Report: Digitizing the Performing Arts
Live performing arts organizations have long prided themselves on providing an important way for individuals and communities to connect, be entertained and have important conversations. Yet audience expectations have been changing rapidly, and place-independent access to information and entertainment has become common place. The urgency to understand how digital innovation in the performing arts will affect Canada’s performing arts presenting eco-system lies at the heart of this landmark report by CAPACOA and Strategic Moves, Digitizing the Performing Arts: An Assessment of Opportunities, Issues and Challenges.
Digitizing the Performing Arts explores crucial aspects of the digital evolution:
- – Economic dynamic of live performing arts presentation today.
- – Technology trends from backbone technologies and standards like blockchain and semantic web to augmented and virtual reality and an evolution toward a holographic world.
- – The continuum of digital opportunities in the performing arts that includes examples of innovative Canadian digital experiments.
- – Lessons learned from other sectors changed by digital competitors or digital alternatives.
The question at the core of this work is who will be the digital intermediaries for the performing arts and whether performing arts presenters can carve out a space that transfers and expands their expertise to these new digital spaces in a way that supports and benefits the entire performing arts eco-system. In Digitizing the Performing Arts the authors outline paths forward for the performing arts presenting eco-system and emphasize the need for new collaborations, partnerships, digital knowledge and capabilities within the arts presenting field.
In short, this assessment provides a springboard for new conversations and digital capacity – and skill-building – in the presenting field.
This report by CAPACOA and Strategic Moves is the culmination of several years of conversations that emanated from our study on The Value of Presenting: A Study of Performing Arts Presentation in Canada.
[Republished from CAPACOA website, originally released April 2017]
