“Do We Have LIFT-Off?” Social Media Marketing and Digital Performance at a British Arts Festival

Sam Miles

doi:10.1080/10632921.2017.1366379

Abstract

ABSTRACTArts festivals have been explored through many lenses, but social media marketing and digital performance are less studied. The potential of social media networks in digital performance is exemplified by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), which repositions social media technology as an enabler for audiences to co-produce digitally oriented performance. This article argues that the relationship between social media marketing and performance is more hybridized than often assumed, with performances forming a creative development loop from producer to audience through performative social media. Harnessing the creative potential of social media platforms via “digital staging” encourages audience insight into process as well as product.

Highlights

The London International Festival of Theatre, known as LIFT, is a month-long biennial urban arts festival encompassing theatre, music, and dance: a place “where the city meets the stage” (LIFT 2014)
By extending established research on performance to the relations between audience and producer, and social media marketing as an embedded part of digital performance that recognizes the value of personalized interactions between consumer and company (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004), this article has demonstrated how hybrid digital spaces that reveal their own constructedness can progress creatively generative performance
Twitter, and YouTube are ubiquitous social media platforms that can be harnessed in unusual ways to hybridize the digital/physical space between performer and audience, resulting in novel, co-produced digital performance

Summary

Introduction

The London International Festival of Theatre, known as LIFT, is a month-long biennial urban arts festival encompassing theatre, music, and dance: a place “where the city meets the stage” (LIFT 2014). Despite the “digital labour” (Postigo 2016, 332) that viewers and subscribers perform by viewing content, YouTube’s prioritization of subscriber-sourced content means that the platform is still generally an equitable space for user contribution: it “gives credence to viewership, not sponsorship” (Hodgson 2010, 8) This is an important draw for LIFT, which has an ethical responsibility to balance its social networking with audiences in such a way that reciprocal involvement is as organic and meaningful as possible while operating in proactive ways that encourage digital natives into the festival through peer recommendation. This departure from an orthodox broadcast model constituted a new digital space in which the audience experience functions as a form of live feedback to the performance To aid this communicative framework, the hashtag #AWaSH (a reference to the show’s corrupt “Academy of Water and Spiritual Healing”) was coined to collate audience-generated social media updates (Figure 5), and a website inviting users to log real-life incidents of climate change in their vicinity was circulated online. The technical glitches visible in this model of digital performance convey a valuable, albeit unintentional, insight into its liveness and its digital staging

Conclusions

Findings

A Networked Self