Why are theatre companies so bad at video?

posted by Cheshire on Mon, Apr 14, 2008
in Theatre Issues

Theatre Communications Group (TCG) invited member companies to submit three-minute videos about their company and their vision of theatre 20 years from now. I hope that 20 years from now, theatre companies are better at representing themselves on video. A lot better.

For the record, Impact is not a member of TCG. We certainly do envision a future in which we qualify to become a member of TCG, the benchmarks being, among other things, that our budget exceeds $50,000 (we're close) and we have at least one full-time staff member (dream on). Until that happy time, though, we'll be content to sit on the sidelines and watch the bigger kids play. And comment.

I'm not sure whether TCG's eight finalists are the only ones who submitted or they were short-listed from a larger pool. I'm hoping it was the former. If these videos were plays, the powers that be at those companies would have never let most of these get anywhere near a stage. Out of the eight, I only liked two: the Magic's and Imagination Stage. Both demonstrated strong ideas and professional execution. I think the folks at the Magic just get it: video is a great tool. We might as well embrace it -- and even enjoy it. Imagination Stage's piece, while not really polished, at least has ambition and vision.

All of the others were either so boring or so poorly constructed (or both) that they were practically unwatchable, even though the content looked like it was interesting.

The project reminded me that most theatre companies don't really know what to do with video. They're wading into the water but aren't sure what they want to accomplish with the medium. They're afraid of turning into television -- which they characterize as quick cuts and shallow content -- so their pieces often end up looking like 80s-era documentaries rather than something engaging. They might as well not even do video.

But they do, and they're doing it more and more. The increasing affordability of camcorders has made companies feel like it's not that hard to bang out a little video piece here and there. They don't take into consideration, however, that they're investing in the video equivalent of the kind of theatre that would never meet TCG's membership standards.

One of the problems of video, of course, is that theatre is theatre, not video, and so theatre often looks bad on video -- and it sounds even worse. Theatre companies that have dabbled into video are often using terrible audio setups (if they're even using something other than the camera's on-board mic). No matter how good the video looks, if it sounds like a suburban dad shooting his kid's fifth-grade play, it's failed. At Impact, we get around the audio problem in different ways: we replace the audio with sound effects (for the Jukebox Stories trailer, that isn't really the sound the quarter made going into the machine) or just put a piece of music instead (e.g., the trailers for Impact Briefs and Money & Run).

But most theatre companies seem not to want to a) think that hard about their videos or b) spend the kind of money it takes to do something akin to the quality they would put on stage. Partly it's because of precisely that -- they'd rather put their money on stage. And who can blame them? They're theatre companies, not video production houses.

If they really want to use this medium successfully, though, they're going to have to stop churning out this cut-rate stuff. Video is going to be even more dominant in the future, and theatre companies will need to be fluent in that language to be relevant.