Interpreting Hybrid

Five ISPA members share their thoughts on hybrid events. They discuss the opportunities created by new technologies, describe the perfect setup for audiences joining live and remotely, and talk about how to accommodate unexpected changes smoothly. So please dive in, try to re-imagine the future of the performing arts and get inspired!

If you are interested in learning more about the integration of arts and technology, don’t miss our virtual Hong Kong 2022 ISPA Congress, To Connect Beyond. We have a special session on Arts Tech: A New World of Connectivity featuring speakers from South Africa to Hong Kong, China. We hope you will register to join us! 

Quicklinks:

• Mark Ball, Southbank Centre (UK)
• Nelson Chia, Nine Years Theatre (Singapore)
• Joe Solway & Alban Bassuet, Arup
• Pamela Tatge, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (USA)

What is your and your organization’s definition of hybrid events?

I will speak about my recent experience at the Manchester International Festival just because I've only been here at Southbank for eight weeks.

In terms of my definition of a hybrid event, I think it's where you're bringing the live and the digital together to become more than the sum of their parts, so that you are really looking at how the affordance of creating liveness within a digital environment enhances, creates new types of audience experiences.

I can give a couple of examples of that, the first two are artistic and the third one is similar to ISPA Congress.

So on the artistic side, at Manchester we worked collaboratively with a number of artists and organizations, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Philharmonia, Punchdrunk and a really fantastic digital company with the amazing name of Marshmallow Laser Feast, to create a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream that entirely lived within a virtual platform that replicated the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

We used software called Unreal Engine, which drives all of the coding and the architecture for the Fortnite gaming platform and used it to build the virtual environment. For audiences there was always a live moment within the virtual environment when performers in a studio in Stratford fitted with motion capture sensors all over their bodies and performed against a green screen, so that their live presence could be integrated live into the virtual forest.

So you were watching on a screen a live event with live performance in a wholly virtual environment, one that was unbounded by the laws of physics, and that took on the fantastical dream like qualities of Shakespeare’s famous forest. It became a genuinely hybrid event where you are using liveness with technology to create something which is new, and which has an ability to reach beyond the usual live audiences for that type of work. This project, Dream, and got very significant engagement from audiences, with tens of thousands of people engaging online with it during each performance.

The other thing which we did in Manchester was a project with the actor Riz Ahmed, who pre-pandemic we were working with to produce a theatrical staging of his new album The Long Goodbye. The week of its final rehearsal, the pandemic started and we had to cancel the live event, but instead, we created, another piece of hybrid theater, where the actor was performing live in a theater in San Francisco, but using a phone and a handheld camera and live editing between them to create a powerful, DIY filmic love experience where Riz moved through the theatre’s spaces to create a theatrical kind of retelling of the album. It was under 25 minutes long, and it really played with the possibilities of both film and live performance within a live event, but it was much more DIY because the actor was just using this [a phone]. It was streamed on the MIF website and, partly because he is a big star now, got an lot of attention and an lot of people tuned into it [At the recent Academy Awards, Riz Ahmed’s film based on the album won the Oscar for the best live-action short film].

And then finally, another example: Manchester International Festival in 2021 happened physically, but we always used to host a big, middle weekend for the festival called Arts Weekend, where about 150 venue and festival leaders would fly from around the world to see the festival’s body of work. We decided that we couldn't do that for obvious reasons in 2021 and to move the whole experience online. We turned it into a project that we called 24 Hour Arty People to play on the film 24 Hour Party People, which is about Manchester. So, the 24 Hour Arty People was a 24-hour dive into the festival.

It was staged in a television studio. We were using full television broadcast technology, including live edits. It ran for 24 hours continuously, in order to capture essentially three different international time zones, from the west coast of the US, to Europe, and across China, and it was hosted live for over 24 hours by four hosts. And essentially it became a kind of rolling TV channel, but all of those people, and more in fact, than would've come to the arts weekend. And because of the nature of the platform, which was essentially a modified version of Zoom, there was a strong level of interactivity.

So, what was an interesting outcome was how we were able to really extend the reach of the physical event, to people who would never have travelled to Manchester. We had a lot more engagement from places like East and West Africa, and East Asia, more than we would've ordinarily done.

How did your pricing change to accommodate a hybrid event?

So, we didn't charge for the professional events, because we wouldn't have charged for people to come to the festival. There would've been by invitation. We did charge for The Long Goodbye event, but we significantly lowered the cost. I think we charged five pounds for a ticket, with an option for people to pay what they could. And with Dream events, all of the ticketing happened through the Royal Shakespeare Company. They also charged, but it was a much lower ticket price than they would ordinarily have done. Because of the capacity to engage with work on a screen, both of those events were much shorter, about 20, 25 minutes each. So, in a way, the pricing also reflected the duration.

Plus, since we were naturally reaching much broader audiences, different cultures, and different locations, setting a price point that might have been valid in the UK context, wasn't really relevant.

What were the logistic challenges of producing a hybrid event?

When we did the 24 Hour Arty People it was running for 24 hours. So, a part of the challenge was that there was a lot of time to fill, we needed a lot of content. So, we did actually have some pre-recorded films that weren't long, but were maybe 10 minutes each that we would feature, across all the three different time zones. The same film was shown three or four times, but we were confident that people wouldn't have seen it more than once because of the way the time zone shifted. I think the other logistical challenge for Dream project was that technical experimentation required a lot of investment - the technology in terms of setting up the studio, all of the motion capture and in building the virtual environment, using the Unreal Engine. So, it was expensive to make.

Don't underestimate the costs, think carefully about actually how fit for purpose the content is when people are watching online, and obviously consider time zones.

Do you think you and your organization will continue your hybrid practice into future programming (post pandemic)?

Yes. It’s interesting, the immediate reaction when thinking about getting back to normal is somehow to do less digital work. For me that feels counterintuitive.

I think the future of audiences' experiences will now have to encompass hybrid, because actually artistically it allows you to do things that you can't do either within the purely live space or that you can't within a purely virtual space where there is no liveness, such as streaming purely live content. It allows a level of artistic innovation which is continuing to push the experience of making and engaging with performance and is continuing to find new ways of connecting to audiences.

When we were building The Factory and COVID started we decided that we were going to build a virtual version of The Factory on the Fortnite gaming platform. So, we built an architectural render of the factory on an island in Fortnite and commissioned a virtual artist to create a playable quest-based game that allowed people to explore all the spaces of The Factory but using the familiar tropes of gaming We'd never done it before. We had no idea what the engagement would be. We looked at the numbers in the first week and the number of the active players who actually chose to go to the island to take part in the game was 1.5 million. So, when you are occupying those kinds of spaces, you've got an ability to reach audiences in a way that is going to be so important for the future of culture.

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What is your and your organization’s definition of hybrid events?

It's only quite recently that I come to realize what hybrid means to me. On the surface, we're talking about hybrid as a mix of something live and something virtual or online. But there’s more to that.

I was talking about it with the ISPA program committee, reflecting on the recent New York 2022 Congress. Granted the main event was the live congress happening in New York, complemented by the hybrid presence. And as such, as a hybrid audience, I felt like I was peeping into someone’s party. That made me think, can we also consider hybrid as a case where we are trying to build a meaningful relationship between the live audience and the virtual audience?

And what does a meaningful relationship mean? I think different people have different ideas, and I don't have an answer. But I'm thinking for example, as an online audience whether what I’m doing or saying can have an impact on the live audience as well. We understand live-ness is very strong and when I meet you face-to-face, it always turns out that we just don’t think about who is online anymore.

So how do we equalize that two presences? How do we have a meaningful dialogue and a meaningful relationship between the live and the virtual? Well, say we're having a live conversation here, but there's also an online presence that is commenting. People are commenting through a voice or a chat interface or something, and the live audiences are also responding to the online comment, and sometimes one party can impact the other. That sort of approach could possibly equalize how people influence one another.

So in short, hybrid for me is about finding ways to establish a meaningful relationship between the different dimensions of audience.

Did you engage both in-person and virtual audiences?

Yes, we did in a way. We tried different formats, we had prerecorded things, like a short film we made and video on demand of our productions that we offered to the audience. These are the kinds that are not entirely interactive.

We also had a small celebration for Nine Years Theatre’s ninth anniversary last year which we did online. It’s a zoom celebration and we were very nervous about it. But it turned out quite well, and people had fun.

In terms of performance, we presented Three Sisters, a collaboration with SITI Company from New York, where we experimented with hybrid. This was forced by circumstances as the American actors couldn't travel to Singapore. It is always a bit more difficult with performances because they are built on conventions, or receptions are built on conventions.

For the Three Sisters hybrid performance, the feeling I got was that live audiences found it a bit more difficult to digest the format. When rehearsing, my live actors had to react to a prerecorded video, which was very difficult. The actors found a way and got used to it eventually. But when we presented it on stage, live audiences needed time to get used to it. The audiences were like, why are they speaking to video, are people in the video actually online?

I think the grasping of new conventions definitely undermined their live viewing experience a little, since it’s not so easy to get on board with this idea. And online audience had a different experience. They’re watching something prerecorded so it kind of cancels out. They also have the chance to see close-ups, to rewind, fast forward or just listen to it. So it’s a different experience which is not immediately comparable.

So some things are easier, like online event, small celebrations, meet ups, prerecorded things, since there is a convention to these kind of forms. But in terms of a performance, that is a bit more challenging. We have different answers for hybrid for different event formats.

What were the logistic challenges of producing a hybrid event?

I’ll talk about the Three Sisters’ production in particular. It was not just the challenges of digital technology, whether we knew how to use it? Do we have enough resources to get the right people with the expertise to help us do it? Those were monetary kind of challenges, which could be solved with extra funding.

The real challenge, was the fact that we were making work separately, physically apart. Making two separate works, then join them together afterward. I think that separation and coming together were something we had no previous experience with, and nothing to learn from.

I'm sure people have done it before, but it's just something we were not used to. On top of that, in the experience of Three Sisters, the two companies involved, Nine Years Theatre and SITI Company, share similar kind of training specific to live performances: to make us be very aware of the relationship between live bodies in space and time. That's what our training is about.

When we are together in a space, suddenly space and time become so significant for us and our bodies will just move in a way like we understand one another. Then that was totally gone. So with a hybrid version, space and time had to be seen differently and we didn’t have enough time to learn. I could see a lot of hybrid work nowadays, but I'm not sure how many of us, how many artists, organizations have the luxury of actually exploring the work over long period of time. Because you need to find out, what does it mean when perception of space and time changes.

Live-ness and digital have always had tension in their relationship. And it is just now that we're forced to look at it more carefully. But do we have the time as artists and the resources to explore it before we create the work? Very often, we just have to create the work.

How did your pricing change to accommodate a hybrid event?

To be honest, after Three Sisters, we have not done anything that is a combination of live and online. Moving into 2022, in Singapore, people can get back into live theater now. In terms of offering things digitally, the general feeling is that we don’t dare to price it too high. Because people are not that enthusiastic nowadays. People are still talking about digital fatigue and digital content is not in high demand as before. There was a period where organizations and companies were studying the audience sentiments. But the time for that was so short that we don't really have enough data.

We don’t have enough data from online consumption. We know how many tickets were sold and how many people watched, but audience responses can be very different.

So when people ask me if online work, such as making video on demand, is effective. I say, we’re still in the midst of it, we haven’t gotten anywhere and we are already feeling fatigue.

So it's a weird situation and there's just not enough substantial data to move on or to say something meaningful.

In 2020, people were craving to watch something, so they will pay to watch it. But once live theater comes back, they're like, thank you very much, but I'm going back to the theater. So with all these sentiments, we are not pricing digital content very high now. Monetization of digital content has not been easy.

Do you think you and your organization will continue your hybrid practice into future programming (post pandemic)?

Like I’ve said, I really want to consider what is a meaningful relationship between the digital and the live. Moving forward the word hybrid may not be that important anymore. And digital elements are taking many forms nowadays – AR, VR, the metaverse… Imagine the New York Congress, what if moving forward, we also have VR elements. So some people can choose to get a VR goggles and dive into a congress metaverse. They put on the VR goggles, they can be there, and we can see David (Baile) waving at us. It's going to be a very different experience.

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Alban Bassuet, Associate Principal | Arts + Culture (New England)
Arup

What is your and your organization’s definition of hybrid events?

Joe Solway: Performances have gone from just in-person experiences, pre-pandemic, to fully remote experiences during the pandemic. At this moment, we’re now just beginning to explore the concept of a hybrid model that engages both in-person and virtual audiences.

Alban Bassuet: A main takeaway from the last two years is that the remote experience needs to be as interesting as the in-person experience. During the pandemic, many arts and culture organizations had no other choice than to host streaming events, with some successes in certain instances and ultimately ensuring continued engagement with their audiences. However, these were also less engaging events experienced through the screen that were utilizing traditional recording techniques.

With new remote event demands, we have the opportunity to make it more immersive, interactive, and engaging to audiences.

What can an organization do to make it more engaging?

AB: We are looking at this from many different perspectives. One way is to use 3D technology so that we can stream 3D performances that give remote audiences agency and presence. Agency is when you go into the hall virtually, you have the ability to move, or to turn your head and hear the spatial change in the sound. We have developed tools allowing virtual users to pan through the space and experience its acoustics using a basic computer mouse or a VR headset.

Second is a sense of presence, so the performance that you're listening to feels nearly real and has the sensation of it occurring right there in front of you. As a firm, we're looking at different ways of conveying that. A lot of the agency and presence come from the recording techniques that captures how sound moves through the space.

We are also thinking of the gamification of performance, with interfaces allowing users to pick locations in a hall, or even to build a virtual acoustical space which could be an especially great way to engage with younger audiences.

What were the logistic challenges of producing a hybrid event?

AB: In the simplest terms, the main challenge often comes down to documenting and broadcasting an in-person performance for a virtual audience: setting-up microphones and pan, tilt, and zoom cameras around the performers, which are starting to become very common on performance stages, and adjusting the orientation of performers for better camera shots. In-person audiences are also becoming more aware of remote participants and tend to be more forgiving with the increasing presence of technology on stage. As we move into our hybrid future, recording could be conducted with more sophistication such as utilizing 3D cameras and microphones to stream immersive events, and at the upper end involve large background LED screens to mix composite VR/AR videos. All these challenges and possible solutions make us think differently as venue designers about new performance spaces, how to integrate technology in future halls, provide configuration flexibility, and to connect both in-person and remote viewers.

How did your pricing change to accommodate a hybrid event?

JS: With our new hybrid reality, there's the ability for new sources of revenue because you can provide the unique experience for a broader remote audience. This shift potentially expands your audience for people that couldn't afford higher price in-person tickets but may be willing to pay at a lower price point for a unique virtual experience.

AB: On the financial aspect we start to see the influence of the creator economy in the performing arts. Established musicians are streaming performances directly from their home, like pianist Julian Brocal for example, with his successful Jardin Musical. Brocal streams 50-person events from the attic of his home in Brussels, often inviting other renowned musicians to join performances while monetizing in-person and remote audience directly on his organization’s website. Streamed performances obviously increase the audience potential but also provide access to events otherwise not available to certain communities or persons with disabilities. Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are also becoming more influential in arts and culture. For example, NFTs could open new revenue streams for performing arts organization by monetizing on the value of a unique live performance as CDs did several decades ago.

Do you think you and your organization will continue your hybrid practice into future programming (post-pandemic)?

JS: As we look to the future we’re thinking about these key questions, asking how do we engage virtual audiences? What does that mean in terms of the design and layout of the performance venue? What are the implications for integrating new technology in venues? Design has to accommodate the new paradigm.

AB: We are not going to be able to put the genie back in the box.

We will continue to attend in-person events, but we will certainly experience more and more interesting remote programs, visit a museum online, or just live our lives in increasingly virtual ways. Our younger generations are totally used to both, having in-person and virtual friends and experiences.

We are working from home. Now they will do the same. They will go to school virtually. So, it's not going back. We're not going back. That trend had already begun before the pandemic, and the pandemic accelerated the process more than anything else.

At the moment, we are working on conveying the essence of an exciting performance. Presence, intimacy, being immersed, a sense of live connection, etc. Nobody wants to take away the in-person performance. It's just going to be more good stuff that you can also do at home. Why not?

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What is your and your organization’s definition of hybrid events?

Yes. When we described our festival last summer, it was a hybrid festival in that it consisted of live events and digital events. It was important to recognize that the digital was not just an extension of the in-person; it had its own integrity.

In 2020, we canceled our festival for the first time in 88 years and we created an all virtual festival of 36 events in the summer of 2020. The School was completely online.

Then, in 2021, we went to a hybrid model. For example, in The School we could have a certain number of dancers socially distant in our studio. So we had 11 in-person dancers and 20 learning online. Faculty had to think about how to create a program that would serve each group and they were hugely innovative at thinking about the exchange. For example, in the tap program, the virtual dancers ended up choreographing works for the in-person dancers as a part of the program.

Now, in 2022, we know that dancers are doing everything they can to have space to dance and not be dancing in their living rooms anymore. So we created Jacob's Pillow Intensives in three cities: Chicago, Miami, and London. Dancers will go to a studio and be streamed into The School at Jacob's Pillow as part of their learning. They can be in a studio space, and still virtually connect to the faculty and the site that is Jacob's Pillow.

What were the logistic challenges of producing a hybrid event?

I think it's important to note that we only chose to do certain events as live streams. For the most part, we created digital products that were derived from our in-person events and then broadcast them. The format was a digital stream of the performance two weeks after its in-person premiere. So, we had the opportunity to edit a piece of work to make sure it best translated to the screen. As opposed to a livestream where it’s more logistically challenging to give context with behind the scenes, pre-show, and post-show. Contextualization really enriched the experience.

A challenge was adequately marketing and promoting both the live and the digital festival contemporaneously. And that was a heavy lift on our staff for a 10-week time period.

The other revelation we had is that there’s a reason why distributors don't traditionally premiere a major new television series in the summer - people are not typically on their screens, depending of course, on where in the world they live. With that in mind, we made the decision to pick only select works in this summer’s festival to film and we will broadcast these between October and May, enabling us to put marketing focus into monthly – rather than weekly-releases.

The other fascinating finding of last summer is that only 8% of the in-person audience was also a part of our digital audience. From that, we know we're programming and creating content for two separate audiences, and we need to approach it that way. The exciting thing about that digital audience is: they come from 66 countries. The fact that Jacob's Pillow is known around the world, but few people will have the opportunity to journey to our remote location in Western Massachusetts to partake, was a revelation in terms of reaching new audiences who can tune in virtually. And these digital audiences, for us and for many organizations, skew younger and more diverse in terms of race. That was a great discovery.

We were also ready to jump into a digital festival because of our history of being an organization whose resources have been accessible online for over ten years. Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive is one of the most accessible digital platforms for dance in the world. We had the staff knowledge and the means to pivot very fast.

How did your pricing change to accommodate a hybrid event?

We experimented with a few strategies. We had two international streams last summer that were ticketed, one from the Paris Opera Ballet and a film that we commissioned from Nrityagram. Our other performance streams were offered for free for a limited time. We asked for contributions to support the Pillow as well as the artists. We made the case to our audience that in order to return to dance, artists needed essential residencies that we were providing, and we asked people to support those investments in dancers and companies. We also noted that we were paying them for the right to stream their work and that their contribution would support the artist as well as Jacob's Pillow. So at this point it's been donation based and the contributions do not meet the costs of the streams.

The platform needed additional fundraising support. We felt that because we could allow only very few people to see performances live because of social distancing, it was our responsibility to make the streams accessible to audiences who couldn't come to the Pillow because of COVID or because of our limited capacity.

Just as everyone else, we are trying to figure out number one, how to make this sustainable for the artists. What is the proper compensation? And how do we think about artist compensation in terms of what we need to do to level the hierarchy between presenters and artists at this time in our world. Number two, we have to think about how to make it sustainable for Jacob's Pillow to invest in this level of operation.

We've always invested, since the 1980s, in documentation of works, and that's why we have such a rich archive. The important thing is that every artist leaves here with that documentation and a full professional photography shoot.

But we have never done three camera shoots, which is what we did last summer. And the potential here is asking, what can this shoot do and give audiences that they cannot get even when they're in the third row? What is that small gesture that look from dancer to dancer that you can zoom in on with that third camera that we might not otherwise be able to see as an audience member? What we are all trying to figure out is how we can add value in the digital experiences.

The bottom line is that we have not figured out what that model is yet, but I will say that the highest percentage of our new donors came through our digital platform, people who registered for digital products.

So that is really an exciting possibility for us.

Do you think you and your organization will continue your hybrid practice into future programming (post pandemic)?

For sure. The theme here is experimentation. We know that we are in a time of rapid change and that we need to stay open to what audiences want and need.

I think we are all called upon to pivot and adapt in how we approach the future of digital programming in relationship to our organization. So we have planned to continue to stream some full length works. Moving forward, it is also part of our strategic plan working over the next five years to more fully develop a digital crossroads for Jacob’s Pillow. To bring many of our assets together under one umbrella, we are currently researching what infrastructure, technical support and staffing support will be necessary to realize this.

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