UPDATE: This post is kind of a train wreck. Fair warning
Original Post:
I’m sitting in the lobby at the Armory waiting for the doors to open at Apollo, Portland Center Stage’s new 3.5-hour, multimedia production about Nazis, and outer space, and… stuff. Tonight’s the “Twitter and live-blog friendly performance,” which means that the balcony is full of new media types on laptops and iphones
It’s weird. I’m going to liveblog it. I’m curious about the entire experience: how watching a play while plugged into the internet changes the viewing experience; if it’s even possible to pay attention to a 3.5 hour play when the entire, endlessly diverting internet is at my fingertips; if this is a new, possibly improved way of relating to theater, or simply a novel PR hook. I’ll post updates after the jump, and I might follow it on Twitter as well: alisonhallett if you’re interested.
7:39 Well, we’re ten minutes in and I have no idea what’s going on because I’ve spent the past few minutes in setup mode. There’s been dancing, and paper airplanes hurled at the audience. Also, it’s hard to type in the dark. Oh, and pdx pipeline just rolled in fashionably late. Hi, Julian.
7:50 the lighting is gorgeous, damn. But I’m finding it virtually impossible to both pay attention to the show, and maintain any kind of coherent commentary. So far, this is not working for me: I’d rather just be watching the play, ’cause frankly it looks way more interesting than this computer screen right now. Erik Henriksen, who is sitting next to me, just texted: “You have TRICKED me Apollo isn’t in this at all THIS IS NOT BATTLESTAR.”
I actually think I’m missing something by trying to divide my attention between the stage and my computer. I’m getting that the show is very visual, very movement-based, very rhythmic, but the inability to focus completely on the show is really undermining all of those elements. I’m gonna close the laptop for a bit.
8:05: Erik says: This is really pretty. The multimedia backdrop stuff is great, and is enough to make me forget that the sets are usually the only reason I like PCS’ plays. Or wait, does this count as a set? I guess it does. So things are still the same. All this V2 rocket stuff is like Gravity’s Rainbow, if Pynchon had really cool lighting effects and made less sense
8:10 I’m going to give this to Erik for a while because I am on new media strike.
8:19 Okay. Erik here. Alison just kind of crammed her laptop in my face, and even though I was sending her IMs via iPhone throughout the play thus far—there’s something novel enough about being “allowed” to text while being all cultural and shit at the theater that it’s kind of hard to resist doing so—I’m in the same boat as her, basically. This show is really complex and sprawling (and we haven’t even hit the first of TWO intermissions yet), requiring a lot of pieces to be put together by the audience. Frankly, I have limited patience for a lot of avant garde-ish stuff to begin with, but being expected to be able to keep all this stuff straight and/or pay attention, while also being expected to provide color commentary? I am not up to this task, so I’ll just describe what’s happening onstage right now, and you’ll have to believe me I’m not making this shit up, despite the fact I might have taken a bit of codeine cough syrup before coming over here: Walt Disney is talking to a German scientist while some lady in Mickey Mouse ears walks around a Mickey Mouse puppet while she screeches out lines of dialogue in an exceedingly annoying imitation of Mickey’s voice. Now they’re all singing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I either took too much medicine or not enough.
8:24
OK, Alison here. God, the set is just beautiful. What a stunning first-act curtain drop. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but it’s really fantastic. Unfortunately that’s all I got; I’m having a hard time with this little thought experiment. Someone just said, “this is making me all headachey, trying to tweet and watch at the same time.” I feel really old media right now, but I have to agree. I am reluctant, too, to actually tweet the show: I don’t want to inundate my poor 60 followers or whatever with 100 one-liners about a show they’re probably not going to see. Seems like a breach of etiquette. But liveblogging it like is this kinda pointless: I’m equally talking about a show most people aren’t going to see, and I’m failing to say anything insightful or even funny. I can’t imagine this is the best read. I think a better bet, if PCS repeats this experiment in the future, would be to use the same liveblogging program that we used to liveblog the presidential debates—that way everyone who’s up here could be participating in a conversation, if they wanted to, instead of just trying to vomit clever oneliners into the internet.
Wonderful things are happening on the set right now, even during intermission. This show is stunningly designed.
8:34 I heard someone say during the preshow tweetup that watching the show while twittering would be like being a critic: taking notes during a show. I would like to say NOT AT ALL. I jot down notes while watching shows for two reasons: To remind myself of details I’m afraid I might forget (names, dates, etc); and to remind myself of ideas I’m afraid I might forget (jokes, character insights, etc). My notes would make no sense to anyone but me, because they’re not written with any thought that anyone but me will see them. They’re a tool. This is something different.
Everyone is introducing themselves by their screennames and making friends in the aisles, which is cute. Someone rightly noted that if nothing else, this is creating incredible internet buzz for the show.
8:50 movement based segment, and i’m all, “oh, they’re not talking! down time! I better blog!”
9:45 Intermission
This blog post is worthless. I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. Twitter lends itself to little blips of randomness in a way that blog posts don’t; but there’s definitely a skill involved in formulating compelling Tweets, so it’ll be interesting to see how the final transcript of this ends up looking—PCS is going to post it, I think. I’m gonna cut this out, though, ’cause i think it’s a waste of time.
How can you be distracted by “blogging” when all you’re blogging about is how distracting your blogging about being distracted is?
Just enjoy the show and pause to add a one-line quip or impression once in a while!
But how is that of any interest/value to anyone?
I mean, point totally taken. But if I just type shit like “More Nazi brain-eating jokes,” it doesn’t make for a coherent blog post; and for people following me on Twitter, it’d just be spammy and annoying. I’d think.
I would really like to hear how this went for other people, either those who participated or those who followed it on twitter during or after the fact.
Full disclosure: I work at PCS. But following along the live tweets from home tonight was fascinating. Having already seen the production, I found the tweets putting the show back into my head, scene by scene, with all of the strong visuals really clear to me. Like seeing the show again, but with the audience’s brains. I wonder if tweeps who see the show and then read the Twitter stream will have the same experience? will be interesting to know.
A year ago, I thought Twitter was the exemplar of the worst sort of navel-gazing. I really did not care if you just had a delicious cup of coffee… but it seems to have morphed, and now the people I follow actually provide information, entertainment, and the conversations emerge as full pictures. Will Twitter continue to be something different? Don’t know. Will it even be in a year?
but it’s compelling to wonder, and this little experiment, like the play — new, interesting, entertaining, and not perfect. But I was never bored during either.
Do you think if you hadn’t seen the show you would’ve found following the #apollo tweets interesting? The more I think about it, the more a chatroom-style liveblog seems like a better option to me—I imagine most people at the show tonight were following each other’s updates anyway. The thing that held me back from Twitter tonight was a reluctance to bombard everyone who follows me with what would be, for any non theater fans (and I’m afraid there are many), pretty inane and irrelevant tweets. Because I do think Twitter can be informative and entertaining, but only if the people using it are exercising some restraint. Obviously the preponderance of #apollo tags was a boon for PCS’s web visibility, but I’m not yet convinced it served any end beyond that.
This will obviously take some more time to percolate through my brain, but I found the process rather useful. I’ve always been frustrated by the traditional sit in a dark room and don’t respond to what’s happening culture that is our theatre.
Shakespeare’s time allowed for people to respond to the show in real time, and for actors to directly address audience. There needs to be more of that in our time. Twitter allows that to a degree.
There were some useful thoughts and insights in other Tweeple’s posts. I will digets them over the next couple of days.
Thanks for noticing, Alison. We have to be fashionable….
I was up there in the balcony last night too. I thought the play itself and the Twitter thing were both mixed-bags. Like everyone else, I spent too much of the first act trying to come up with snark and ignoring what was happening on stage. I finally gave up and decided to just pay attention instead once Walt Disney showed up.
All in all, Apollo was waaaaaaay too dense and exhausting of a production for something like this. Even without the distraction of my iPhone and the couple near us that talked nonstop, it was hard enough to try to keep all of the facts, metaphors and historical figures straight.
As a total outsider on this entire experiment, I have to say that to me it just played as a “oh, everyone’s into this Twitter thing, let’s try to capitalize on that buzz for a bit” more than anything else.
But I do think that “More Nazi brain-eating jokes” should be tweeted randomly by more people throughout any given day.
I think experiment is the operative word, and I enjoyed the opportunity to be part of it and to do something totally different…maybe I annoyed the people who followed me, but heck, sometimes they annoy me too! I (almost) never tweet about what’s in my cup or on my plate…so if on this particular night I tweeted more than usual, I think it all balances out. Plus, as someone who self-edits way too much, it was probably therapeutic to just let thoughts fly without polishing–or even proofing. (V2, not B2… Sheesh!) For me theatre is about seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, in a way that makes me think or laugh or feel. I was totally engaged, even if it was in a kind of schizophrenic way. I’d like to see it again sometime in a more conventional way…hopefully after it’s been edited down a bit. – @carmenhill and/or @fearless youth
I enjoyed the experience a lot, perhaps in part because this is not the kind of play that personally engages me. (Loved Pillowman here, though.) I got a lot of insight on the play — which was kind of like a puzzle anyway — by reading fellow tweeters’ comments in real time. They provided some of the humor that this show needed (and lacked).
Mentioned over at PCS blog that it was an interesting idea. It would be cool if they wrote a blog post about what they learned from doing it. What worked, what seemed not to work, what would you do differently. I give them a hand for trying different ways to use social media and live theater.
@alison I was at a show at Backspace and reading the twitter #apollo updates from other peeps, giving lines from the play and such. To an outside observer, it was, indeed, just as senseless and silly as you suggest.
My critical reading, it is shot… would you recommend this play? Will you be reviewing it fully at some point? Sounds like it might be neat if I’m not iBlogging while watching.
Temple Lentz will be reviewing it in this week’s paper. I can’t recommend it, because I had no idea what was going on and in fact spent the last act reading Huffington Post, because that’s what happens when you tell me I have permission not to pay attention to something.