Hotel Modern’s homepage
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It’s said that the eyes are the window to the soul. Perhaps by extension, a well made website is a window to the soul of an organisation.
If this is the case, well Hotel Modern is a pretty far out place. Their website (well worth a little visit) gives the visitor a strong flavour of the creativity at the heart of the organisation.
Not being familiar with their work, my first visit to this website made me realise I wished I’d attended their show in last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival – it’s pretty rare for me that a website would have this effect.
Below, a still from Kamp, which was performed in the Samuel Beckett last year, as part of this festival.
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(thanks to Caroline Williams of Dublin Dance Festival / Dublin Theatre Festival for passing on the link).
Sinead Mac Manus, originally from Dublin, is a London based creative business consultant and trainer.
A regular contributor to the London Theatre Blog, she’s worked in management in a number of art organisations, including Frantic Assembly.
Of interest to Arts Audiences readers will be posts she has written outlining how to get going with a wordpress website. It’s actually very easy, and in these posts, she lays it all out very clearly;
How to start a wordpress site – part 1
How to start a wordpress site – part 2
In another post, Sinead gives a simple introductory explanation of how Theatre companies can use social media.
If people want to be kept up to date with the rest of the series – blogging is next – they can subscribe by RSS and email.
Finally worth mentioning that she has also set up a website called startatheatrecompany.com which provide a series of training modules for those looking to set up a theatre company, giving practical advice on business plans, budgeting, strategy as well as on audience development, marketing, and all that jazz!
Those of you who were at the Arts Council’s New Media, New Audience? conference last November may remember a speaker from the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spoke of the RSC’s strategy of using the internet to reach out to new audiences, many of which the RSC felt would never actually make it to their venue.
Their site is indeed a fantastic resource for anyone interested in Shakespeare, or theatre in general. You could, for example, watch insightful footage of a rehearsal of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. There is no direct ’sell’ involved with this, i.e. they’re not selling tickets to Romeo and Juliet. In monetary terms it may be hard to see a financial return from this kind of web activity. However, this degree of online endeavour clearly reinforces the RSC’s brand internationally, and it’s claim to be the world’s leading authority on the works of Shakespeare.
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The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is taking things a step further, and are now ‘the first museum on the European Continent to have developed an iPhone application’.
The app, called “Yours, Vincent” is a little work of art in itself. Free to download from iTunes, it incorporates a selection of beautifully produced short films, interviews and images to bring the user through selected accounts from Vincent van Gogh’s letters, and related paintings.
The app was developed to go along with the exhibit “Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks” which opened earlier this month, and runs to January 3, 2010 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
For those unable to make it to Amsterdam, all of the letters are also available to view online at www.vangoghletters.org.
While the subject matter may not be for everyone, Michael Scott’s forthcoming production of My First Time is using the internet imaginatively to generate content and build audiences, bringing the term User Generated Content to a new level.
The production is similar in format to the Vagina Monologues (another format which Scott very successfully brought over from the US). In the case of this coming production, the public have been invited to submit stories of an intimate nature on the production’s website. These submissions are then used as material for inclusion the production; 4 actors through the course of the performance take turns to read out a selection of these stories.
I imagine the call for stories could have legs virally (if viruses have legs) and that those who submit their stories would be keen to turn up to see if their story features.
In another example of using UGC to produce material, The Royal Opera Company in London produced Twitterdammerung: the Twitter Opera last month. Composed entirely of tweets from the public, the production was designed to make opera more widely accessible. The Telegraph critic wasn’t bowled over, but concluded “as cheap gimmicks go, this was a good ‘un”.
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