Spare a thought, and a dime, for artists forced to go digital
• And give them a gap while they experiment with formats that are not so familiar to them
Reader, welcome to lockdown. If you’re lucky enough to have a decent home internet connection, the arts world is your digital oyster for the next few weeks. Ditto if you have a smartphone and a decent amount of data at your disposal. These are, it remains necessary to say, luxuries for most South Africans — who will, instead, depend on radio and TV for their entertainment and distraction.
The public broadcaster will be upping its “local content” ,a measure announced by the minister of sports, arts and culture that is designed to increase royalty revenues for musicians — and perhaps the odd radio playwright or voiceover artist. When this money will find its way to the intended beneficiaries is another matter altogether.
Like a handful of other interventions listed this week by arts &culture minister Nathi Mthethwa, it is welcome but amounts to little more than a gesture, and only invites more questions from those in the arts industry: R150m in “relief” (disbursed to whom and on what basis?); a promise to commission “messages that will bring courage and hope” (how much per message, and to what end?); and a recommendation to make use of live streaming (are you trying to insult our intelligence?).
So, while arts consumers are sitting relatively pretty, arts producers are feeling desperate. How can you help? Assuming that you will probably at least double your usual daily screen time in the weeks and months ahead, you can consciously allocate a portion of that time to paid or sponsored content.
By all means, read and listen to the e-books now freely available. Watch the downloadable archive theatre performances. Listen to your favourite musicians cranking out their hits from makeshift home studios. Enjoy those virtual gallery and museum visits. Certainly, I will be — and I’ll be sharing my experiences with you in this column space. But I’ll also be on the lookout for performances that are generating income for someone.
There will hopefully be many such initiatives, and I look forward to seeing what forms they take. The first one that came up on my radar goes by the hashtag #GetNakedAtHome, a clever marketing-meets Coronavirus-CSI undertaking by the innovative company Naked Insurance. By Wednesday afternoon, way ahead of lockdown but a full fortnight into performing artist limbo (a side effect of Covid-19 is the warping of time), Naked’s people had already sponsored three ad hoc performances on Instagram Live.
I caught the third one: funnyman Rob van Vuuren acting out — at least, I think he was acting — a kind of housebound mania. You could tell he was at home from the family photos on the wall, the background domestic noise, the dog that trotted into the room midway and the fact that Van Vuuren kept mentioning his front door. I imagine that, for many of us, the front door will become a minor obsession as March ticks into April.
A social media live performance does not fundamentally change what a musician does at a microphone or on an instrument. For theatre makers, the shift to acting for cameras and an empty auditorium will require an adjustment in technique, but the lack of an audience is not prohibitive. When it comes to stand-up comedy, however, doing an Instagram gig means creating a new genre altogether.
You have to interact with your audience, feed off them, respond to them. But this means reading a rapidly disappearing stream of comments, which are often less than helpful. In front of a crowd, you can deal with the odd heckler; in a comment stream, everyone is a comedian, except for people posting laughing-crying emojis — which could never really be the equivalent of energising laughter — and others demanding that you do their favourite material.
Happily for Van Vuuren, a consummate actor in his own right who usually has a tightly honed set, his comic brand also includes a steady supply of random interjections and zany personas. When confusion reigns, tech fails and entropy threatens the whole enterprise, this seems more or less germane.
Other performers are not so fortunate. Home audiences will need to exercise a little patience while live-streaming artists experiment with the platforms on which they can monetise their craft.