Diary of Assembling a Livestream Series Part 1

F&F, short for Fast and Furious is a series at The Tank. The premise of the show is that artists create (quickly) performances responding to the (infuriating) world events in the week prior to the show. It began in June 2016, I've been participating since January 2019, and as of this year am now in charge of assembling it! I have various goals for the series, so I’m going to write about how things go and share learnings about curation and livestreaming.
 
 
Pre-April 2020, F&F was a wonderful live experience that always felt warm and communal. Digitally, I feel the live-chat fills a bit of that togetherness spirit. Artists making totally new pieces, with an encouragement to experiment and fail in response to the world is a worthwhile endeavor in my opinion. The show has always had an open invitation for participants, and for me and friends it puts us in a sort of pressure cooker to make a piece with a fun limitation and a specific deadline+presentation.

What's my role?

The word assembler has appealed to me recently. When I make art I feel like I'm just assembling thoughts and collaging media. My baseline objective is to create a show that is entertaining and meaningful to audiences. I want to ensure the lineup is made up of wonderful people. And I want those wonderful people to be supported with whatever they need that I can provide or connect them with, whether it is technical expertise, a dramaturgical sounding board, and ultimately a receptive audience.

Who should be a part of this show?

Keeping the door open for anyone to contribute to this show feels important. I inherited a list of emails for people who have expressed interest in participating, made up of strangers and many I’ve met from previous editions. Emailing that list ensures there will be the minimum amount of material for a show. There is space for more. So, I am inviting people I have a relationship with, whose work I love, and asking people who I think would know some people to connect me with them.

Captions

The stream will feature pre-recorded videos and live performances. I am going to request that everyone who makes a video include captions in it, or I will add them for them. For live performers I have two ideas:
  • If the performance follows a script, then I could scroll through it via a window at the bottom of the video (does this make sense?)
  • If there’s improvisation or the above option doesn’t work, I’ll set up webcaptioner.com, which will automatically generate captions!

Graphic / Marketing Materials

In big letters F and F, with ampersand in between. Below it "fast and furious"
Like many things, I don’t have training or expertise in graphic design, but I enjoy doing it! So I took it upon myself to create a new graphic to use for F&F. After many iterations and ideas I created the above graphic to represent the series, and have an idea on how each edition’s marketing graphic will look. But I don't think this is very good! Sincerely, but not sincerely I had a minor meltdown when discussing the graphic to my friend Gabriel and I said something along the lines of it doesn’t have to be perfect, but I want it to be amazing enough to get into the MoMA, as representation for 2021 brilliance in design for performance events. I wish I knew someone who could be doing these graphics, but I don’t have a budget to compensate for this labor so I did it and I consider the exposure, meaning, experience, growth, clout, etc I get from producing this show enough compensation for me…which leads me to...

MONEY!

Thanks to the Tank, every person/performance unit will receive $20, which obviously isn’t a lot but I’m super grateful for this monetary and administrative support. My hope is that if these next few editions to go well, I would seek additional funding to pay participating artists more. Or I could pay for graphic designers to create marketing materials, composers to write transition music, etc

Random thoughts:

  • Do strangers feel comfortable emailing me to express interest in participating? Should I make a form?
  • I want to make a trailer for the show
  • I don’t want to host the show, in fact I don’t think the show really needs a compére to speak in between each performance. My plan is to try and weave the performances together, with some nice transitions and music and text