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Join U-M Museum of Art in UMS Tweet Seats

The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) first participated in the UMS tweet seats program during the 2012-13 season, and the performance that I attended was Alison Balsom, Trumpet & the Scottish Ensemble (April 20th, 2013). As both a trumpet player and a social media enthusiast, I was very excited to attend the performance–and even more excited to be invited to live tweet the event with others that were interested in the interactive aspect of experiencing the performing arts.

As the music started, I began to think about the performance in more of a conceptual way–how could I articulate what I was seeing and hearing to someone wasn’t there? How could I describe the experience in words or pictures? Was there a way for me to educate or inspire people who were not present at the performance? As I was tweeting from the @ummamuseum handle, I was also thinking about ways that I could relate and connect the performance to the Museum. The Baroque period music that filled Hill Auditorium on that night provided a great opportunity to delve into the various Baroque period works found in UMMA’s encyclopedic collection. Some of the paintings really seemed to ‘come alive’ to the music as I was looking at them.

UMMA-TweetSeats-Photo

After participating in the tweet seats myself, I realized two things: 1) there is unlimited potential in pairing UMMA’s vast collection of over 19,000 works with the diverse line-up of world-class performing arts presented by UMS each year, and 2) this presents a great opportunity for UMMA and our students to help create a parallel narrative and to draw connections between visual art and performing art. This season, we will work with our student docents to prepare a visual narrative from UMMA’s collection prior to each of the UMS tweet seat shows. The students will then attend the shows and live-tweet the performances.

UMMA’s partnership with UMS seems very natural, specifically with the focus on dance performances during the 2013-2014 UMS season (look for an opening night Q&A and “You Can Dance” event accompanying each dance performance). You can watch for our blog posts (before) and tweets (during) the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (9/27), Ballet Preljocaj (11/1) and Compagnie Käfig (2/14). We hope to highlight some interesting ways that our collection relates specifically to the dance performances that we will be tweeting about this season. See you at #UMSLobby!

Are you interested in giving tweet seats a try? Call our ticket office and mention “tweet seats” (along with the related performance) to order at 734-764-2538.

Tweet Seats: Alison Balsom & the Scottish Ensemble

On to our final tweet seats event of the 2012-2013 season, Alison Balsom, trumpet and the Scottish Ensemble at Hill Auditorium.

Meet the participants.

UMS: Tell us a little about you.

Sydney Hawkins: I am the new Communications Marketing Manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Professionally, I have a background in radio and digital marketing. Personally, I love road tripping, coffee drinking, music making, ice creaming, fun running, skydiving, and trying new things. I’ll be tweeting from @ummamuseum (I moonlight at @sydneyhawkins when I flip handles).

Angela Elkordy: I am an educational technologist; my passions are instructional technologies, teaching, learning and leading (K-20) as well as connecting with others through technology.

Megan Pfiester: Since a very young age I have been fascinated by all things musical whether it be Beethoven or the Beatles. I work as a communications coordinator and create as much music as possible all day every day. I am currently a member of the Ypsilanti Symphony Orchestra and hope to study violin performance and music education in the fall. You can find me at @MusiGeek on Twitter.

Jared Rawlings: I am a process-centered innovative teacher, and an emerging researcher. I tweet @Jared_Rawlings and my website is: www.jaredrawlings.com.

Cody Takacs: I am a recent graduate of the School of Music earning my BM in Double Bass Performance. I appear frequently as a soloist specializing in new music with performances ranging from the University of Michigan’s Collage Concert to Carnegie Hall. As an educator, I have been the double bass instructor for Skyline High School’s orchestra and chamber music coach for Michigan Bass Bash.

UMS: In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology?

Sydney Hawkins: My relationship with technology is pretty balanced – it keeps me connected, but I don’t let myself disconnect from what is happening around me.

Angela Elkordy: Connected!

Megan Pfiester: I would say I’m pretty tech-savvy.

Cody Takacs: I use technology to build and maintain a strong musical network and also to share and express my musical ideas.

Jared Rawlings: My relationship with technology is necessary in order to build my personal/professional learning network.

UMS: To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience?

Sydney Hawkins: To me, to be present is to have the ability to clear your mind and ‘check out’ of the real world when you enter through the doors – it is an opportunity to relax, to recharge, and to get inspired.

Angela Elkordy: Being present, to me, means being immersed in the experience and making meaning by sharing the experience with others.

Megan Pfiester: Being present during a performance is so much more than simply taking a seat in a hall or an auditorium. To me it’s blissfully leaving whatever happened that day at the curb and not only listening to someone else’s creation and ideas. It’s taking it all in, sight sound and smell, and letting it stir your imagination.

Cody Takacs:  To be “present” at a performance to me means 1) that the listener is physically present and 2) that they are mentally experiencing the performance on one or a combination of any of Aaron Copland’s three planes of listening that find best suiting for their own listening experience (the sensual, expressive, and sheerly musical planes).

Jared Rawlings: Being present means it’s a way of capturing the “lived experience” of the concert goer.  Also, given the temporal nature of music, theatre, and dance the tweet seats project is a way of focusing in on this phenomenon that is exclusive to live arts in Ann Arbor.

Meet the tweets.

After the performance

UMS: How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance?

Sydney Hawkins: It made me ‘think’ about the performance in more of a conceptual way – how can I articulate what I’m seeing/hearing to someone who isn’t here? How can I describe this in words? Is there a way for me to educate or inspire people who aren’t here? As I was tweeting from the @ummamuseum handle, I was also thinking about ways that I could relate and connect the performance to the museum (which is something that I’d definitely do a bit more research on prior to the performance next time).

Angela Elkordy: In sharing the experience in real-time, I was more conscious of trying to communicate what I thought would be of interest to others who were not at the concert. It was really interesting to read the tweets of others experiencing the same event…. and hence tweeting provides a unique experience for participants who can share as the event is on-going. How else could that be accomplished? and how powerful is that? 🙂

Jared Rawlings: I was more aware of the people around me. More specifically, I was looking for audience body language, facial animation, and vocal reaction when audible. I tried to be a thorough “twitter correspondent” and with Ms. Balsom’s performance, I had to remind myself to tweet. She was absolutely captivating.

UMS: Did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Sydney Hawkins: I think that I learned quite a bit from the performance because I was actively watching/listening for things about it in which I could relay to others. I was also following the hashtag to see what other people in the tweet seats were saying about it too – it was a way of having a conversation without talking. I wasn’t completely surprised by this outcome – there are many conferences or lectures that I’ve been to that offer hashtags and I believe that it makes people pay attention and try to relay the important parts of the conversation. It provides for a more attentive audience.

Angela Elkordy: I usually share snippets of information while attending events, but in being part of a group tweeting was a great experience. I think we all wonder on some level how others experience things and the tweeting together made the event more social without being imposing. Yes, this was a pleasant surprise 🙂

Jared Rawlings: I was much more interested in the audience’s reaction of the performance. I could not believe the number of people who were there to see a trumpet performer. The upper balcony was almost full. I did not expect this outcome.

Are you interested in joining our tweet seats section? Sign up & we’ll let you what’s coming in the 2013-2014 season.

Tweet Seats: Esperanza Spalding

On to our fourth tweet seats event! This time we saw Esperanza Spalding perform at Michigan Theater on April 6.

Meet the participants.

UMS: Tell us a little about you.

Richard Retyi: I am the social media director at Fluency Media, a digital marketing agency in Ann Arbor, as well as a regular feature writer for AnnArbor.comConcentratemedia.com and other publications. You can follow me on Twitter at @RichRetyi or read my work at RichRetyi.com.

Cody Takacs: I am a recent graduate of the School of Music earning my BM in Double Bass Performance. I appear frequently as a soloist specializing in new music with performances ranging from the University of Michigan’s Collage Concert to Carnegie Hall. As an educator, I have been the double bass instructor for Skyline High School’s orchestra and chamber music coach for Michigan Bass Bash.

Kristin Kurzawa: A graduate of the University of Michigan School of Art and Design (MFA 2009), I describe myself as a storyteller, innovator, and educator with a passion for bringing communities together through information sharing and online platforms. Photography, feature writing, content management, and social media community management/development are the tools I use to create user-friendly content and foster communities. My website is www.kristinkurzawa.com, and follow me on Twitter: @kriskurzawa, on Instagram at instragram.com/kristinkurzawa, and LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kristinkurzawa

Jasmine Hentschel: My relationship with UMS started back in my sophomore year at U of M, when I started interning in the production department. It was one of the most enriching, enlightening, and greatest learning experiences not only of my undergraduate career, but of my entire life. I currently work for Cambridge Michigan Language Assessments making standardized English language tests, and I’m headed to U of M’s School of Information to study computational linguistics in the fall. @JasmineShuree on Twitter.

UMS: In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology?

Richard Retyi: The only reason I am in social media is because I signed up for Twitter back in 2007 on a whim. Since then, I’ve been kind of tethered to my phone. All the world’s knowledge in a single device, plus Instagram.

Cody Takacs: I use technology to build and maintain a strong musical network and also to share and express my musical ideas.

Kristin Kurzawa: As a self-proclaimed geek, I appreciate the technology in every tool I use throughout the day, from my anti-glare eyeglasses to my ubiquitous iPhone to the latest cloud-based software.

Jasmine Hentschel: I am wonderfully overwhelmed by the incredible knowledge and power that technological advances of recent decades have afforded people all over the world.

UMS: Why did you decide to participate in this project?

Richard Retyi: Curiousity.

Cody Takacs: As I mentioned in the second question, I like to use technology to share and express my musical thoughts and ideas. I feel that the Tweet Seats project would allow me a great opportunity to relay my thoughts and ideas to my musical network and even public at large.

Kristin Kurzawa:  I love the idea of bringing digital communities and live, in-person communities together. I’m 100% committed to increasing awareness of the arts!  The Tweet Seats is one of the most innovative and exciting ideas for involving everyone in the experience!

Jasmine Hentschel: I think UMS is an incredible organization that really brings a great deal of phenomenal art and culture to the vibrant city of Ann Arbor. Having worked as an intern for several years in the production department, I’ve been to dozens and dozens of UMS shows and I thought this would be an exciting new way to get involved. I am very curious to see how it feels to be engaged in the performance in a totally different way.

UMS: To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience?

Richard Retyi: I think unless you really know a particular sphere of art or performance (musicians, dancers, etc.), performances transport your mind somewhere else most of the time. You watch the musicians, you watch the artists and then your mind wanders. To past memories, creative ideas, whatever. And then you return to what’s actually happening. Or maybe that’s just me.

Cody Takacs: To be “present” at a performance to me means 1) that the listener is physically present and 2) that they are mentally experiencing the performance on one or a combination of any of Aaron Copland’s three planes of listening that find best suiting for their own listening experience (the sensual, expressive, and sheerly musical planes).

Kristin Kurzawa: To me, “being present” involves all five senses. The ability to really observe both the micro and macro level of the entire experience- from the smell of the auditorium, to the sounds of the orchestra’s warm-up, to the visual impact of the set design or audience reaction, to the feel of the velvet seats beneath you– to the taste of the fountain soda during intermission!

Jasmine Hentschel: Being “present” is a matter of being engaged in a performance and giving it all of your consideration and attention, regardless of your preconceived notions and expectations of what it might be. It’s about not only noticing the little things, including all of the time and effort that gets put into every aspect of a performance, but also how it makes you feel before, during and after, and how you the art you’re watching ties into and relates to your personal experiences and those of all of mankind, whether it be theater, dance, music, or some other art form.

Meet the tweets.


After the performance

UMS: How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance?

Kristin Kurzawa: I thought the tweeting experience might be a wee bit distracting to my focus, but it was just the opposite. Knowing that I was the eyes and ears of the concert for those following kept me hyper-focused on the band, the audience, and of course, Esperanza Spalding’s voice!

Jasmine Hentschel: I was so mesmerized by Esperanza and the band throughout the entire performance that it was hard to decide when to take my eyes off them to post a tweet. However, tweeting about the performance also forced me to analyze how I was thinking and feeling in a very different way than I normally would during a show, to determine exactly why I was so mesmerized, and to put these thoughts and feelings into comprehensible words. It’s interesting to have the tweets now to look back on after the fact, to recall what I was thinking at very specific moments throughout the performance that I would totally forget about otherwise.

Richard Retyi: Working in athletics and live-tweeting a number of games for work, the experience wasn’t new to me. With the hashtag, I was more curious about what my fellow tweet seaters were saying, so it was like the four of us were having mini conversations during the performance.

UMS: Did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Kristin Kurzawa: I enjoyed meeting and sharing tweets with my fellow Tweet Seaters. We represented such unique perspectives that we created a team. I would love to see us have more dialogue during or after the shows, but that would take a lot of multi-tasking for sure.

Jasmine Hentschel: I honestly thought it would be a little easier because I anticipated there being at least a couple lulls in the performance. But every song was completely engaging and I found it hard to take my attention away from the stage even for a few moments. It was definitely easier than tweeting during a Shakespeare play though, because I could still hear the music and follow the show without a problem even when I was on my phone–trying to do that during a play meant I had to look up and jump back into the show after missing dialogue and action that you can’t take in if you’re looking down. That was right along the lines of what I expected.

Richard Retyi: I didn’t really know what to expect going in. I should have known that the hashtag wouldn’t be in use during the performance by the people in the theater. I’d be curious about the response from tweet seaters in the overall UMS community.

Are you interested in joining our tweet seats section? Sign up & we’ll let you what’s coming in the 2013-2014 season.

Tweet Seats: Propeller

For our third tweet seats event, we saw Propeller Theater Company’s Twelfth Night at Power Center.

UMS: Tell us a little about you. If you have an online presence you like to share publicly, please tell us the relevant websites or user names/handles.

Annette Smith: Independent thinker, small furry creature lover, amateur photographer, lifelong learner, automotive marketing executive. Proud graduate of Chicago and Michigan. Find me @bluepersiancat on Twitter.

Hannah Mahalak: My name is Hannah Mahalak. I go to Chelsea High School as a Senior and plan to attend Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee next year. Currently I am involved in the high-school show choir, Company C, and also the Varsity Swim Team. I am @ha_m24 on Twitter.

Nisreen Salka: My name is Nisreen Salka and I am a freshman at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, studying Business Administration (Marketing) with a minor in Screen Arts and Cultures. I enjoy photography, writing, reading, and socializing with friends. I am very passionate about everything I do, and throw my heart and soul into my every endeavor. I am @Nizzi_Salka on Twitter.

Jasmine Hentschel: My relationship with UMS started back in my sophomore year at U of M, when I started interning in the production department. It was one of the most enriching, enlightening, and greatest learning experiences not only of my undergraduate career, but of my entire life. I currently work for Cambridge Michigan Language Assessments making standardized English language tests, and I’m headed to U of M’s School of Information to study computational linguistics in the fall. @JasmineShuree on Twitter.

UMS: In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology?

Annette Smith: Love/hate. Still remember my first computer and discovering the internet…I didn’t sleep for two weeks, it was like the door to a magical whole new world had opened to me, and I couldn’t get enough. I also fell in love the first time I saw a flat screen television, but was too practical to buy one at $12K. The “hate” part comes having to figure out how to work/use the new stuff, and oftentimes getting frustrated while I’m doing this.

Hannah Mahalak: I would say I am pretty tech-savvy. I have a smart phone, so I tend to keep up with the latest and greatest trends and news updates.

Nisreen Salka: I believe that technology is an essential part of daily life; I use my iPhone, laptop, and camera every day to finish academic work, schedule appointments, coordinate extracurricular activities, and keep in touch with friends that I haven’t seen in a while.

Jasmine Hentschel: I am wonderfully overwhelmed by the incredible knowledge and power that technological advances of recent decades have afforded people all over the world.

UMS: Why did you decide to participate in this project?

Annette Smith: As someone relatively new to Twitter, I want to take my tweet game to the next level. Blending Twitter with my love of the arts seems like a natural step. I am intrigued by the prospect of being able to share my thoughts, reactions to the performance with others real-time. I’m also interested in how/if others respond. It may be crickets out there. We’ll see!

Hannah Mahalak: I am taking a class at Chelsea [High School] that is a mentorship course with UMS and getting a little taste of each department. I’m trying to get as much experience as I can in the music business and all that goes into it since that’s what I will be studying next year.

Nisreen Salka: Although I love technology as a whole, I have never jumped onto the social media bandwagon. I suppose I always thought it was some sort of fad, a waste of time, or a superficial way to gather information and/or keep in touch. It has recently dawned on me, however, that maybe social media has some merit, and I decided it was about time that I tried it. I want to see if it would really interfere with my life in a negative way, or actually improve my understanding of the world around me in the same way the rest of technology does. I would also like to see the impact it has on my understanding of the performance.

Jasmine Hentschel: I think UMS is an incredible organization that really brings a great deal of phenomenal art and culture to the vibrant city of Ann Arbor. Having worked as an intern for several years in the production department, I’ve been to dozens and dozens of UMS shows and I thought this would be an exciting new way to get involved. I am very curious to see how it feels to be engaged in the performance in a totally different way.

UMS: To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience?

Annette Smith: This is a tough one to put in words, but to me I think this means to be engaged in the artistic experience with my heart as well as my mind. When I’m “present”, I am 100% engaged. Every word/note/movement is heightened. Sometimes, I can actually feel the performance. To be honest, it’s easiest for me to “be present” at musical performances, where I close my eyes, and just focus on the sounds and how they make me feel. And when I finally feel that first frisson, I know I’m there.

Hannah Mahalak: To “Be Present” is a lot more than just sitting in the audience. I believe that you need to try and look for a deeper meaning to each story the performer is trying to convey. The more you invest into the performance the more you can get out of it.

Nisreen Salka: Being present in a performance means watching the performance attentively, understanding what is happening on stage, and connecting with the performers themselves.

Jasmine Hentschel: Being “present” is a matter of being engaged in a performance and giving it all of your consideration and attention, regardless of your preconceived notions and expectations of what it might be. It’s about not only noticing the little things, including all of the time and effort that gets put into every aspect of a performance, but also how it makes you feel before, during and after, and how you the art you’re watching ties into and relates to your personal experiences and those of all of mankind, whether it be theater, dance, music, or some other art form.

Meet the tweets.

How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance?

Annette Smith: I had to take my eyes off stage to tweet, so missed seeing a few things, but still felt like I heard everything. Tweet seat location – at back of the balcony – was not ideal. I could not really see facial expressions, costume details, etc. It’s a little tight and cramped having all of the tweeters (twitterers?) sitting side by side with the black boxes on our laps. Not unbearable, but there definitely wasn’t much space to move or stretch.

Hannah Mahalak: I really enjoyed the tweet seat experience. It made me pay attention to the play more and stay focused. It was a really unique and innovative way to get the word out about the performances and the UMS organization.

Nisreen Salka: Tweeting during the performance allowed me to express my opinions about the performance without speaking, and therefore without annoying others who were fully immersed in the play. It also encouraged me to think more about the purpose of the play, almost to critique it, rather than just follow the narrative. I was able to think more about the artistic merit of the performers, express those opinions to other interested viewers, and read their responses. Exposure to other viewers’ opinions also encouraged me to notice aspects of the performance that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Jasmine Hentschel: This was my first tweet seats experience, and it was definitely a little more difficult than I had expected. I think it would have been much different had it been a musical performance, because with music you can still hear and feel the music, even if you’re looking down at your phone. With Twelfth Night, I had difficulty getting adjusted to the language at first, and was completely unfamiliar with this particular play. I had a hard time trying to tweet during the performance at first because I had to completely stop paying attention and look down at my phone. It was a matter of removing myself from the very personal and introspective experience of watching, experiencing, and processing the play and changing my mindset to think about how to express my thoughts and opinions to a public audience. You have to not only carefully consider your thoughts, but also how to phrase them in a way that will make sense to other people. You have to use your brainpower to focus on minor things like spelling, grammar, and how to make your thoughts make sense that otherwise would never be crossing your mind during a performance.

Taylor Davis: I enjoyed that not only could I tweet my thoughts and experience, but through following the #umslobby hashtag I could communicate and interact by others.

Did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Annette Smith: I expected having to take my eyes off stage to tweet – no way around this. Since I was expecting this, it didn’t really bother me. The location of the seats was a surprise. To get the maximum visual experience of live theater, the back of the balcony is almost the last place you want to be. I didn’t expect the “tight” feeling from all of us sitting together. But we adjusted. After intermission, some of the tweet participants either exited or moved, freeing up space, and making it much more comfortable.

Nisreen Salka: I did expect to consider the performance more carefully, but I did not expect the strong effect of other viewers’ responses. At times, the tweets followed almost like a conversation, with questions and answers, and at others the tweets formed a list of comments. Both formats encouraged me to notice aspects of the performance I wouldn’t have otherwise, and to consider those elements when I tweeted again.

Hannah Mahalak: Yes, I expected to pay more attention to the play and get really involved in the play and each character.

Jasmine Hentschel: I definitely expected some sense of disconnect just considering the nature of the gig. However, like I said, I think I didn’t totally take into account the fact that doing this for a musical performance and a play is a totally different thing. It was a little harder than I anticipated, but I think it definitely would’ve been easier if I had been more familiar with the play ahead of time!

Taylor Davis: I was surprised by how much I really enjoyed interacting with others. At first, I was nervous that I didn’t really have anything that I considered “tweet worthy” and that my twitter followers would enjoy and interact with. However, as the performance progressed, I was able to see what other people were saying through following the #umslobby hashtag. Once I was able to read their tweets and see their interactions, I tailored my tweets to join in the conversation.

What I found the most surprising was that I had two friends text me that the next time I go to a UMS event they want to come with. I also had someone respond to my tweet asking where I was, which is kind of a cool grassroots and authentic way that UMS can further their marketing.

Curious to try it? Sign up.

Tweet Seats: Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán

For our second tweet seats event, we saw Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán in Hill Auditorium

Meet the participants. 

photo (1)

UMS: Tell us a little about you. If you have an online presence you like to share publicly, please tell us the relevant websites or user names/handles.

Matt Landry: I am a K-12 certified music teacher, a University of Michigan graduate, Detroit Symphony Orchestra intern, and saxophonist of the Akropolis Reed Quintet, a five-time national prize-winning classical music ensemble. I tweet from @akropolis5tet, and I help manage the ensemble’s website: www.akropolisquintet.com.

Jared Rawlings: I am a process-centered innovative teacher, and an emerging researcher. I tweet @Jared_Rawlings and my website is: www.jaredrawlings.com.

UMS: In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology?

Matt Landry: I have a love/hate relationship with technology, enjoying its contribution to bettering life while wondering if it is making humans less human.

Jared Rawlings: My relationship with technology is necessary in order to build my personal/professional learning network.

UMS: Why did you decide to participate in this project?

Matt Landry: I decided to participate in order to further deepen this relationship. I wonder if being engaged electronically in a live performance will enhance or detract from the beauty on stage.

Jared Rawlings: I am always looking for new ways to include professional development – on demand.

UMS: To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience?

Matt Landry: To be “present” at a performance one must consider what the event will be remembered as. One must comprehend the magnitude of the live performance, clear the mind to listen and/or view, and have a perspective of the event while it is occurring. Looking back on events and their personal significance is important, but doing so at the time of the performance, to me, is being “present.”

Jared Rawlings: Being present means it’s a way of capturing the “lived experience” of the concert goer.  Also, given the temporal nature of music, theatre, and dance the tweet seats project is a way of focusing in on this phenomenon that is exclusive to live arts in Ann Arbor.

Meet the tweets.


UMS: How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance; did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Matt Landry:

Jared Rawlings:

Curious about live tweeting during a performance? Sign up.

Tweet Seats: Gabriel Kahane

Welcome to winter’s first tweet seats event: Gabriel Kahane & yMusic on Janury 17 (they perform again on January 18!).

Meet the participants.

UMS: Tell us a little about you. If you have an online presence you like to share publically, please tell us the relevant websites or user names/handles.

Corey Smith: I am a junior at the University of Michigan majoring in Music Composition. I’m a composer, but also a poet and performance artist. I tweet @Corey_D_Smith and if I ever actually get around to it, I’m starting up a blog at coreysmithmusic.tumblr.com.

Hannah Weiner: I’m a junior studying English and Philosophy, an editorial intern for UMS, and I’m about to begin writing an Honors thesis on the relationship between poetry and hip-hop. I’ve written concert and album reviews for a couple publications on campus, most recently: arts.umich.edu/seen. I have a casual music blog where I post about new music: http://whateverneveramen.tumblr.com/

Cody Takacs: I am a recent graduate of the School of Music earning my BM in Double Bass Performance. I appear frequently as a soloist specializing in new music with performances ranging from the University of Michigan’s Collage Concert to Carnegie Hall. As an educator, I have been the double bass instructor for Skyline High School’s orchestra and chamber music coach for Michigan Bass Bash.

UMS: In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology?

Corey Smith: From the video games I played as a kid to the notation software I use to write music, technology has impacted almost every area of my life, for better or for worse. I’ve grown up with it and I am excited by it, thrilled at how it can expand communication, information, art, and the world.

Hannah Weiner: I don’t hate technology, but I have a more intimate relationship with people (and things) when technology is left out of the equation.

Cody Takacs: I use technology to build and maintain a strong musical network and also to share and express my musical ideas.

UMS: Why did you decide to participate in this project?

Corey Smith: I’m terribly interested in the capacity for social media to enhance an artistic experience and I’m particularly captured by the possibilities offered by Twitter. It’s brief, powerful, and (perhaps most importantly) exists in real time, allowing for a democratic and real dialogue to occur while the performance is happening. When I heard that UMS was opening up the tweet seats, I just knew I had to apply.

Hannah Weiner: In a weird way, broadcasting my immediate reactions might make me appreciate the performance more than I would if I didn’t have to think about what messages I was trying to send out. I’m curious how Twitter will affect my experience with live music.

Cody Takacs: As I mentioned in the second question, I like to use technology to share and express my musical thoughts and ideas. I feel that the Tweet Seats project would allow me a great opportunity to relay my thoughts and ideas to my musical network and even public at large.

UMS: To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience?

Corey Smith: Presence for me is pursuit of a state of higher awareness. It is complete and total engagement with the moment in hope that I forget about my body for a second, and become subsumed in the artistic present. It means physical, emotional, and intellectual engagement with the experience in the hope that I can touch the sublime.

Hannah Weiner: I think it’s pretty simple – being alert and attuned to the messages that the artist is trying to send you. Mostly just being aware of how a performance makes you feel, or what it makes you think, and then having a conversation with yourself (or others) about why and how the artist does that.

Cody Takacs: To be “present” at a performance to me means 1) that the listener is physically present and 2) that they are mentally experiencing the performance on one or a combination of any of Aaron Copland’s three planes of listening that find best suiting for their own listening experience (the sensual, expressive, and sheerly musical planes).

Meet the tweets.


UMS: How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance?

Corey Smith: There was a certain level of detached concentration that the tweet seats demanded. I was engaged with the music at a very cognitive level, always ready to find something else to notice and then tweet about. It certainly allowed me to stay alert and in a constant state of analysis, but perhaps didn’t let me become too emotionally engaged in the performance.

Cody Takacs: From a listening standpoint, I feel that tweeting didn’t really change the way I listened or payed attention during the performance. This is the type of performance I’d normally be intrigued with all the details of what’s happening in the music and on stage rather than simply being present at a performance, sitting back, and relaxing to it. If anything, sometimes I felt obligated to tweet, and tweeted for the sake of tweeting something. Overall, I did really enjoy the experience because I was able to share my thoughts on the performance immediately when I had them.

Hannah Weiner: Tweeting made me more self-conscious of my role as an audience member. I felt like I was constantly asking the question of “What should I be doing?”, so tweeting forced me to decide what parts of the concert I was going to acknowledge and focus on. Since the other two people in the tweet seats study music, I realized if I was going to broadcast any of my musical knowledge, it would pale in comparison to their analysis. I instead found myself enjoying what I knew about the concert – Kahane’s references to contemporary poets, his lyrics, etc.

UMS: Did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Cody Takacs: For the most part, this is how I expected my Tweet Seat experience to go. In general, Tweet Seats is a wonderful experience that I look forward to participating in in upcoming concerts!

Corey Smith: It was certainly surprising! But it’s worth noting that the performance was no less fantastic because I stayed in a particular head space. Tweeting forced me to stay engaged in a very analytic way, but there was so much to enjoy that the I really don’t think I lost very much at all! Although I was ready to be away from my phone for a while after the show…

Hannah Weiner: I had a feeling tweeting would make me analyze the concert more, but I didn’t expect it to make me think about my role as an audience member. Usually, I listen to the music passively and don’t think much about why it’s making me feel a certain way. I assumed tweeting would force me to take an active role, but I didn’t anticipate any step in between “passive member” and “active member.”

How do you feel about using technology during live performances?

Tweet with UMS


This fall, we kicked off our pilot tweet seats program. Our participants came from all walks of life and all kinds of attitudes towards technology.

This winter, we’re opening tweet seats up to you, our audience. Are you curious about live tweeting during a performance? Fill out the form below if you’re interested in tweeting with UMS at one or more of the following performances:

Thursday, January 17: Gabriel Kahane & yMusic. Find out what happened.
Sunday, January 27: Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán Find out what happened.
Wednesday, February 20: Propeller: Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Find out what happened.
Saturday, April 6: Esperanza Spalding
Saturday, April 20: Alison Balsom, trumpet & the Scottish Ensemble

As a reminder, tweet seats refer to seats in which tweeting is permitted during the performance. Only these tweet seats participants will be permitted to use devices in a special tweet seats section; for the rest of the audience, our standard device policy applies (“Turn off all cellphones and electronic devices”).

Tweet Seats 4: Gilberto Gil

The UMS Tweet Seats project continued at Gilberto Gil’s performance on November 16.

Interview with participants to come. For now, enjoy the tweets:

Tweet Seats 3: Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg

Editor’s note: This season, UMS is launching a new pilot project: tweet seats. Read the complete project description and pre-interviews with participants

For the third tweet seats event, we saw the Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg:

This week’s participants:

  • Paul Kitti, writer for iSPY magazine
  • Mariah Cherem, Production Librarian at Ann Arbor District Library
  • Mark Clague, U-M Associate Professor of Musicology and UMS Board member
  • University of Michigan social media intern Taylor Davis

Read the whole tweet seats conversation.

UMS: How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance? Did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Mariah Cherem: At first, I did feel awkward tweeting. I felt that it took me out of the moment a bit, and removed me one more step as observing my experience in a different way. As the performance went on, there were times when I felt completely comfortable tweeting, and other times when I frankly just wanted to let go of that way of thinking because I didn’t have much (more) to say.

UMS: If you’ve participated in prior tweet seats, how did tweeting at this performance compare to tweeting at Aspen Santa Fe Ballet or at Rhinocéros?

Paul Kitti: Tweeting the orchestral performance had less of an effect on my experience than it did during the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and Rhinocéros. It was less interruptive and I felt it didn’t take away from the experience, because I didn’t need to have my attention on the stage the whole time. It felt natural because I’m used to being on social media while listening to music.

Mark Clague: As I could hear the orchestra even while looking at my cell phone’s screen, I found tweeting the concert less disturbing than tweeting for the dance and theatre events I had experimented with previously. The sold-out audience for Mariinsky also provided an exciting atmosphere. There was more Twitter dialogue at the intermission and afterwards from friends and current students–maybe a result of the larger seating capacity of Hill Auditorium and this added to the fun for me. There was also a bit of debate about the concert and which piece was played most expertly. Several people I know who didn’t tweet were clearly following the feed and commented to me about it face-to-face encounters the next day. I did receive one disapproving Tweet response from a follower who objected to my picture of the orchestra (assembling and not taken during the performance) as a violation of decorum. The august traditions of great music in our concert halls may prove discouraging to new media. In some ways, tweeting orchestra concerts seems like the perfect entry point for social-media enabled conversations to start (since one does not have to “see” the stage constantly to experience the art fully), but on the other hand the formal nature of our classical concert rituals might make it difficult to sanction change. I wonder if Hill wouldn’t be the perfect location for an intermission tweet exchange in which all patrons were encouraged to discuss a performance during the interval and/or immediately after a performance. Because of the large seating capacity, there are likely dozens with active Twitter accounts who might want to sign on. The screens showing the stage in the lobby could instead post the twitter feed to share the discussion more broadly.

UMS: How did you feel about tweeting in Hill Auditorium?

Paul Kitti: Because I was tweeting in Hill Auditorium, I was seated in the very back row of the balcony. The place is beautiful and I got to take it all in from this perspective. I felt a considerable distance from the performance, however, and – added to the fact that I was tweeting and relaying information to the outside world – it kind of put me in suspension rather than feeling connected to the music.

Mariah Cherem: Hill is a gorgeous venue – from both a visual and auditory standpoint. It was great to be able to hear so well even in the very back corner row. I wish that I had been able to take my phone out of the box to capture more of the visuals. I should have captured some visual detail/close-ups for twitter/instagram during intermission, but frankly I was too focused on getting in a quick break!

Stay tuned for the next tweet seats event: Gilberto Gil on Saturday, November 16.

How do you feel about using technology during live arts experiences?

Getting ready to tweet at Mariinsky Orchestra performance

Our distinguished panel of tweet seats participants getting ready to tweet at the Mariinsky Orchestra performance last weekend. Learn about our tweet seats project.

Tweet Seats 2: Théâtre de la Ville: Ionesco’s Rhinocéros

Editor’s note: This season, UMS is launching a new pilot project: tweet seats. Read the complete project description and pre-interviews with participants here.

For the second tweet seats event, we saw Théâtre de la Ville: Ionesco’s Rhinocéros:

This week’s participants:

  • Paul Kitti, writer for iSPY magazine
  • Greg Baise, Detroit-based concert promoter, arts writer, and DJ
  • Leslie Stainton, U-M School of Public Health Findings magazine editor and umslobby.org contributor
  • Mark Clague, U-M Associate Professor of Musicology and UMS Board member
  • University of Michigan social media intern Mollye Rogel
  • Michael Kondziolka, UMS director of programming, scheduled to tweet at this event, was not able to participate. See his note about why below.

Read the whole tweet seats conversation here.

UMS: So, how did tweeting affect your experience of this performance?

Paul Kitti:  For this particular performance, tweeting was most often on the back burner for me. It was impossible to tweet without missing something, as the performance was in French with surtitles (and I only know about three words in French…) The outcome, which I expected, was that I enjoyed the play as well as the twitter conversation, but the dialogue I missed in the process left some holes in the experience.

Greg Baise: I found myself thinking of tweets, but waiting for lulls to post them. Some tweets got away because I was deep into the play. Initially I was concerned that my tweeting activity would be a distraction to others. It turns out it was more of a distraction to myself!

Mark Clague: I was surprised by the conversational quality of tweeting Rhinoceros. Since we were reacting to a provocative narrative characterized by inference, juxtaposition, and an epic sense of language that seemed immediately referential and symbolic, many of the tweets searched for meaning. I paid attention to the hashtag and responded to several of the other tweet experimenters, but also to a couple of friends who either attended or just reacted to my observations. One such interchange led to a couple rounds of comments and ultimately intractable disagreement in interpretation. I found myself musing on the disagreement for days afterward and discussing the show face-to-face with another friend to clarify my own understanding. I didn’t change my mind and still prefer a more open interpretation connected to contemporary events, but my commitment to that understanding is richer and deeper for the tweets. Another thing I liked is that a question occurred to me the next day and I could tweet @UMSNews to get my question answered — YES, the set was transported from Paris to Ann Arbor. Finally, I attended the play a second time the next night and did not tweet. My experience was different — I became aware of how many people were speaking French in the audience. I don’t speak French, but gradually improved my understanding of the actors as the play progressed. Also, I sat in row 8 or so close to the stage, rather than tweeting from the back of the balcony. The emotional intensity of the play was much higher sitting so much closer. I was engaged both nights: the first felt a bit more intellectual (tweeting the show in this situation felt like taking notes at an exciting lecture) while the second was more raw and emotional. I’m guessing that my experience on night #2 was richer for having “researched” the play the evening before.

Leslie Stainton: If anything, this second experience of tweeting only confirmed my earlier antipathy to the form (if that’s the right word). It probably didn’t help that I saw the show near the end of the work week and after a glass of wine, so the dim lights and French dialogue and stratospheric tweet seats combined to send me into a bit of a nap. I felt oddly detached from the performance, and I suspect part of that had to do with the isolation I now associate with tweeting live theater. You’re apart from the crowd, with your little black box and too-bright phone. The production itself was gorgeous, provocative, beautifully acted, deeply meaningful. Some of this came together for me at the end, when I really did wake up with a “pow” and suddenly wished I could see it again, without the filter of tweets, and certainly from a better seat than the ones we had. (Didn’t bother me nearly so much with Aspen-Santa Fe, but this production needed to be seen up close, I think.) What “stuck” from the experience is my realization that I don’t want to tweet again–as I said to someone on my way out, I’d prefer to keep my brain farts to myself next time. But thanks for the experiment, and thanks to UMS, as always, for going about this so intelligently and carefully. And thanks for making it possible for those who DO get something out of this medium to keep at it.

Michael Kondziolka: I bailed on my commitment to be a tweet seater last night.  Not because I didn’t want to try it out, but because if became clear that the General Manager of Théâtre de la Ville and the US tour producer of Rhinocéros wanted to sit with me at the opening night performance. I didn’t want to run the risk of offending anyone by creating a moment of “cultural misunderstanding.” After the show, I mentioned this to them both and they were, not surprisingly, first a little put off by the whole notion of tweet seats and, after more conversation, intrigued. I shared the tweet stream with them…and they seemed to like it. Interestingly, there seems to be very little commitment or conversation at the moment in Paris around the role of social media in connecting with audiences OR in building or attracting new audiences.  At least this seems to be the case at TdlV. The GM of TdlV wanted as much information on the topic as I could give him…clearly he knows that he needs to look at these issues very seriously. Imagining what the experience of tweeting during last night’s performance would have been like gives me a rash. The complexity of the show…the layers of meaning and metaphor embedded in the text….how that meaning is delivered through the force of the acting and physical performance…PLUS the reading of super-titles (my French is only so-so)…was a lot to take in and make sense of from time to time. The idea of another layer — the processing of my thoughts and experiences and transmitting them in real time on a little illuminated keypad with my thumbs in real time — might have sent me around the bend. But I am still willing to try at an upcoming show!!

UMS: What do you think makes for a performance “sticky” (the performance “sticks” in your memory months or years later)? Do you think live tweeting a performance make it more or less likely to be “sticky”?

Molly Roegel: The quality of a performance in terms of acting, directing, music and set design, makes it “sticky” for viewers, as well as the relevance to them and how much they can personally understand. Live tweeting made this performance far less sticky to me as I could not pay attention to the subtitles, Instagram, Twitter, and the actual performance in any sort of way that would have allowed me to get the full experience of the play. I greatly enjoyed live tweeting but it was definitely not conducive to gaining the full scope of the play.

Mark Clague: Tweeting Rhinoceros has certainly made the experience more memorable or “sticky” for me. Four days later I can remember specific lines of dialogue and the emotion of the play remains vivid. I’ve had several conversations about the play with friends inspired by my twitter exchanges and reviewed my tweets archived on Twitter.com to review the performance, which reminded me of several personal responses that had begun to fade. Tweeting the show is definitely a source of distraction — I’m watching my cell phone screen at times rather than the stage. However, it’s not like I avoided all distraction the next night when I wasn’t tweeting on assignment. For the most part, I found that tweeting enhanced my attention and put me in a mindset to parse and understand the show. If the purpose of art is to get us to think and to think in unexpected ways, Twitter seems (for me at least) to serve this goal.  If tweeting an art experience were to become more routine and typical, I wonder if some sort of compromise that takes the best of both my night 1 & 2 experience would be possible. One could tweet intermittently and engage with a broader conversation as the show inspired it. The brevity of Twitter leads to an immediacy and directness that might balance emotional reaction with analytical understanding.

Stay tuned for the next tweet seats event: Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg on Saturday, October 27.

How do you feel about using technology during live arts experiences?

Tweet Seats 1: Aspen Santa Fe Ballet

Editor’s note: This season, UMS is launching a new pilot project: an experiment at the cross-section of live performing arts and technology commonly known as “tweet seats.” Read the complete project description and pre-interviews with participants here.

For the first tweet seats event, we saw Aspen Santa Fe Ballet:

This week’s  participants:

  • Leslie Stainton, U-M School of Public Health Findings magazine editor and umslobby.org contributor
  • Paul Kitti, writer for iSPY magazine
  • Mark Clague, U-M Associate Professor of Musicology and UMS Board member
  • University of Michigan Director of Social Media Jordan Miller

Read the whole tweet seats conversation here.

UMS: How did tweeting affect your experience of the performance?

Paul Kitti: Tweeting about the performance to people I knew weren’t in attendance made me more conscious about not only how I was perceiving the experience, but how others might. I also feel if I hadn’t been actively thinking about things to say about what I was seeing, I would have viewed it more passively – almost as if in a trance. I think it was a good thing to be viewing the performance analytically, but at the same time, it somewhat took away from the dreamy, ethereal effect of the ballet.

Mark Clague:  I was looking forward to the performance with added anticipation knowing that I’d be participating in the Tweet Seats experiment. For me, the result was positive in that it focused my attention into distilling my experience into pithy statements that could be shared via Twitter. There certainly were times when I had to check out from watching the dance to attend to writing a tweet, although as it turned out, I think tweeting could easily have been limited to the breaks between dances. I did feel a bit uncomfortable tweeting, knowing that I was “breaking the rules” of typical concert behavior and that the glow of my smart phone’s screen on my face might distract others. This distraction factor would seem to be maximized in theatrical presentations and dance where the audience is in complete darkness and the stage is lit with colored lighting and other effects that are vital to the aesthetic of the performance. Dance / theater must be watched so it prompts the question of whether an instrumental concert might be more hospitable for tweeting as one can hear and look at a handheld device at the same time, plus audience lighting is low but not black for say an orchestral concert which would make screen glow less remarkable.

Leslie Stainton: I think I felt a bit the way I did in third grade, passing notes back and forth during class and hoping I didn’t get caught, meanwhile missing most of what the teacher was trying to teach. I’m afraid the experience has not changed my (admittedly biased) opinion that tweeting–and much of social media, for that matter–is a largely superficial, narcissistic activity beloved by people with a tendency toward ADD. I didn’t mind tweeting during intermission, but when I did it during the performance I completely missed what was happening onstage and disrupted any sort of narrative continuity. I found myself thinking more about how clever I could be tweeting than about what the pieces were trying to say to me. It kept me from delving more fully into the experience. I was “present,” yes, but mostly to myself and the small gaggle of people who were tweeting and following tweets. In retrospect, I think I got the lesser end of the deal.

Do we really need to “perform” as we watch performances? And what about those audience members who were spending their time tracking tweets rather than engaging fully with what was happening onstage? And what about the poor performers–going through their extraordinary paces to a distracted audience?

Jordan Miller: I think that the tweeting greatly enhanced my experience. I was able to share my thoughts with a whole variety of people, and to hear what they had to say. There were some people tweeting with a much greater knowledge of dance than I have, and that helped me appreciate aspects I wouldn’t have even thought about.

UMS: Did you expect this effect or are you surprised by this outcome?

Paul Kitti: I really didn’t know what to expect, but I wouldn’t say I was surprised. The ongoing tweet conversation made it feel more like a community experience, which I thought was cool.

Mark Clague: One surprise to me was that our tweeting didn’t really amount to a conversation. I think this was because we were sitting together at the back of the hall and thus our dialogue happened by turning to each other in response to a tweet rather than using twitter. Several times one person would turn to another at an intermission break to say “nice tweet,” or to discuss a topic that might have been too sensitive to post to the world — for example, the sexual overtones of the opening dance. In this sense, tweets did create a conversation and introduced me to new people, but tweets served as conversation starters for a face-to-face dialogue rather than the conversation itself. I can imagine a twitter section doing something similar in that those who choose to sit there are making a statement that they are engaged in the performance to search for things to share and discuss. Therefore, one doesn’t feel awkward in turning to a neighbor during the show to find out their twitter ID name and to ask a face-to-face followup based on some observation. I’d love to experience a performance in which several dozens of tweeters were engaged as I wonder how the momentum of the electronic conversation might be different. I made new friends at the Santa Fe performance via Tweeting and what surprises me is that I’d recognize them today if they sat next to me on a campus bus. Rather than substituting for person-to-person engagement with virtual friends, my twitter seat experience created real world connections.

Leslie Stainton: I’m not convinced the activity of tweeting enriched my experience of the concert in any way. I’ll try it again Thursday (though can’t promise how actively I’ll tweet during a show, in French, that has no intermission!). It certainly doesn’t seem to be the same sort of reflective activity as, say, blogging, or writing up a comment for the Lobby. Maybe I’ll change my mind? Doubt it!

Jordan Miller: I hadn’t expected the conversation to be so robust. Not only were the official “tweeters” engaging, but there were other audience members tweeting during intermission and before and after the performance as well, and that was very cool. In fact, I was able to meet up with a student who was at the show and talked to her afterward.

Stay tuned for the next tweet seats event: Théâtre de la Ville’s Ionesco’s Rhinocéros on Thursday, October 11.

Presenting: UMS Tweet Seats Pilot Project

TWEET SEATS EVENTS

Tweet Seats 1: Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. Find out what happened.
Tweet Seats 2: Théâtre de la Ville: Ionesco’s Rhinocéros. Find out what happened.
Tweet Seats 3: Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg. Find out what happened.
Tweet Seats 4: Find out what happened.

WHAT ARE TWEET SEATS?

This season, UMS is launching a new pilot project: an experiment at the cross-section of live performing arts and technology commonly known as “tweet seats.”

Tweet seats refer to seats in which tweeting is permitted during the performance.

UMS has invited 5-7 people to participate in our tweet seats pilot project at 4 select performances.  Only these 5-7 tweet seats participants will be permitted to use devices to participate in this pilot project; for the rest of the audience, our standard device policy applies (“Turn off all cellphones and electronic devices”).

The tweet seats participants will silence their phones and dim back-light to lowest setting; we’ve also prepared individual phone containers which will almost completely minimize any light emitted from the devices so that the experience of other patrons is not affected by tweet seats. Ensuring a smooth performance experience for all is our top priority.

At each of the 4 designated performances, participants are required to tweet 3-5 times using the hashtag #umslobby. No specific instructions for content of tweets are given. We’ll follow up with participants after the performance and chat with them about their experience; interviews will appear here on UMS Lobby.

You can follow or join the conversation after the performance here.

WHY TWEET SEATS?
Studies show that for some, engaging with technology is the preferred method of processing a performance and of “being present” at a performance.

In one such study, (“Making Sense of Audience Engagement”) Alan Brown & Rebecca Ratzkin refer to this subset of audiences as “technology-based processors.” They “love all forms of online engagement, and appear to be growing in number, especially among younger audience segments. Technology-based processors search for information online before and after the event. They connect with others on Facebook and other social media, and are most likely to read and contribute to blogs and discussion forums on the arts organization’s website. Their motivations are both intellectual and social in nature.”

So, we thought, let’s get together a group of people with differing attitudes towards technology to learn more about the effects of using technology during a live performance experience for all.

Our question: what can experimenting with technology teach us about being “engaged” or “present” at a performance?

OUR PARTICIPANTS:
We’ve pre-interviewed some of our participants so that you can get to know the range of attitudes that are part of the project. We asked them questions like:

  • In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology?
  • What kinds of arts experiences do you like or look forward to most?
  • To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience?
  • What are you looking forward to in this experiment of experiencing performing arts with technology? What questions, concerns, reservations, or anxieties do you have about this experiment?

Learn more about them & their thoughts about technology and this pilot project below :

  • Leslie Stainton, U-M School of Public Health Findings magazine editor and umslobby.org contributor
  • Michael Kondziolka, UMS Director of Programming
  • Mariah Cherem, Production Librarian at Ann Arbor District Library
  • Paul Kitti, writer for iSPY magazine
  • Mark Clague, U-M Associate Professor of Musicology and UMS Board member
  • Greg Baise, Detroit-based concert promoter, arts writer, and DJ
  • Garrett Schumann, composer, U-M Master of Music in Composition student, and umslobby.org contributor
  • Neutral Zone and the University of Michigan participants

INTERVIEWS
UMS : Tell us about you. If you have an online presence you like to share publicly  please tell us the relevant websites or user names/handles.

Leslie Stainton: I’m an editor at the UM School of Public Health and the author of a biography of Spanish playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca and a history/memoir of an American theater. My website is lesliestainton.com.

Greg Baise: I am Detroit-based concert promoter, arts writer, and occasional DJ. Some of my playlists can be found at vivaradio.com/lavie

Paul Kitti: I am a writer for iSPY Magazine, a monthly entertainment publication. I’ve spent the past two years covering a wide range of local events, including concerts, festivals, and screenings. Music and writing consume most of my brainpower, and I’ve found Ann Arbor to be an ideal environment for discovering new artists. In addition to journalism, I’ve held positions within U of M’s Athletic Department and Career Center. Magazine: http://mispymag.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=91711849&trk=tab_pro

Mark Clague: I’m an Associate Professor of Musicology, American Culture, African American Studies, and Non-Profit Management (whew!) at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance as well as a member of the UMS board. I tweet as @usmusicscholar and have a couple of WordPress blogs, including one on the bicentennial of the U.S. National Anthem (osaycanyouhear).

Michael Kondziolka: My name is Michael Kondziolka and I am the Director of Programming at UMS. My online presence is limited to Facebook and a couple of blogs that I regularly comment on.

Mariah Cherem: My love of music started with singing as a toddler, and has followed me through years of violin, various bands, and the occasional DJ set. My interest in how communities articulate their values through policy led me to EMU’s Arts Management MA program. A few years later, curiosity about online communities and the interplay between on and off-line behavior led me to UM’s School of Information. I now count myself extraordinarily lucky to be bringing all of these interests together in my work as a Production Librarian at AADL.

Garrett Schumann: I am a composer pursuing my doctorate in Music Composition at the University. In addition to writing music, I host a music show on Washington Public Radio called We Are Not Beethoven where the ever-changing place music holds in the 21st-Century world is discussed. Learn more at garrettschumann.com and follow me on twitter @garrt.

UMS: In one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with technology? OK, you can elaborate beyond this first “thesis” sentence if you would like.

Greg Baise: If a new record comes on vinyl with a digital download, I always opt for the vinyl over the cd. If the vinyl doesn’t come with a digital download, I buy the vinyl anyways.

Leslie Stainton: Troubled! I’m dependent on it, like everyone, and annoyed by it. I want it to do what I need it to do, and that’s it—I’m not a gadget person, don’t like games, don’t find technology interesting for its own sake. While I see the utility of social media, it strikes me as a giant time suck, and so I seldom engage—though I do enjoy blogging for UMS. I enjoy the way it makes me think more deeply about what I’ve seen onstage. I’ve done some tweeting and Facebook posting for the School of Public Health, but not enough to feel confident or particularly comfortable in either area.

Mariah Cherem: Technology can be fun and fascinating and super-mind-blowingly-cool, but I’m most interested in how people use it to connect to each other, to information/resources that they need, and to things that they’re passionate about. Also, I think our definitions of what constitutes “technology” are constantly shifting. A pen or a typewriter doesn’t seem like technology now, but there was once a point when it did.

Michael Kondziolka: I have an enigmatic relationship with technology.  I tend to be a late adopter….and, while I accept that technology is here to stay, I sometimes bemoan its impact on our culture.  In my view, the irony of “connectivity” embedded in much of mythology/ideology of social media is one of the great farces of our time:  users seem decidedly less connected.  (This is in no way an insightful observation as much has been written on the topic.)  This fundamental concern aside, I can be a fanatical user of technology from time to time and I don’t think I could give up my iPhone at this point.  I have social media sites that I use on a semi-regular basis.  At the end of the day, I have a very healthy skepticism and think it is important to push back on assumptions in all sectors of life.

Garrett Schumann: I believe the Internet Web-based media have created a new and unprecedented aesthetic experience in the 21st Century, and it is imperative for those involved in the performing arts and other parts of culture to interact with and embrace those technologies if their work is to remain relevant to society at large.

Paul Kitti: I’m an email addict, avid texter and internet junkie with a loyalty to Apple products. Despite growing fully accustomed to the constant technological buzz of my generation, I still prefer hard copies of books and magazines.

Mark Clague: I enjoy exploring technology for new views on our world and to grow my own creativity, skills, and perspectives.

UMS: This pilot includes a broad range of performing arts experiences: theater, dance, global music, orchestral performance. What sorts of performing arts experiences are you most familiar with? More broadly, what kinds of arts experiences do you like or look forward to most? What do you wish to have more experience with?

Leslie Stainton: I did my BA in drama and my MFA in dramaturgy, so I’m passionate about live theater and know a fair amount about it, or at least once did. I’ve studied dance off and on and am interested in the form, though don’t know as much about it as I probably should. Ditto music: I’m married to a musicologist, and we attend many concerts and talk about music and listen to it at home. But I’ve never taken a theory course so don’t understand it in the kind of depth I’d like. I’m far more drawn to classical music than to popular forms, jazz, country, or so-called global music. I adore museums—think of them as spiritual centers and seek them out almost every time I travel—and spent six years working for UMMA. I’m interested in arts experiences that provoke and challenge, that cross traditional genres and boundaries, that make me think more profoundly.

Mariah Cherem: I am most interested in (and luckily can attend) the orchestral performance and the performance by Gilberto Gil.  In general, at some point I’d love to do UMS “Night School” related to a dance performance, as that’s an area I feel that might help my enjoyment even more.

Greg Baise: In music, I’m mostly familiar with rock, world music, contemporary classical music and modern dance. I’m very interested in art history in general, and modern art in particular, especially stuff that’s too current for the latest art history surveys. I’d love to get deeper into experimental theater and more modern dance.

Paul Kitti: I’ve played a couple instruments and attended several classical concerts. The most memorable performance I’ve witnessed was “Einstein on the Beach” as presented by UMS earlier this year. My knowledge about theatre and dance is limited, although I’ve grown more and more interested in these types of productions over the past year. The art-related experiences I look forward to most are the ones involving music and/or acting.

Garrett Schumann: Because I am a composer I am most familiar with music and musical performances. However, I love all kinds of performing arts and cultural experiences from dance shows to theatrical performances and, particularly, contemporary arts exhibits.

Michael Kondziolka: Relatively speaking, I have a lot of experience with most forms of the performing arts and a passing familiarity with the others.  I am least familiar with some forms of contemporary popular music and culture.  I look forward to a broad range of experiences from the very traditional to the very experimental.

Mark Clague: My primary arts experience is as an orchestral musicians (bassoonist), but I also masquerade as a photographer, saxophonist, and singer. Inspired by John Cage, I like to challenge myself to explore new kinds of art and to open myself up to new ideas and experiences. Thus I’ve increasingly attended UMS dance, theater, and world music events to stretch beyond my orchestra and jazz comfort zone.

UMS: Why did you decide to participate in this project? 

Michael Kondziolka: As a way of testing my own, sometimes staunch, assumptions.

Greg Baise: UMS’s programming plays a huge part in my cultural activities. HUGE. I’m still astounded that within the past year I’ve seen the Gate Theatre, Einstein on the Beach, and Jessye Norman perform John Cage, all thanks to UMS. I hope I can contribute through these tweet seats and raise awareness of UMS’s presence and programming. And I’m honored to be asked to participate.

Mariah Cherem: In general, I think very highly of UMS’s programming. I’m not often able to attend that many performances, however, due to time and budget constraints. I’ve been interested in how various technologies can help or hinder enjoyment or engagement in experiences (in this case, it’d be performances). I’m not sure that I think that Tweeting about performances is really quite right for me, but I’m willing to give it a shot and try it in the name of experimentation. This idea pushes me a little bit out of my comfort zone of “things I tweet about” or talk about online, and I think that nudging around one’s boundaries now and then is important.

Garrett Schumann: I use twitter a lot in my life both for fun and for professional purposes, so I feel like I am experienced enough with the technology to contribute a meaningful opinion to this project’s discussion. Also, I think the tweet-seat question is emblematic of performing arts organizations’ struggle to maintain relevance in the 21st-century.

Paul Kitti: I appreciate what UMS brings to Ann Arbor, and I’ve immensely enjoyed my past experiences with their productions. Honestly, the opportunity to witness and participate in these events is something I knew I couldn’t pass up.

Mark Clague: I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Tweet Seats and enjoyed the few times I’ve surreptitiously tweeted at an arts event and thus wanted to try it out for myself when it was “legal.”

Leslie Stainton: Because I’m addicted to working with UMS?!

UMS: To you, what does it mean to “be present” during a performance or another arts experience? 

Garrett Schumann: Obviously, attending an event is step one to ‘being present’, but I think the phrase involves incorporating the experience you’ve had at a concert/performance into your life at large. By this, I mean talking to people you know about what you’ve seen/heard, breaking down your experience in conversations and sharing it with others either online or in person.

Greg Baise: Hmm. Present? Paying attention. Learning. Enjoying. Not distracted. Taking it in in the present, and remembering it for later, too.

Paul Kitti: Art requires the beholder to suspend all preconceptions and unrelated thoughts; to be present during an arts experience is to lend your mind as best as you are able to what is before you, constantly trying to identify the message, meaning, uniqueness or beauty of what you’re seeing and hearing.

Leslie Stainton: To shut out the workaday world and become utterly absorbed in the experience at hand; to come away with some new understanding.

Mariah Cherem: The ideas of presence and focus are those that I struggle with most when thinking about how this experience might go. For me, I often don’t want to be the lens – don’t want to be capturing pieces of something, as then I become detached. Even at rock shows, I get a little annoyed when the guy in the front feels the need to film everything instead of just getting into it and being “in the moment.”  However, at the same time, I think that there may be potential for people to raise awareness of their experience of a particular musician, play, etc. via social media channels. I don’t want the arts to get lost in our larger conversations because we “shouldn’t” be talking about them in some way or another – using some tech or another.

Mark Clague: It’s more than just physically attending; To be present is to connect with the art and engage with it, allowing the motivations, messages, and even the spiritual dimension of the art to converse with you. For me Twitter is one way to honor that conversation by translating my nebulous experience into 140-character thoughts, documenting and sharing these, and potentially chatting with others about these reactions.

Michael Kondziolka: This, for me, is the nub of the issue.  I do not tend to believe that a mediating device can truly help in this regard.  Of course, there are tools that can help mediate the experience and enhance it — infra-red listening devices, subtitles, etc.  But, at the end of the day, those are mediating tools which are necessary to aid the user in accessing some aspect of the presentation that they otherwise could not.  Critique, the intellectual processing and analysis of what has happened, starts during the performance but is codified through words after the performance.  (“How can I put this experience into words….?”)  Even a non-critique, a purely emotion-based exclamation – “I loved that!” — to be tweeted, takes one out of the experience.  I have yet to understand what/why/how the dimension of time plays into all this.  I can’t wrap my head around why something tweeted in real time — at the moment it is felt or realized during a performance — is more valuable than something tweeted during a natural break in a performance — at intermission or after the show.  (“Wow…impressive return to the tonic key!”)  That is how we have always tended to process our collective experiences pre-technology…and I don’t understand why we frame the real-time possibilities offered by tweeting to be somehow better…or an improvement.  (It may be, as umsLobby’s Musiclover would call it, a “disimprovement.”)  I view the communication that takes place between a performer and an audience member — whether it be lyric, declaimed or movement based – to be sacred.  Therefore, anything that breaks that bond is anathema to the notion of being “being present.”  I also subscribe to basic norms, rightly or wrongly, of what I was taught to believe are civil manners — if someone is speaking (or performing) they deserve your full attention.

When I really drill down on this topic, I realize that I actually believe that the use of technology in new and possibly intrusive ways — in this instance, as part of the performance experience — is most probably an ideological metaphor of independence:  a classic moment of generational division..  (“Look Ma, we have our own ways of doing things.”)  And that ideological position probably exists outside the forum that is being created to address this question.

UMS: What are you looking forward to in this experiment of merging performing arts with technology? What anxieties, concerns, reservations, or questions do you have about this experiment?

Paul Kitti: I’m looking forward to simply experiencing these productions, and the chance to offer input and be engaged through technology is kind of an added bonus.

Greg Baise: I’m looking forward to new cultural experiences, and sharing my impressions and observations. And also getting feedback – I hope I say stuff that’s of interest to both my friends and to total strangers. I might be a little reserved about thinking about (or over-thinking) what I tweet, maybe to a point where I’m concentrating more on the tweet than the performance. Also, I’m concerned about interfering with the enjoyment of others through use of technology and wonder how isolated we will be from the general audience.

Michael Kondziolka: I am looking forward to the basic act of testing one’s strongly held views.  I am most concerned about breaking the scared bond and I take solace in the fact that I can go again and have the same experience in a completely unmediated, truly present, way on a subsequent evening.  Anxiety would come in the form of worrying that, through my actions, I am interfering in someone else’s sacred moment.

Leslie Stainton: I’m honestly not sure about my ability to tweet—haven’t quite gotten the hang of 140 characters and don’t really understand hashtags. I’m also frankly worried about the ADD element of all this—trying to multitask while watching a performance. I’m not at all sure I’ll enjoy the experience or want to repeat it, but I’m sufficiently curious I’m willing to try it once.

Mariah Cherem: I think that my answers to the two questions above actually already hit on these points! : )

Garrett Schumann: I’m most interested in the arguments against allowing twitter into the concert hall. Because I am unabashedly in favor of the ‘tweet seat’ idea, my bias tends to inhibit my ability to relate to the dissent that is out there, and I look forward to an opportunity to learn more about viewpoints that oppose mine.

Mark Clague: I’m looking forward to the real-time conversation with other Tweet-seaters; my only worry is in getting criticism from other patrons who either think we’re doing something wrong or who just personally object to social media in an arts event.

Stay tuned for more interviews with our participants about their experiences over the course of the pilot project.

 

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