I’m not always won over by Portland Center Stage’s productions, but their marketing efforts consistently impress. From offering $10 rush tickets to hosting indie bands in their lobby to their involvement with this month’s Fertile Ground Festival, PCS is making a calculated bid to attract a younger audience. They have an excellent website and an active Twitter presence—and now I’ve been informed that they’ll be reserving the balcony of the Sat, Jan 19 Jan 17 performance of Apollo (premiering as part of Fertile Ground) for laptop/iPhone users who want to tweet during the show. Anyone who follows PCS on Twitter (pcsghost) will be invited to a pre-show tweetup, and folks are encouraged to tag their posts #apollo so that others can easily follow the action.

More thoughts on this, and a gratuitous use of the term “Brechtian,” after the jump.

This is a really interesting idea, both in its bold and possibly unprecedented bid to attract a new audience (or engage an old audience in a new way), and what it’s willing to concede for the sake of attracting that audience. It’s going to rub many people the wrong way: The fracturing of attention that texting/blogging/Twittering produces is antithetical to the traditional experience of theater, to that old idea that theater requires suspension of disbelief in order to work its alchemy.

The flip side of that, though, is the complaint I hear from friends my own age when I do manage to drag them to the theater: They have a hard time paying attention; they actually can’t suspend disbelief. We’re no longer living in some Brechtian scenario where audiences need to be reminded that they’re watching a play or risk over-identifying with the action. It’s the opposite—many people can’t forget they’re watching a play. (And forget “breaking the fourth wall” or metatheater; been there, done that, and music and film are all over that shit.) To some extent, I think audiences weaned on stories told via the cuts and closeups of television and film find the relatively static medium of theater fundamentally unengaging. Offering them a new way to interact with theater makes a lot of sense, if those are the audience members you want to attract.

Diane Haithman’s recent LA Times article raised some good points about arts (theater, dance, classical music) audiences, taking on the oft-repeated notion that audiences are “graying”: Basically, Haithman suggests that these audiences have always been old, and they might stay that way, because theater is an experience better suited to old people than young. (Oldsters like to sit down; they’re more affluent; they want to be home before 11.) And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for theater companies, since old people are more likely to buy season subscriptions. But she raises the following point, which I think is where PCS’ marketing strategies come in:

WHETHER there is truth to such speculation, L.A. Opera’s [John] Tavenner insists that it’s “overly optimistic” to expect that people will develop an interest in the performing arts simply as a function of age — early exposure is still required. “I think the bulk of the audience is not going to appear magically like that, which is why performing arts organizations spend so much of their resources and time on education and community outreach,” he says.

You need new old people to replace the ones who die. And for the new old people to even consider theater a viable entertainment option, they need to have some previous exposure to the medium—even if by the time they get around to buying a season subscription, they’re too arthritic to give a tweet-by-tweet account of the action. Perhaps, too, that allowing young people to engage with theater in a new way will directly result in more of them attending the theater. Which begs the inevtiable question: Is this something that people are going to want to do? I got sucked into the Twitterverse during the snowstorm, but had to cut myself off when I realized I’d begun thinking in updates. Anyone? Is this appealing? Will you do it?

Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.

6 replies on “New Media Meets an Old Medium at PCS”

  1. You raise some good points here.

    Sojourn similarly explored twitter and other live interactive forms as part of our Fall work in DC around the election, and our show, The Race.

    I think the question of what an audience, for whom ‘interruption’ is a daily part of information and narrative discourse, wants, or even needs, to engage, be delighted, be surprised…it is the contemporary question of live performance.

    hand2mouth explores it, like other modern experimental ensembles, by creating pop culture heavy imagistic and more and more participatory events that are not to be witnessed but joined. Fever Theater seems to do it through an examination of ritual and community. Likewise, at Sojourn, we keep pushing the relationship between story and participation, with site, journey and technology as our main modes of formal inquiry.

    There is the event, and there is getting people to the event.
    And marketing techno-sophistication to web-savvy young audiences as a way to let them know that- ‘yes, we know you are interacting with your culture in a new way, and we want to meet you there’- its smart.

    I think the real revolution, already happening all over, but difficult at the big houses, is when these opportunities to engage aren’t just in response to the event, but actually allow the ‘audience’ to ‘impact’ the event.

    The phenomenon of new arts consumers isn’t just to get them in the door, but give them opportunities to co-author. As the web, and video games, and music and film all do now…that is the frontier for live performance. And its a challenging, exciting one.

    And a place like Portland should be, and in many ways is, exactly where the conversation is happening.

    Michael Rohd

  4. Fascinating stuff, Alison. Speaking as a geezer who doesn’t know a twitter from a cheep (good lord, I’ve never even sent a text message, although I DO know how to use my cell phone) I know I can’t speak for the tech-savvy generation my kids belong to. But I do know arts groups have been worrying about the graying of the audience for as long as I’ve been writing about the performing arts, and that stretches back to the late 1970s. I once asked David Shifrin, artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest, about it, and he said the average age of the audience now (this was about four years ago) was pretty much the same as when he’d begun at CMNW more than 20 years before. So, there’s some truth to the “growing into art” argument.

    But, I think, only some. One thing that’s changed remarkably is the level of access to the arts in America’s public schools. When I was a school kid in the 1950s and ’60s, even in a less-than-prosperous small town, we had full-time music teachers from grade school on up, and art teachers in junior high and high school (in grade school, art was a regular part of almost every teacher’s bag of tricks), and I had teachers in other disciplines who would routinely use the arts to teach their own subjects. While we’ve been busy leaving No Child Behind, we’ve left a massive hole in the educational experience. And without some sort of decent, everyday (or at least, regular) exposure to the ideas and practices of art when they’re kids, I think a lot of people WON’T follow the old pattern: The traditional art forms, at least as presented in traditional ways, simply won’t ever hook them.

    Of course, a three-minute song can be a wondrous thing. And the fractured form that contemporary aesthetics is taking has its own excitement — of collaboration, of something new, of being part of a mosaic instead of buying in to the old-fashioned Artist as Solitary Genius model. I think it’s great that groups like Sojourn are exploring this sort of thing (although the world of visual arts so far is way ahead of theater in this regard, and theater’s ahead of opera and classical music). A good rhymed couplet is every bit as aesthetically satisfying as an epic poem, and usually a good deal more accessible. For better and for worse, art forms will always break up and re-create themselves.

    One thing does worry me, though, about the shortened tech-age attention span: Are we losing the ability to follow extended arguments, just at the time when the increased complexity of the world would seem to demand that we pay close attention? I don’t mean that long is good for long’s sake — I’ve never managed to get farther than 60 pages in Proust — but a four-hour encounter with Shakespeare, an hour-long symphony (music compresses time so that Beethoven’s hour equals roughly Shakespeare’s four), an evening-length ballet, a Mozart opera are more than just potentially exhilarating sensual experiences, they’re exercises in extended thought.

    Unfortunately, theater and classical music and opera and ballet are exceedingly expensive enterprises, and with shrinking audiences, they (like newspapers) are in danger of tipping over the edge and going out of business. Bummer.

    So. Maybe the path to Ibsen and O’Neill and Arthur Miller runs through new theater — the twittering, elliptical, short-burst, energetic, phantasmagoric stuff that young theater people are creating. Maybe, if Hand2Mouth and Sojourn and Vertigo and others grab your attention and spark your interest, at some point, when you have your marriage and your mortgage and your 2.2 kids, that long-form stuff will start to look more appealing and you’ll add Center Stage or Artists Rep or Oregon Ballet Theatre or the symphony or the opera to your list. Or maybe not.

    Just sayin’.

  5. I’m sure Bob Hicks wrote some great stuff there. I don’t know though. I just skimmed it. I have a shortened “tech-age” attention span and can’t follow extended arguments.

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