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Breaking the Threshold of Fear at Tessitura

Renee Fleming's Tuesday keynote was live streamed from Orlando over Tessitura's website, a service Fleming herself called inevitable and important. 

REPORTING FROM ORLANDO — Tessitura’s 15th Learning and Community Conference (TLCC 2015) kicked off in Orlando on Aug.16 with 1,722 Tessitura users in attendance. About 43 percent of those were first-time participants. While the conference seems to have no trouble attracting the new, young crowd, many of the organizations — performing arts centers, operas, museums and symphonies — are struggling to get that same demographic through their doors. The situation is allowing for a number of creative solutions using new technologies and outside-the-box thinking.

Keynote speaker Renée Fleming said she looked to Grateful Dead’s recent farewell tour at Soldier Field, Chicago, as the perfect example of creating an event that is cool, glamorous, desirable and a lifestyle event. As Lyric Opera of Chicago's first-ever Creative Consultant, Fleming has been focusing on audience development and getting a new crowd through the doors with a new take on programming.

“We can safely expand what we present by maintaining a core of high-quality opera," said Fleming. “Young generations are doing this already. They’re performing classical music juxtaposed with bluegrass in unconventional places. The walls are down.”

One project found Fleming teaming up with Chicago's comedy improv hotspot, Second City, to produce "Second City’s Guide to the Opera," a comedic and somewhat satirical take on the art form. Though Fleming said she was wary of "making fun" of opera, the partnership was a success, attracting a sold-out audience, 35 percent of whom were new to the opera house. With a number of initiatives like this one, Fleming said it’s a matter of reintroducing the history of singing to the general public.

“It may look like we’re inviting people into the ‘temple’ of opera, but what we’re saying is please let us back in, because we have something to offer as well,” said Fleming. “We offer the history of singing and we want to be included in the mainstream again.”

Seb Chan, director of digital & emerging media at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, is also working to attract a new audience to museums using exciting and interactive technology. In first reconstructing the historical building, they then rethought the purpose and the experience the building would be able to offer in order to attract new visitors.

Before this rethinking, the museum offered about a 45-minute experience for a collection of over 210,000 objects, including porcelain animals, bird cages, wall paper and even cricket cages. The collection also swung the other way, including an app and a 3D-printed vase along with the accompanying source code. The challenge was bringing relevance to the collection.

“In reopening the museum, we needed a way to assert the importance of physically visiting the museum when you could in fact see all this stuff online at home,” said Chan. “This threshold fear keeps out the very audiences these museums are designed to serve.”

In breaking that threshold fear, technology was going to be key. It needed to be an interactive, social, look-up experience that was something everybody understood and could enjoy.

“The idea came up that we’re a design museum, so why not give everyone a pen?” said Chan. “The pen would allow people to create and record what they did. It would get people away from their phones and get people closer to the designs. Design is about doing things, not only looking at things.”

By working with firms like GE, Sistel Networks and Made Simple they built this device from scratch. The pens are used to “collect” objects from around the museum, and then you can explore those objects at tables throughout the space. With the other end of the pen, you can draw and design things at the tables in what Chan describes as a "coffee table experience." The pen is also connected to your ticket, so when you go home you can log on and see all the things you collected.

“It’s a very playful way to explore the museum,” said Chan.

The museum’s 3,000 pens were given out over 64,000 times in five months, meaning more than 90 percent of visitors used one. Because the museum also houses one of the largest wallpaper collections in North America, they created an immersion room where people can create and draw their own wall-papers and also browse the collection of wall papers and see them projected full scale. In the immersion room, over 56,000 designs have been saved and shared. The interactive experience has increased the average guest time to 102 minutes.

“This is people taking ownership of the museum,” said Chan. “We’ve given people things to do, and we can measure it. Over a third of all our ticketholders log back in using their tickets to look over the things they’ve created.”

Whether it’s through new programming or technology or even through the creation of a cool, new space, Tessitura users are thinking outside the box to reach new audiences and introduce their arts and products to a new generation.

TLCC 2015 continues through Aug. 20 when the 2016 dates will be announced.


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