Since I have been invoking the idea of assessing technology and only using what is suitable for you instead of jumping on the latest trend, I need to issue a mea culpa.
At various times I have suggested in my entries that organizations should have the artistic staff blog about their rehearsal experience. I still think this is a good idea. However, of the few organizations I have seen who have had their artistic staff blog, I have to say I have been really unimpressed.
Many of them start out the first couple days of rehearsals and then either come to a dead stop or don’t pick up again until just around opening night. The entries that are there are pretty predictable. They start out talking about the great group that has been assembled and how exciting it all is. Then often nothing more.
Certainly one could get more entries generated if one made it a contractual requirement and set aside time each day during which performers and the creative team were to scribe their musings. After reading the experiences of a college professor who required her classes to blog, I am not sure this is the most constructive or productive tack to take.
Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.
I imagine that if you assembled the most brilliant group of performers and artistic collaborators the world could imagine, you might find that their brilliance was less apparent in what they produced for the blogosphere.
So I take it back. If you can do it well and your audiences will benefit from it, blog away! If not, turn the creative energies toward creating a great performance.
The Rorshach Theatre in Washington DC has a great blog http://rorschachtheatre.blogspot.com with quick interviews with the cast and crew, production design notes, and notes about what happens even after a show has opened.
But, you do raise a very good point. We’ll need to keep in mind that everyone shouldn’t be a blogger.
Joe, I really agree with your assessment. Most organizational blogs that deal with the rehearsal process are pretty awful – and for a variety of reasons.
So many of these blogs are ghostwritten by some PR staffer because the artistic staff doesn’t have the time or the interest to really engage the audience. So, the tone and content of the posts seems stilted, trivial, and puffy. The agenda is not really to reveal, but rather to sell or provoke interest in attendance – not bad goals – but somewhat disingenuous.
To write about the rehearsal process – as it really is – well, that’s dangerous. Rehearsal can be a naked, ugly struggle towards something transcendant. To reveal requires a degree of transparency that is discomforting, especially in such a vulnerable setting. Directors and actors argue, fight, stumble, and often take flight, but the process isn’t all that pretty sometimes.
I can’t blame artists for wanting some privacy and discretion in an age where so many people feel entitled to be voyeurs. I also believe that art is not too unlike sausage in that watching it being made can reduce one’s appetite for it.