Oh, shoot
// February 6th, 2010 // Kris's Soapbox
Are you tired of watching theatre audiences grow old and wither? Are you worried at the non-theatre-going kids of today will become the non-theatre-going adults of tomorrow? Well, you’re not alone! So what are you gonna do about it?
The folks at Gruppo Rubato — those folks include me — had an idea for audience development that involved their new theatre project, which is called Airport Security. While we’re quite sure that doing a satirical play on the topic of travel security has broad audience appeal, we’re also very aware that there’s an almost-infinite pool of non-theatre-going people out there for whom our little show will be utterly invisible. We think we’ve got some great material to share, though, and want to invite the non-theatre-goers along. So. How can we reach those folks, and help them feel welcome?
Here’s our take: let’s meet those non-theatre-goers on their turf: outside the theatre.
Our playwright for this project, Patrick Gauthier, wrote a bunch of scenes for the play that, for various reasons, will never be seen on stage. We have decided to film these scenes and use them as an integral part of the project. The idea is that the filmed scenes and the play function together as a whole: instead of putting together a 2-minute YouTube promo video that shows a clip from the stage show, we’ll offer three online scenes from the world of the play– shot on location, as professionally as we can muster — presented in a form that non-theatre-goers are more used to seeing. Instead of seeing an “online ad” for a story, they’ll see a story. We’re very excited about the idea.
This means that our little theatre-producing company turned into a little theatre-and-film-producing company this week. We finished shooting our scenes yesterday, and we have learned an awful lot about planning and shooting a video. I’d like to share some of the experience with you, and that’ll be the focus of the next few posts.
