Talk about leading the pack! Greenroom wrote about this last November. We thought we’d strut our stuff and republish our comments from back then as La Boite Theatre encourages its audiences to tweet their reviews of I Love You Bro’ opening this week at the Roundhouse. No tweeting during the show now, unless of course you sit in the back row and get permission first, as @h_suarez did for King Lear at QPAC recently. Hannah Suarez, incidentally, is the social networking savvy marketing director for The Brisbane Festival.
There’s been some swift (rather than considered) responses from the social networking crowd in the last 24 hours or so about whether or not tweeting during a show should be ‘allowed.’ This was sparked by queries from La Boite and Bell Shakespeare in Twitter and on Facebook. We smell marketing departments at work!
In response, the FB crowd have said ‘No way,’ and, hardly surprisingly, the Twitter crew were more open-minded. Always good to challenge received practice and the status quo in the arts though, isn’t it?
We can’t wait to see which theatre here will be the first either to allocate back rows or declare an ‘open-twitter’ performance for those who wish to tweet and carry on the conversation during a show – without disturbing the performers or rest of the audience of course. A passing phase maybe? Who would dare to predict …
29 November, 2009
Eurobeat: almost Eurovision opens at QPAC’s Lyric Theatre this week for a season through December 5. QPAC is hosting a gathering before the opening performance on Wednesday. They’re calling it Eurotweet and have invited a flock of ‘Twitterati’ who will get to tweet their thoughts before, during, and after what we hear is a very funny show – ‘don’t wear mascara to Eurobeat’ says their website. The audience will also be using their mobile phones to vote the winners. Could this be a first for Brisbane theatre? Might it be a last? Somehow, we think not … a monster has been unleased. Continue reading “Ready for some tweet-reviews?”
