Page 136 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014For creators, this second screen also opens up an opportunity. Some of them, as is the case with The Eyes of Helios and Diablo Ballet, have already produced experiences in which this tool is used to monitor the effect a work is having on the audience while it is being performed.If, in the short term, this second screen does not become a way of communicating with other members of an audience, who may be present in the building or elsewhere outside, it can be used as a support for theatre information that was previously provided on paper. Any institution knows how expensive it is to publish a good-quality programme of events. But the fact that it is provided to people just as they are entering the building is a hindrance to reading it. Very few people arrive sufficiently early. Today’s audiences arrive with all their problems and hardly have time to prepare themselves for, or adjust to, the performance they have come to see. It would not be surprising, therefore, to see theatres become the publishers of their own programmes in electronic format. This would make marketing possible before the performance, and even much afterwards through the interest generated by specialist articles to accompany the work. As with video performances, in which a number of theatres have already made themselves their own producers, something similar might happen with the publication of the programmes to accompany performances.What follows is a selection of various cases in which the new technologies have been used during performances.LIVE OPERA ON TWITTERTeatro alla Scala (Milan)@teatroallascalaOn 7 September 2013 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan a new opera season opened. It was the much anticipated moment, the prima that excites the attention of the Italian artistic and theatre-going world. Thanks to the new technologies this eventAC/Ehad a global dimension. The season opened with a performance of La Traviata, an iconic work for the opera house in Verdi’s bicentennial year, and it was transmitted live to a network of high-definition cinemas around the world.Two hours before the performance began the Scala’s Twitter account started providing backstage images of the artists being made up. There were even images of one of them in the dressing room adjusting their costume and winking at the camera. However, there is evidence to suggest that these images were recorded on the day of the dressFOCUS 2014: THE USE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE PERFORMING ARTS2.1 THE USE OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES DURING PERFORMANCES CURRENT PAGE...LIVE OPERA ON TWITTER AT TEATRO ALLA SCALA IN MILÁN136