If it takes 18 months, or even longer, for enough Americans to get vaccinated, could Americans simply lose the habit of going to the movies, learning to get their video entertainment from streaming series and their socializing from the backyard? – Washington Post
Category: AUDIENCE
Uffizi Gallery Says TikTok Has Doubled The Number Of Its Young Visitors
“Since moving onto multiple social media channels, including TikTok, during the lockdown, the Uffizi’s online presence has exploded. In an apparently related trend, young visitors (as a proportion of the total) have nearly doubled since the museum [in Florence] reopened over the summer.” – The Art Newspaper
Could A Drive-In ‘Nutcracker’ Work This Christmas? This Company’s Trying It
“For five nights [Atlanta Ballet] will construct a pop-up drive-in movie theater on its surface parking lot, and will welcome patrons at $100 a carload ($150 for the front-row parking spaces). … The film will feature the new staging of The Nutcracker, with its outsize sets and startling video projections, introduced to Atlanta audiences in 2018 by artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin.” – Atlanta Journal Constitution
Is It Fair To Call ‘Tenet’ A Flop? Not Exactly …
“Overall, it can be agreed [that Christopher Nolan’s] palindromic thriller is gradually coming to be viewed as a theatrical launch failure — certainly not a flop in traditional terms, but no doubt a studio example of what not to do in pandemic circumstances with your biggest IP.” – Vulture
Online Theatre Has Become Very Creative. But Can A Model To Support It Evolve?
The best of them have come in the shape of theatrical activism, especially amid the Black Lives Matter movement, made cheaply and with a speed that a live theatrical production could never match. These have included a YouTube series about racism experienced by British East Asians as a result of Covid-19, the Bush theatre’s The Protest after the killing of George Floyd, and Roy Williams’s 846, all of which combined the arts, politics and activism. There has also been the Almeida’s Shifting Tides series, which focused on climate activism in audio plays made by their young actors. – The Guardian
The First Drive-In Book Festival
“The book lovers of Appledore, a picturesque fishing village on the north Devon coast, are a resourceful, determined lot. When their library faced closure 14 years ago, they helped save it by launching a literary festival, which grew and developed year by year into one of the most popular cultural events in the south-west of England. And when the 2020 Appledore book festival was threatened with cancellation because of the COVID crisis, they came up with the bold idea of holding a coronavirus-secure drive-in event, believed to be the first in the UK.” – The Guardian
TV Cord-Cutting Has Accelerated During The Pandemic
“Consumers are choosing to cut the cord because of high prices, especially compared with streaming alternatives. The loss of live sports in H1 2020 contributed to further declines. While sports have returned, people will not return to their old cable or satellite plans.” – TechCrunch
U.S. Movie Theatres See Outlook Not Improving Much At All
Three-quarters of the country’s movie theatres are open on at least a limited basis; new movies are coming out weekly … and … that’s a no from audiences. “Americans are not going back in significant numbers in the COVID-[19] era.” – Portland Press-Herald (AP)
The Future Of Theatre
There are many ideas. Many hopes. Stephanie Ybarra of Baltimore’s Center Stage: “We will rely less on the stuff of the stage and more on the physical bodies of the performers and the words they speak or sing and the movement of those bodies.” – NPR
Can Arts Groups Successfully Charge Viewers For Online Content? And How Much?
“The wave of free content [put online during the COVID lockdown] was a generous gesture with some lasting side effects – not least of which is the emergence of a price anchor, an expectation that digital culture is somehow free to produce and therefore free to watch. This will take some time to shake off.” Here’s an analysis – with some surprises, both happy and worrisome – of data from a recent survey of more than 130,000 regular arts attenders in the UK. – Arts Professional