Lisa’s Room

The last days have seen me researching how virtual audiences have been consuming art in the past 6 months. Despite the foreseeable criticism of virtual theatre as in “it’s not the same as a live experience” raised by early interviewees from the performing arts scene, I felt reinsured by the wealth of headlines reading ‘best theatre to watch now online’ that popped on my laptop screen. From the efforts made by all-size theatres to make an increasing number of productions accessible online through to the valuable support individuals have been directly (!) giving to their favourite artists through donations, purchasing live-streaming performances, and repeatedly accessing their online channels, these tendencies signal that performing arts are far from shrivelling up; they are rather entering a new market. In these to-some-extend clear waters, will Bluebeard find its blue ocean?

Bluebeard was born to support independent artists to (1) establish a more meaningful virtual presence by nourishing a niche community of indie art lovers around their work. Featuring a hand-curated selection of the most unconventional ‘stage-to-screen’ performances to be watched on-demand, (2) Bluebeard releases subculture vultures from the hassle of infinite web browsing. (3) A one-stop destination for those striving to be the first to explore the underground, see the rise of emerging performers and share impressions with soulmates sitting at opposite earth’s poles.

From my interviews with possible featuring performance artists, I reckon that their concerns around rights and limited knowledge of/access to sophisticated video technologies have pushed them away from exploring the digital as a sphere where to keep their audiences engaged. As we were squeezing brains around viable solutions, in a galaxy not-so-far-far-away, Miley Cyrus was live streaming on her Instagram, Ben Gibbard from The Death Cab for Cutie was streaming daily concerts to YouTube, Pitchfork launched an Instagram concert series to raise money for United for Respect?! Good news, my friends, the bar has been lowered.  

Getting to Green Light

The new real is making virtual audiences get more accustomed to lo-fi and low-cost options and thus opening up new opportunities for independent artists to reach out to them. Bluebeard needs to ride the same wave: by lowering the streaming quality below the VOD industry’s standards and reducing the offering to a limited list of performances to watch on-demand on its platform for finite time period, it aims to divert its efforts toward building a name within a targeted art scene. Therefore, I created a minimum viable product pitching the look and taste I hypothesis my customer segment would find captivating.

The video was integrated to a customer-facing landing page conveying Bluebeard’s value proposition to target audience and body of work simultaneously. Initially, I thought about preparing a different pitch for potential collaborators. Then, I realised that mentioning the Job-to-be-done Story in my MVP means to openly call for the same support people have been wanting to give in the last months and thus adding value to the service itself.  So, here it is, and it is better to be real!

I have decided to take two different approaches to evaluate Bluebeard: (1) a survey linked to the landing page will help me verify the hypothesis I made based upon my research on customer behaviour that informed my minimum value proposition, and collect general data on my customer segment’s habits; (2) conducting in-depth interviews with body of work and potential customers to test the ‘what’, and also and foremost the ‘how’.

One week ago, I went to bed still with the intent to build a job-to-be-done story out of the need of friends and acquaintances in the performing arts scene to escape the feeling of uncertainty that comes from not knowing when they will be able to go on stage again. Having realised the constraint of being depended on a stumbling machinery, whereby theatres – some of them now finally reopening – are more often concerned about their own survival, how could my resources be of any help? The desire to power cultural agility was making me feel rather paralysed.

Then, the milkshake story came to mind: whereas the preoccupation of theatre-makers during the past six months has been to prototype a product-fit to help them stay connected to their audiences, do I really want to compete with what I had identified as my customer segment on finding a solution to a problem we all want to be only transitional? We were taught that customer needs are volatile, unlike situations where a certain job needs to-be-done. Well, I think we could agree on the fact that we all hope the current is not here to stay. Ultimately, who dares to think that performers could function without a physical public on the long-term?

Shifting Perspective…

“With so much time away from in-person performance, we are undergoing a worldwide reconstrual of what it means to be a member of the crowd”

Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, October 5 2020

On Friday 12^th February 2020, Pina Bausch’s early masterpiece Bluebeard was revived by her company for the first time in the UK on Sadler’s Wells stage. While waiting for the performance to begin, I remember I could not help but noticing that the crowd didn’t look as grey as usual. Actually, I found myself to be among what I expect to be the audience of Vetements runway at London Fashion Week. I get it: these people – myself included – had been compelled to the premiere by the sense of confrontational novelty the Tanztheater Wuppertal still stands for within the contemporary dance scene. This is the power of the arts: they build, reflect, destroy standards. And there will always be a crowd seeking to fulfil aspirational needs by consuming unconventional art whose purpose is to push generic boundaries. How is this adapting to the age of virtual theatre?

The truth is that the pandemic hasn’t stricken only the performing arts, but also their audiences. And whilst Virtual Theatre – which qualifies as a genre only by its reliance on WI-FI – hopefully represents a temporary compromise to theatre-makers, it is more likely to become a context each member of the crowd might need to go through.

Bluebeard is an online content hub providing a column on and hand-curated selection of international performances to stream anywhere, anytime. Unlike existing platforms and hybrid guides to big-scale productions by established artists now online, Bluebeard showcases pure avant-garde. A one-stop online destination for those souls striving to be the firsts to witness the rise of emerging independent theatre and share impressions with a niche community driven by the same passion for unconventional, irreverent performances.

Below a unique version of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring: the kind of goose bumps Bluebeard wants to give.

Ever since I have embarked on this journey, many serendipitous moments have been inspired by the bright minds gravitating around the cohort. One of the most interesting personalities I got to meet was Jeremy Till, visionary architect and currently Head of Central Saint Martins. Best known for his sustainable projects, he has recently worked on a major EU funded research project resulting in the amazing book The Design of Scarcity. This teaches us the great lesson to be learned from the attempt to construct value and cultural meaning out of relationship to scarcity, a word I have given particularly relevance in my previous posts. Scarcity means constraints and, as such, represents a positive component of any venture design: narrower its scope, broader our exercise on creativity.

Last weekend, my talented partners and I have launched What’s your (c)art?, a creative pop-up business born out of our desire to inspire an inventive reaction to experiences of change. By offering a culturally attuned tarot readings, we wanted to help inquisitive minds tackle the challenges posed by this time of uncertainty and, perhaps, to get a nudge towards what we hoped could be a creative epiphany. For the sake of clarity, we are not esoteric geeks – speaking strictly for myself, I moved away from that path as soon as I exited puberty. Yet, it seemed to us that providing light-hearted tarot readings as a sort of ritual well suited the feeling of vulnerability and helplessness towards the disruptive evens we are going through and on which we have no control. We thought we live in a world of infinite possibilities, where motivation and self-awareness can lead us, if not to fulfil our ambitions, at least to make a living doing what we know best. Even those who first saw in the current recession the chance to take risks and make a positive change, they are needed to consider the constraints posed by a brand new ‘adjacent possible’.

We were born to adapt. The real question now seems to be to which extent is this moment transitional? Are we surviving a – no matter how unprecedented – still circumscribed phase in our lives or are we rather asked to start thinking differently about our own practices and how these can be delivered? This is what I have been asking to freelance professionals in the performing arts while trying to understand the motivations and needs of the present. They told me about the frustration of “being in a limbo”, without the possibility to work at the usual pace due to the dramatically precarious state of the cultural sector or to shift to an in-house position in a job market that is poor on openings and where competition is deadly high. Long-term plans are not allowed, and mid-term plans are more often draining and not always feasible, especially if you are asked to make investments to outmanoeuvre competitors. Two issue are particularly dear to performers at this time: 1) find a way to stay connected with their audiences; 2) fight the narrative that making art is free of costs. For now, I am still considering which of the above my resources would be more suited to tackle.

I genuinely thought a design thinking approach could have helped me craft a solution that really addresses today’s problems and supports cultural agility. Above all, what performing arts seem in need for at the moment is a Moaning Room.

“We have a natural tendency to romanticise breakthrough innovation, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they are built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape”

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

I have always related entrepreneurship with the concept of autonomy: the autonomy to apply your own capabilities to drive projects you care about. But, is that enough for them to be meaningful in a broader sense? It turns out that it doesn’t really matter where your motivations lie as long as they resonate out there. When it comes to iteratively design a venture project, you might want to develop a strategy based upon whether the initial business idea is there already and need to be customised to the market segment or you are rather trying to solve a ‘wicked problem’, whereby the product or service will eventually be defined at a later stage. Whatever the approach, innovation comes when diverse, complementary capabilities team up to push through an idea that has thought through resources and audiences in the development process.  

Are Inventions a natural response to the Zeitgeist?

Last week, I have touched upon how the concept of ‘scarcity’ redesigned by the pandemic and the inequities this has laid bare would give purpose to any entrepreneurial endeavour committed to reckon the present time. In particular, as the creative industry defines the framework in which we explore entrepreneurship, it seems relevant to zoom in and address how the current events have specifically impacted the cultural sector. Before we do that, it is worth taking a step back. Digital transformation and accessibility have lingered in the agenda of arts organisations for quite a while. Nevertheless, the rigid structure of the Establishment has more often constrained rather than fostered the process. Retaining a great bunch of creative professionals, motivated by the vision that institutions can reflect and embrace culture as a whole, we would expect the arts to be at the forefront of innovation. Unfortunately, we are witnessing quite the opposite with a drop of engagement during the lockdown period and minority groups still far unrepresented inside cultural organisations, not to mention the lack of empathy showed by the mass redundancies forecasted among the poorest-paid staff as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/29/coronavirus-arts-workers-on-south-bank-in-london-rally-against-covid-job-cuts)

By theming wicked problems, we strive to turn them into ‘good problems’ we can build an actionable project upon. True is that the speed and magnitude of a pivotal change has become now vastly bigger, and never has been such time for the arts to explore new channels to connect to the audiences’ needs and set measurable, time-bound goals. It falls to creative professionals to facilitate the shift.

How It All Began

I have always been fascinated by creativity as a genuinely democratic process and by the transformative power it harbours; everyone can produce an idea that makes a meaningful difference. It was around this time last year that I started to sketch potential ideas for a creative project, whereby the MA in Art and Cultural Enterprise at UAL would have equipped me with the knowledge and skills that would have helped me translate my idea into a concrete endeavour. So, I drafted 1962, a social-led project promoting site-specific forms of civic participations to be held in an environmental installation embedded in the pinewoods of Castiglioncello, on the last outpost of the Livornese mountains. The idea was inspired by a journey to Newcastle upon Tyne, after which I started nourishing a genuine curiosity for those design practices investigating the temporary use of public spaces as a stimulus for urban resilience. In particular, I was and still am very much intrigued by how creative practitioners responding to the environmental cause have been finding their raison d’être even in the ability to thrive on scarcity through the optimal use of resources.

Now What?

In the new scenario brought about by a global pandemic, where the fairytale of an endless economic growth and the ethical behaviour our Western society has grown onto can no longer be accountable, the concept of scarcity has acquired a new meaning. What we are experiencing is a unique moment in time marked by uncertainty. Routes to market appear to be permanently changed. Nevertheless, people have never displayed such homogeneity of behaviour in recent history, whereby there is a newly found sense of responsibility and solidarity, with many of us questioning what must be seen as socially acceptable and realising what is truly relevant.

We cannot see into the future, but we can make our contribution to invent it. As a creative professional, I strive to find new ways of putting forth ideas championing collective values such as equity, plurality, and sustainability the whole society can benefit from. We cannot let the crisis go to waste.

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