13 performances by more than 22 artists from at least 10 countries around the world, all performed live on 070707 … it’s been a fantastic day and a wonderful way to celebrate the launch of UpStage V2!
Enormous thank yous to all the artists who put in incredible amounts of work, enthusiasm, and imagination. And thanks to the sponsors and everyone who supported the event, and everyone who came as online audience. It’s been a great day and there will be documentation about it here soon – first we need to party, then we need to rest …
brenda’s blog on UpStage with nice comment from another UpStage visitor : )
Here is my brief analysis-summary:
Overall the festival was really entertaining. It undeniably proves that UpStage can work as a creative tool and performance platform that supports artists’ individual styles and visions.
Especially visuals (avatars and backdrops) were often really beautiful and innovative in 070707 performances. The storytelling part was slightly lacking behind with many performances that were really ‘conceptual collages’ and less ‘narrative’. Only one of the plays that I saw was interactive – the one about rejection – there one character kept asking questions from the audience and really taking their answers as part of the play. In a way ‘Air Guitar’ show presents other kind of fruitful opportunity of audience activity; they had a clear role as a rock concert jamming crowd and clearly had fun making comments although those were not really affecting the performance.
Sound/audio is something that some of performers have been experimenting with, and found some funny ideas to produce layers of sounds to their performances. (imo, in the future sound abilities could be quite high on the technical & interface development list).
In the future my personal wish is to see more performances on UpStage that are designed to be interactive. Commenting seems to become very naturally for the audience members but that of course depends on the play, how dense text it is, how inspiring etc. Sometimes the plays are so fascinating that you just want to sit back and enjoy.