Eating it Up: Are Digital Docents and Tweet Seats Enriching or Ruining Our Experience of Art? by / Clayton Lord

I have for a while now been grappling with the Irvine Foundation/WolfBrown report “Getting in on the Act,” which basically argues for placing the “active participation” of the patron at the center of determining artistic success, an argument that troubles me. It troubles me so much that I have written a 23-page paper on our shifting understanding of participation (drawn, in part, from my writing on my New Beans blog about mirror neurons and immersive “passive” theatre experiences), a paper that will be published in the inaugural issue of the new journal “Artivate” in September (for which I am both grateful and excited). I find a superimposed mandate of active participation on the part of the spectator off-putting and dangerous for this 3,000 year old form—and at the same time I find myself increasingly preoccupied with certain efforts to increase the impact of our work with participatory activities that are directed, interpretive and optional, without sacrificing the presentational aspects of the form that make it special and unique.

I've written about interpretive artistic mediation before—a fancy way of grouping things like audio commentaries, “tweet seats,” etc. But I can't seem to let the thought go. At Theatre Bay Area, we are in the process of writing a major grant request to work with local director Rob Melrose and connectivity/engagement expert Rachel Grossman to experiment with specifically in-performance mediation techniques. The point of the program is to develop some basic mediations, implement them in controlled settings with three member companies, and use questions we developed around intrinsic impact to try and understand what the effects, positive and negative, are on both the person getting the mediation and the people nearby.

As I have said before, I find something useful and fascinating about interpretive assistance. I don't put much stock in the argument that theatre needs to stand on its own, and I don't think that means we need to bemoan the stupid, uncritical audience we must have if this assistance is necessary—if anything, I think we need to incorporate mediation and interpretation because our audiences are more connected, more savvy and filled with more hunger for a complete understanding of the art than ever before. How else can you explain, variously, a movie theatre that is making news by creating a timed tasting menu with things like pine-smoked popcorn to be eaten when scene in a forest comes up, a symphony that has an assistant conductor sending play-by-play tweets on what audience members should be listening for, or (more mundanely) the proliferation and normalization of things like information placards next to museum pieces, liner notes in recorded music, etc.?

We live in a society where, if you know an actor's face on a television show, you can use an app on your phone and figure out not only that actor's name but a comprehensive list of their previous television and film appearances in under two minutes. Moreover, we also now live in a world where, if you're so inclined, you can read robust criticism dissecting “The Dark Knight” while watching “The Dark Knight,” so that by the time you get to the closing credits you not only have seen the film, but you've absorbed the collective cultural response to the film. We live in a world that now expects to be able to understand foreign opera, usually via subtitles on seats, and that increasingly expects to be able to pick up a headset at the beginning of a museum show. In all of these cases, the goal is not to get sub-par patrons bootstrapped up to standard patron level with assistance—it is to give your best patrons, your most engaged, the ones constantly seeking more...well, more.

As I have written about before, this concept of providing an overlay during the art for the audience member is particularly panic-inducing for a lot of artists. There are a lot of fears out there without there being a lot of facts, and that uncertainty is understandably nervous-making. Do people get less out of the art itself when their attention is divided? Is their attention, in fact, divided? Do people lose something if even small interpretive decisions about the art are made for them and told to them? If the interpretation is not done in conjunction with the artist, or even by the artist, then is the art cheapened? Or in these cases is it possible that the truth is exactly or partially the opposite: that people get more with interpretation, that targeting and narrowing possible interpretations increases impact, and/or that the art is made more valuable by being more understood?

Who knows? That's why we want so badly to get this program funded and actually run the experiments. We think there's a good chance the answer is rather nuanced and less crystal-clear than we would hope—it probably is something like: some mediations work well, others work poorly, some mediations are better with certain types of work than with others, with certain audiences than with others, with certain artists and companies than with others. As it always is, right? But what is exciting to me about this, what is exciting to all of us working on the project, is the potential to (just as when we were building out and conducting the intrinsic impact work) not just guess, but to finally, finally know. Give me more data, I say. I'll eat it up.

Clay Lord is director of communications for Theatre Bay Area. He is also editor of the new book Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, and author of New Beans, an Arts Journal blog on new art and new audiences. E-mail clay@theatrebayarea.org.