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Innovations in Audience Engagement in Virtual Performance

Event Date: 04.01.2021

Time: 2-3:30pm

Part of Mass Cultural Council’s Recover, Rebuild, Renew Series

Creating & Marketing Programming that Rises Above the Fray. Learning, Testing & Understanding Audience Behavior in the Cloud. The Artist’s Perspective: What Artists Need & New Opportunities for Connection. Innovations & Approaches to Building, Engaging, & Retaining Audiences in the Virtual Space. Models & Examples of Powerful, Meaningful Audience Engagement During COVID-19

This will be a 90-minute webinar. Using BroadBand’s ​All Together Now​ streaming show, created in April 2020 to bring artists and audiences together during the pandemic, as a core case study, this webinar will be a mix of presentation, stories, data, and discussion, with ppt slides to support concepts, examples and sharing from the group, and sharing of videos from a range of virtual performance and audience experiences happening across the country during this time of crisis.

Outcomes: At the end of this session, participants will be able to shape and implement new strategies for ​building and maintaining an audience virtually, be able to identify key questions and approaches to help ​shape audience engagement and audience experience​ experiments for virtual performance, understand and be able to ​test new audience engagement tools​ ​and platforms ​for virtual performance, have new frameworks for ​engaging artists​ in adaptive and innovative audience engagement activities, be able to articulate and distinguish between ​programming​ using virtual platforms for dissemination, and programming and audience experiences created specifically for the virtual space, and emerge with ​a new network ​of colleagues with whom to continue this conversation, learn from, and support, strengthening the sector.

Firm: BroadBand Collaborative, Arlington, MA

Content Experts: Cristin Canterbury Bagnall, Sara Stackhouse, and Bobbie Steinbach

Cristin Canterbury Bagnall, ​Founder & Principal, is an independent producer whose credits include Osvaldo Golijov’s ​Falling Out of Time,​ a song cycle commissioned by Silkroad (executive producer), Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammy-winning ​Songs of Joy & Peace​ (executive producer), and Morgan Neville’s documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble​, one of the top-grossing documentaries of 2016 (co-executive producer). Previously, Cristin spent nineteen years working with Yo-Yo Ma, serving in capacities such as General Manager and Director of Strategic Planning. Cristin was the founding Treasurer of Silkroad (then called the Silk Road Project), served for eight years as a board member and for two years as the director of artistic and learning programs. Cristin is also a strategic consultant to cultural institutions, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and MusiCorps, a conservatory-level music rehabilitation program working at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to help severely wounded warriors play music and recover their lives. She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, Massachusetts, where she is the co-chair of the Arlington Commission for Arts & Culture.

Sara Stackhouse, ​Founder & Principal of BroadBand, is a producer and specialist in organizational development and strategy. Clients have included The Steve Fund, Arlekin Players Theater, Children’s Hope India, Boston Baroque Orchestra, Mass Cultural Council, Silkroad, Arts Boston, Swanee Hunt Alternatives, ArtWorks SA, and the Acera School. She was the founding Executive Producer/CEO of Actors’ Shakespeare Project for 11 years, and then served as Chair of Theater at Boston Conservatory during the merger with Berklee College of Music. On sabbatical in 2011, Stackhouse spent a year with her family in Cape Town working with The Sibongile Care Centre for disabled children. In 2016, she founded The Mama Project, a cross-cultural artistic project with women from Boston and township communities in Cape Town. Previously, Stackhouse was supervising producer of Inside ​This Old House for the A&E television network. She served as project manager for cellist Yo-Yo Ma for six years, managing projects and overseeing collaborations with artists such as Mark O’Connor, Bobby McFerrin, Mark Morris, Toni Morrison, Torvill and Dean, Atom Egoyan, and others. Stackhouse was associate producer on eight films, including the ​Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach ​series, which received numerous international awards. She was the first director of education for NPR’s ​From the Top, ​designing curriculum, training teachers, and creating the ​Make Your Own Radio p​ rogram and ​Cultural Ambassador program, served as a consultant to the Berkshire Institute for Theology and the Arts for over a decade, produced ​A Taste of Chanukah f​ or PBS, PRI, and Rounder Records, and was an executive producer of the MIT Media Lab’s ​Toy Symphony. S​ he is the immediate past chair and a current board member of MASSCreative, Massachusetts’ arts advocacy organization. Sara lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.

Bobbie Steinbach​, ​Host, All Together Now, an actor, director, cabaret performer and acting coach, is a longtime member of Boston’s theatre community. She is a Founding Member of Actors’ Shakespeare Project and a Resident Actor with the company; So far, she has performed in 20 plays in the Bard’s canon. She has also worked at Huntington Theatre Company​, ​New Repertory Theatre, Lyric Stage Company, Greater Boston Stage Company, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Merrimack Repertory Theatre and Speakeasy Stage Company. Bobbie is the recipient of The Elliot Norton Outstanding Actress award and several Independent Reviewers of New England Best Actress awards. In 2016 The Theatre Communications Guild honored Bobbie with a prestigious two-year Fox Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement, for which she partnered with Actors’ Shakespeare Project, and developed a company project, ​I Am Lear​, and a solo show, ​In Bed With the Bard​. She is also the 2016 Huntington Theatre Company’s Lunt-Fontanne Fellow. Bobbie is an acting coach working mainly with high school students, preparing them for their college theatre auditions.

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Add to Calendar 04/01/2021 02:00 PM 04/01/2021 02:00 PM America/New_York Innovations in Audience Engagement in Virtual Performance Time: 2-3:30pm Part of Mass Cultural Council’s Recover, Rebuild, Renew Series Creating & Marketing Programming that Rises Above the Fray. Learning, Testing & Understanding Audience Behavior in the Cloud. The Artist’s Perspective: What Artists Need & New Opportunities for Connection. Innovations & Approaches to Building, Engaging, & Retaining Audiences in the Virtual ...

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