Lyn Gardner in the Guardian blog today talks about how online audiences (the crowd in the cloud) are crucial to the future of theatre’s sustainable ability. The debate rages with the comment stream after the blog highlighting exactly Lyn’s point: that despite half the commentators not being at the Shift Happens event, they’re still engaging passionately and intelligently with the issues. She picked up The Bush Theatre’s new online initiative, bushgreen.org (in beta: to be launched soon, I’ll review it when it goes live) for crowd sourcing and disseminating new scripts, and there was a mention of pilot-theatre.tv : a simple webcast of a rehearsed reading of Catcher in their Eye, but a very cheap way of showing agents and producers globally what the new play will be like, and enticing them to engage with the process of booking it. Before, either producers would have needed to travel to York to see the rehearsed reading, or Pilot Theatre would have sent off the script and photos to a number of producers and then had to endure waiting times based on “don’t call us: we’ll call you”…
Business models are changing.

At Shift Happens, the National Theatre also talked about NTLive, which amassed cinema audiences of 30,000 for Phaedre in a single weekend (you can’t squeeze that many people into all of the NT auditoria and its labyrinthine corridors together). But a significant shift in the landscape was recognised by Micheal Billington in his Guardian review of NTLive’s production, at a cinema in Chelsea. It starts:

The National Theatre made history last night. Its live transmission of Racine’s Phèdre was broadcast to 73 cinemas in the UK and 200 more around the world. It was a big risk but it paid off brilliantly. Indeed, watching it with a rapt, packed house in London’s Chelsea Cinema, I came to a startling conclusion: the production worked even better in the cinema than it did in the Lyttelton. And the implications of that are enormous.

MB says a theatre production worked even better in the cinema?? I never thought I’d see the day. Cultural behaviours are changing too.

P.S. Lyn also namechecks my other company Envirodigital - I talked about how the internet’s communities of audiences/customers/fans is an opportunity for theatres and other live art forms to begin the consideration of how to make the cultural sector more environmentally sustainable. An organisation’s crowd in the cloud can be their envirodigital community – check my slides here.