Rebooting the Muse

Harnessing digital technologies for sustainability in the Australian performing arts

The performing arts in Australia today face unprecedented (that word again) challenges on multiple fronts. On the one hand, the social-distancing measures needed to control the COVID-19 pandemic undermined the live performance model that is the very bedrock of the profession.

That base had in any case been eroded by the national bushfire emergency that preceded the pandemic, which itself led to widespread cancellations. Last year’s catastrophic floods made a dire situation even worse.

Even the sceptics among us now acknowledge that something is climatically amiss, and that we all need to do something about it.

These calamities have precipitated a wholesale shift from real-time performances to online delivery.This in turn has helped not only to lower the risk of infection for audiences, but also has led to a reduction in size of the carbon footprints generated by touring. But while effective up to a point, this response is grounded in a mindset changed little since the days of Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which also saw technology employed to capture, reformat and disseminate content intended initially to be live performances in front of physical audiences.The danger now is that performing arts organisations and venues may become unviable, caught as they are with artistic content and business models that rely on real time audience experiences and physical box office income, while plying their trade in an increasingly virtual marketplace.

A team of University of Adelaide researchers, led by the Elder Conservatorium’s Professor Anna Goldsworthy, was last year awarded an Australian Research Council-funded Linkage grant to work towards a more artistically and administratively sustainable solution to the conundrum.The team will document the impact of digital technologies on the various stakeholders in the creative equation: from creators whose artistic vision calls for a given technology or process; to performers who have to realise that vision; to audiences for whom the technology might be a help or hinderance, a source of enjoyment or irritation, and finally to administrators who have to parse the results into a sustainable business model fit for the organisation’s purpose.

“These calamities have precipitated a wholesale shift from real-time performances to online delivery.” Mark Carroll, Adjunct Professor at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.

To that end, and thanks to the generosity and vision of the Light Cultural Fund, a South Australian philanthropic organisation dedicated to fostering community wellbeing through artistic excellence, the project has at its disposal a cutting-edge performance space, The Lab, which is situated in Light Square in the centre of Adelaide. In this controlled environment, our project partners – the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Patch Theatre, and Illuminate Adelaide – will create and perform works using the available technology. In that space we will be able to track creative processes, document participant reactions, formulate strategies and, ultimately make meaningful steps towards future-proofing an industry that enriches the lives of us all.

Story by Mark Carroll, Adjunct Professor at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.

Rebooting the Muse: Post-COVID-19 sustainability in the performing arts (LP200300899)