Category: Business and the Arts

Posted on

A New Year and a Greenroom Stocktake

Happy New Year!  It’s great to be back after a wind-down, laid-back festivus season.  Not that some of our colleagues have been slumming it: Shake and Stir and Circa, Harvest Rain, OzFrank and QSE  are all at it during the nominal summer break with workshops as well as rehearsals for Season 2010.

Apart from the start of midsummer, today is also the beginning of the 5th month of operations for Greenroom.  We launched on September 1 with the intention of providing an aggregator site for Queensland professional and independent theatre, and so far things are looking just fine.  Since the launch we’ve had 2 744 hits on the site – not bad for a startup.

We’ve added 40 posts during this time, mostly interviews and commentary, with weekly posts pointing to productions and other theatre events throughout the state.  We’ve got a ‘poster wall’ of Queensland theatre companies with hotlinks back to their individual homepages.  This is a really useful service in our opinion, and helps to give a little bit of link love and profiling to groups around the state.

We’ve also got a lively Twitter stream with 55  followers.  Follow Greenroom on Twitter – click the follow button up there on the right – and you’ll get an update tweet every time there’s a new post here; that’s the way a lot of people like to get their news whether on the desktop or the mobile.  We love photos, so we set up a Flickr group featuring Queensland theatre-related images; send yours in and share with other readers – that’s them on the top of the home page.

There’s also an RSS feed of the latest local ‘proudly parochial’ blog posts over there on the right, as well as a News Bites page via Google Reader with the most interesting and useful theatre and arts business posts from all over the world.  And there’s a hotlinked calendar of current and upcoming theatre events.  Plan on seeing a continuation of these features as well as some new goodies including more reviews, and a weekly opt-in email newsletter for those who like getting their information via the emailbox.

We would love to hear from you on how we can make Greenroom work even better for you and your group.  Don’t forget to send in your information, logos, images and other information for us to use here.  Meanwhile best wishes for sweet, midsummer nights’ dreams and a wonderful season 2010 for you.

Posted on

Work in the theatre? A poll: Do you read reviews of your work?

I followed with interest the blogging of Jane Fonda earlier this year.  She was rehearsing and appearing in 33 Variations on Broadway at the time.  She wrote a post To Read or Not to Read – the reviews, that is – and it emerged that she was advised be her friend, fellow actor Christine Lahti not to read them, at least until after the season was over.  The post and the comments make for good reading – as does the whole blog of the process.  She wrote

This will be hard for me. My curiousity may get the better of me. Yet I can imagine that if a reviewer really likes or really hates something I do, it has the potential to change my performance a little. Something to think about between now and a week from now. I’ll let you know what I decide…maybe.

She turned out to be as good as her word, and read them when the show closed.

I thought it was time to see what the general consensus is, so here’s a poll which we’ll keep open for a couple of weeks.  Have your say!


Posted on

Theatre conference? You want to be in Cats or something?

This post was contributed by Xanthe Coward, a COE09 conference delegate. Many thanks also to Xanthe for her live-tweeting during the sessions. You can catchup with all the hashtagged contributions to the Twitter stream by searching for #coe09

Why are doing a theatre  conference? Why are you doing theatre? Do you want to be in Cats or  something?!

Last weekend Brisbane’s !Metro Arts played host to 100 independent theatre practitioners, including professional and emerging  playwrights, performers, directors, producers and promoters from all over Australia.  In what turned out to be a particularly conversational 3 day program !Metro Arts, in cooperation with Jute and Playlab, set about challenging the definition of what it is to be an artist in the independent theatre sector in Australia, and asked, “How will it – and you – survive?”  The question in the block-quote above was put to one of the delegates by a friend, and it seems to sum up the attitude of many of the broader population who aren’t aware of theatre – apart from the blockbuster musical –  or who don’t really understand how and where else this thing called theatre gets made.  Last weekend, however, pedestrians on Brisbane city’s Edward Street, as well as visitors to New Farm’s Powerhouse might have noticed that theatre is something that attracts an extremely eclectic crowd. Continue reading “Theatre conference? You want to be in Cats or something?”

Posted on

Keeping up: @ the Centre of the Edge independent theatre conference

tweet-writeFor the next few days, from Friday 23 through Sunday 25th October to be exact, Jute Theatre from Cairns are getting together with !Metro Arts and Playlab Press in Brisbane for At the Centre of the Edge, a conference for independent theatre makers from around Australia.  You can read more about it here.  Now we know there were limited places … 100 as it happens … so more missed out than got in, we’d reckon.  Pity that …

Here’s the good news though …  you can keep up with what’s happening via Greenroom’s guest poster for the event – Xanthe Coward from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.  You’ll be able to read Xanthe’s reports from the conference right here on Greenroom,  then if you like, you can add to the discussion with a comment.  If Greenroom noses out any other blogs covering At the Centre of the Edge, we’ll post the links here, as well as RT any tweets that are covering the big issues for the conference.  Those of you who are on Twitter will know that ‘RT’ means ‘re-tweet.’

And speaking of  Twitter, Xanthe is going to live-tweet the Saturday discussion sessions Adapt or Die from 9.30am through to 1pm.  If you don’t already, follow her @xsentertainment so you don’t miss a chirp or shout.  Along with many others, Greenroom will be following Xanthe’s tweets.  We’ll probably also RT some of the more interesting comments.  It will help if everyone sending a tweet puts the hashtag #coe09 somewhere in the post to make searching and archiving easy.

Meanwhile, we’re delighted that Xanthe will be bringing us the conference news, and wish everyone a terrific time.  The weather’s going to be fine … there are lots of shows on to see … check out This Week in Queensland Theatre.  We’d say we’re in for what’s probably going to be a perfect few days in southern Queensland.