Monday 15 November 2010

Creative Nottingham - Review

Yesterday at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, who amazingly have already hit 500,000 visitors in six months since reopening, I experienced Michael Pinchbeck’s Post Show After Party a playful interactive show where Pinchbeck performs with his parents, jumping backwards and forward in time drawing on a real life situation from 1970. The real life scenario is a post show party where his Dad met his Mum after an amateur performance of the Sound of Music. It’s cleverly delivered and picks up on the new wave of audience expectation. Today audiences increasingly want to be more than being a spectator. There is a growing shift in roles and identity. Choice, distraction and purpose is blurring and growing. Audiences are shifting to becoming producers of their own work, inspired perhaps through the democratising of society through the internet, technology and UK’s vibrant arts and cultural scene. Pinchbeck’s unconventional performance takes this risk and plunges, experimenting with the fourth wall. We must protect such excellence and risk I’ve drawn on above and therefore not as an artistic landscape homogenise to mainstream expectations or lose investment on what is really working and growing.


Creative Nottingham

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