A Performance Art School’s story: Going Digital to Survive Lockdown
An interview with Peter Krause, Culture Manager and Musicologist at the Hamburg School for Music and Theatre
Back in Summer 2017, I wanted to work in music. So I interned with Peter Krause, a Culture Manager and Musicologist at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (HfMT), the Hamburg school for music and theatre. My intern duties involved giving out flyers in the street and hanging up posters.
Peter’s job was and still is at a crossroads between the academic and the managerial worlds within the music industry.
On the one hand, I am close to the young musicians, directors, conductors… But I am also in contact with sponsors, doing the fundraising, the marketing, and I need to control the budget. […]It’s a dialectic tension so to speak.
Lockdown hit, and almost 3 years on, I reconnected with him to know more about how this has affected HfMT’s digital strategy.
I have done this for many years now, and there has probably never been such a revolution […] as this digital revolution.
When lockdown hit in March, most performance art institutions and venues had to close. This dealt a tremendous blow to HfMT, which to a great extent relies on live performances to mark the end of the performance art curricula.
For students here, it’s like you have a thesis, but the outcome of this diploma is making art. We’re now doing costume designs, building sets and doing rehearsals in a very different way.[…] We’re having to adjust pieces, and do shorter versions.
Peter and I talked about two major ways Covid-19 has impacted his job at HfMT. First, the school has had to reimagine the way it teaches performance art, making full use of digital tools, and second, it has forced the school to renew its focus on its social media presence.
Performance art lessons going online
Performance art usually involves meticulous rehearsals. From technical rehearsals, to dress rehearsals, to premieres, each step must be carefully scheduled to bring an opera to life. The whole process has been uprooted by government restrictions limiting group gatherings. This has had an effect on the scale and the organisation of the rehearsals.
Scaled back and live-streamed productions
The first reaction to the pandemic was a drastic reduction in the scale of productions. Last summer, HfMT had planned to be the first German performance art school in history to perform a Wagnerian Opera, with Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner. In the face of strict lockdowns, HfMT scaled back the production to only the piano accompaniment, since using a full orchestra had become impossible.
We were hoping that that would save the production, but we’ve just heard that we won’t be able to produce this in front of an audience in February.
The show must go on, however, so the best alternative so far has been to live-stream the premiere event on YouTube. This has been the process followed for most performances such as this one, which premiered late January 2021.
But that’s not all. More streaming has been scheduled to give artists a chance to work on their craft in front of an audience, be it live or virtual.
We’re also thinking of doing the other nights [online] because they are important for the young artists to get into their parts.
The end product has been drastically modified to fit a world suddenly moved online. But the teaching itself has also suffered an incredible blow. How to teach live performance without being able to rehearse live?
All it takes is a few hundred milliseconds
You have to see what can be done digitally in a sensible way, and what has to be done in the same place at the same time.
One of the major hurdles in rehearsing music together online lies in 500 milliseconds of latency traditionally found in video calls. This is a problem because musicians traditionally need less than 30 milliseconds of latency to practice together.
There can be some kind of interaction online, but just the slightest delay in your video call means that you can’t do music like that. Music must be done in the same place at the same time.
Some software companies such as Jamkazam and Jacktrip offer video calling services that claim to overcome this latency through more efficient ways of transmitting audio data. Jamkazam, in particular, has indeed raised $80,000 through crowdfunding in 2020 to improve its services.
Music preparation, on the other hand, can be done online between a performer and a coach. This frees up a great number of rooms in the school, that can then be used for more urgent purposes.
Overall, this experience will allow HfMT to be more flexible in their teaching style, and better distribute limited resources in more efficient ways. And this move to digital courses has become all the more pressing, as the consumption of performance art has also moved online.
Online marketing for performance art?
Performance art is a very analogue world, and moving its communications online means reshaping its entire value proposition.
The power of offline marketing
Peter talked to me about the AIDA model, to best understand HfMT’s marketing strategy. AIDA stands for the 4 key steps an individual has to go through to become a customer, or in this case, a spectator. These are:
- Awareness: An individual first hears about the show
- Interest: The same individual starts to hear more about the show and is keen to know more
- Desire: The individual wants to go to the show
- Action: The individual buys tickets and goes to the theatre
In a normal year, these steps would look something like this:
This process uses a balance between online and offline media, which has traditionally produced fantastic results.
When I wanted to fill our 500 seat hall, I just called a major Hamburg paper for a review of the premier of a new production, and we’d sell out for the entire next 6, 7, 8, 9 performances.
A new reliance on social media
However, this model has been completely reshaped with the dramatic rise of online resources. HfMT’s AIDA process now entirely relies on online assets, such as social media posts and the school’s website. The step by step journey now looks something like this:
This leaves Peter with a difficult dilemma, having to choose which channels will actually bring enough return on investment to promote the show.
I was discussing with colleagues, shall I do PR (public relations) for this, even when this is not a public event? We must keep the school in the minds of people, so I still do PR work. […] I’m happy if a journalist does a report on the rehearsal even if they can’t report on the final production.
With an age-old industry having to rethink its value proposition, this puts artists and institutions in a precarious position.
How is this sustainable?
Covid-19 has changed the game. The “Action” part of the AIDA model has now been completely reimagined. Theatre shows now all end up like the Wagner Opera: scaled back live-streamed productions, which are for the most part displayed for free on YouTube. However, this means that even if someone actually goes through each step and sees the show, they actually won’t be contributing financially to the production in any meaningful way.
Now, we’re just happy if people watch those live streams. But not many people are even willing to pay nowadays. So it will be a hard task changing that.
Financial pressure is mounting on an industry mostly reliant on public and private investment, with far fewer sources of income than before. Though live-streams have been given out for free, audiences need to fully understand the investment that goes into each production.
People must know that these institutions and individual artists will only survive if we support them. And just watching a stream [without paying] is not enough support. How do you want to pay rent with that?
This question remains unresolved, as more and more skilled artists are leaving prestigious schools without any future prospects. Concerns have been raised of the mounting traffic jam of young artists that want to enter the industry but with now 2 or 3 times the number of alumni looking for the same jobs.
Right now, all these artists have to rely on are government subsidies and charity donations. Below are some links to support performance artists in the UK and France.
https://www.comedie-francaise.fr/fr/faites-un-don-en-ligne
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/categories/creative-arts-and-culture
As 2021 progresses, with the prospect of vaccines enabling a gradual return to normal life, we can hope that artistic performances can resume and that the public will understand the need to support the industry by attending concerts and events, possibly for an increased ticket price, to help the theatres and artists recover economically.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
