a thread.

This is is just another example of how, when we are confronted by a problem that exists outside the comfort and habit of our day to day life, we tend towards paralysis. of course, in theory, we should all be able to step back a little, look at the problem a bit more objectively and apply our creative, solution focussed abilities to solving the task at hand.

However despite the theories, the truth is a lot different. I think in most cases our first reaction, as was mine when dealing a technological issue, is because this problem exists within an environment thats alien to me, "I need an expert in case I break something!"

But do we really? Isn't that what the internet gives us now? We are one gigantic, connected network. We have the ability to crowdsource answers to any problem that could ever occur in our day to day lives at home or in business. Not only is this true but we are finding solutions from real experts in the field and these answers are very often embedded in step by step videos so we have a full proof way of dealing with the issue at hand with complete trust.

Even though I use the internet in every aspect of my daily life, it took this simple task to realise how powerful this connectivity really can be.

But this strategy has become a visceral part of how the next generation engages with life. They understand this. They don't even question it. They assume its existence and place complete trust in it. This is going to be the new generation gap. The question is how can a traditional system deal with a generation who is not afraid of breaking stuff? THe one excuse that can never be used again is "I feel disconnected from the youth of today"

Great news in this weeks Stage that fifteen UK independent theatres have come together to form a consortium called Music and Lyrics and will specialise in producing large scale musical tours. It looks like ATG (Ambassador THeatre Group) are also going to be collaborating with subsidised regional theatres in a bid to discover new British Musicals. Despite the huge cost of producing and the slim chances of it returning a profit, the powers that be seem to be betting on them a lot more than straight drama or comedy. Among the musicals we can expect to see over the coming year are: The Nutty Professor, A Fish Called Wanda, American Psycho, Viva Forever (Story of the Spice Girls ala Mama Mia), The Addams Family, American Idiot and thats not counting revivals and transfers including the highly anticipated Book of Mormon!

The Guardian newspaper is carrying out an experiment with opening up its news coverage to the public. The objective is to provide the opportunity for members of the public to begin a dialogue with writers and editors around upcoming stories as they work on them.

The Guardian Blog talks about how you will be able to see what is happening on any given Newsday and what the editors think about particular stories, what theatre they plan to review etc. Naturally they are not going to mention details of stories that are embargoed or any exclusives they might be working on but on the whole, they want to give you the opportunity to share, comment or maybe even add to the story in some way. Yes, of course one could be cynical and say that this is just another trick in the book to try and reverse the steady decline of newspaper sales. On the other hand, it could be another iteration in the age of creating conversations and respecting the opinion of the reader as equal in the dialogue.

After I read it I was thinking how interesting that strategy would be for theatres and arts centres throughout the country. I would love to be able to go onto my local arts centre website and be asked to give an opinion on the productions they are thinking about adding to the future calendar. It would certainly be an optimum strategy in terms of establishing engagement with a potential audience. Obviously, just like newspapers preparing exclusives, there will always be potential bookings a venue wants to remain tight-lipped about, but in the main, the average production, trying to book into the average venue, is no big secret.

I guess the question is, if newspapers, one of the most competitive business sectors, believes in open channels of dialogue as a way forward, why doesn’t theatre? More specifically, if theatre refuses to engage in similar types of conversation with a potential audience, then, what’s standing in the way? What is their biggest fear? Revealing its plans to potential competition, or what a potential audience might really say?

So I go to see a show on the fringe last night and I’m sitting amongst approximately fifteen other people. Small audience for a Thursday I think given that it is in its second week. I realise at the interval that, apart from myself and one other person, the remainder of the audience are friends of the cast. I also find out that this has been the busiest night since the opening, that average attendance is around two to three a night with no advance booking. This must be a hard pill to swallow especially as there is another two weeks to run.  I doubt that the production is going to build on word-of-mouth, it is just not good enough to recommend, particularly in a city with over 145 different performances on offer on any given week night and the marketing budget is minute. Yes, we've all been there, whether as actor, writer, producer and it sucks. This is the third show I have seen in as many months that played under a similar situation; very small attendance, no strong word of mouth, no significant marketing budget, no great reviews and playing an over extended run.

I left the theatre last night not questioning the artistic merits of the piece so much as the business model that we all buy into. What is it that is so important about playing for three to four weeks when we don’t have the marketing budget to promote or sustain such an enterprise? Why do we insist on playing six nights a week when we are more than likely going to have to cancel performances, leaving a demoralized cast to scuttle off to the nearest watering hole to drown their sorrows? I understand that no venue is just going to hire out its premium nights in order to help us deal with poor attendances. The real question is whom are we serving under this condition? A potential audience, a venue managers need to make the rent or, some out dated concept about what constitutes a “serious commitment” to making theatre?

In Los Angeles most theatre plays Thursday to Sunday because the sector understands that people work long hours and rarely go out before the weekend. As a theatre-goer, I wouldn’t judge the quality of a potential show based on how many performances it played in a given week. On the contrary, if something I was interested in attending only played for one or two performances a week over a limited time period, it would certainly make me prioritise it.

At the other end of the spectrum, a friend of mine who runs a venue told me about a situation he found himself in; a young company had booked the venue for a four week run with a new play. After the booking was confirmed and before any booking opened on the show, the venue manager was approached to rent the space for a lucrative promotion on the Wednesday of the company’s second week. He approached them and offered to buy out the night from them at the full seat price. They refused, as was there right and the venue manager turned down the promotional offer. The company played that Wednesday night to ten people in a 110 seat venue; they never played to over thirty people on any night in the run. Would it have been an ignoble act to pocket the 100% takings for one night in advance and utilise those funds to market the show or even to contribute towards paying the actors? What law of theatre producing logic was being upheld?

I was reminded during the week of two separate incidents I observed last year, both involving people in the Arts. Though they happened in two different countries (Ireland and the UK), they were connected because the people involved both hold respected senior positions in the arts, and both incidents had a similar outcome.

The first incident occurred at a reputable arts centre here in the UK on the opening night of a local amateur group’s production of Oliver. The opening night was packed and the show had sold out for the other four nights performances filling I would imagine, close to 1,700 tickets. During the interval, a member of the audience approached the Chief Executive, said he thought the show was fantastic and, this was the kind of product that should be staged regularly. The CE smiled and politely moved away. In a later discussion I happened to mention there were a few venues that were using members of the public to programme a season of work as an exercise in connecting with and, understanding what their audiences want to see. I had hardly finished the sentence when I was told quite categorically that it would never happen at this venue because “that (Oliver) and the Sound of Music is the kind of thing they’d have playing here all the time”.

The second incident occurred at a conference for Irish Arts Officers late last year. During one of the discussions, the conference chair was talking about the problems of engaging and building a cultural audience at grass roots level when she asked “ what would you do if someone said they only wanted to see Eastenders on stage? That was the que for havoc to break out at the thought of such a thing even being considered with a very senior arts person standing up and declaring, “this is why you need the experts!”

And I thought, how funny.  Yes, I certainly think there was a place for ‘experts’ around the establishment of the Arts Council in mid 1940’s and probably for the next 20 years or so. After all, this was the two-pronged approach designed to use both culture and the BBC to apparently educate the masses.

But once arts centres established themselves in towns and villages throughout Britain and Ireland during the 1960’s -70’s where they acted as a kind of conduit for the community into the established cultural provision, while simultaneously empowering a local authentic cultural voice, there really wasn’t a need for experts anymore. Or at least, one would’ve thought. But they never went away. They are still here today, refusing to engage with an authentic and independent new audience unless it’s on their own terms, because they still believe know far better when it comes to cultural provision.

Sixty years ago the average person had no choice; he either consumed the cultural product on offer or he didn’t; end of story. Today however, there is not only an abundance of cultural product available, both as live performance or online, but the very tools of cultural production have been completely democratized. In addition, thanks, to YouTube, Flickr, MySpace to name a few, there is even an audience, bigger than anyone ever imagined, waiting to devour this product and, all this happens in an environment where there is no cultural hierarchy; everyone is equal, producer and consumer.

So if someone mentions that they’d prefer to see Eastenders or Oliver and the doors to discovering something interesting about such a choice are shut in their face, are they bothered? Not really. They’ll just continue producing and consuming the kind of cultural product they desire, simply because they can. And the ‘experts’ can continue to build the walls higher to keep the ‘philistines’ out, but guess what? They don’t have to. Nobody is going to try stealing their patch. Their ‘patch’ actually doesn’t exist in the real world anymore. It’s just a figment of an imagination propagated and supported by other ‘experts’. The only other resort left to these ‘experts’ is to sit around in a huddle and snigger at those within the sector who are actually trying to engage with, and meet a new audience, on their own terms, using social media tools like Twitter, FaceBook etc. As the last grains in the funding sandglass slip away before our very eyes, they will have nowhere to hide. And finally, the ‘expert’ will be no more. Let’s hope they don’t do too much damage in the meantime.