Over 13,000 views following the replays of our recent live talk on flamenco! Thank you to our national theatre Esplanade, in Singapore, for supporting arts and community during these Covid times.
Though we weren’t able to enjoy performances of your da:ns festival in the theatre, you’ve brought us a slew of online programmes with local and international artists.
There’s so much that goes into planning what seems to be just a 1 hour talk. Starting from our brainstorming of topics, back when I was still in Sevilla. I got back home to Singapore, but our other colleague, Angela was not able to, due to the Covid situation in Spain… So the live stream took place from Singapore, Bali and Spain. Thank goodness for the technology that enables us to do so, these days.
On this occasion, we used Microsoft Teams. Now, if you are coming from Zoom or Skype, you might find this not so user-friendly to begin with. We were going ‘argh’ at our first installation and trying to figure things out. Fortunately, we had a technical run with the Esplanade team a week before the event. And then, just to be safe, Angela and I, Tania, did another round of practice the day before the event, brushing up on public-speaking and training our minds to stay focussed on topics we wanted to raise.
Adien was busy that day, juggling his gigs (which Bali fortunately still had, considering the whole island has been closed off to tourism, the major economic driver for the land and its people). Little ‘scares’ happen. An hour before we went live, the internet was still cut in where guitarist Adien was, in Bali. He then had to tether from his mobile, and we crossed our fingers that he had enough data to last that one hour! But fortunately, his data plan held up, phew!
We had Jonathan from the Esplanade tech department code in the 5 short videos we wanted to share with our online audience. He stage-managed the smooth flow of the online programme.
In the times when I’ve had to do a live event on Zoom for my Spanish artists, it’s usually myself managing the people ‘entry’, manoeuvring the videos, facilitating the interactive Q&A with participants. So this time, I was super glad to have that technical assistance, so that I could concentrate on the event. I had to peek separately at my mobile phone, while my Mac Air was being used for the live talk). Vanessa of the Esplanade team also ‘fed’ me the questions, through the chat function of Microsoft Teams. She was instrumental for making this project happen, right from the beginning!
It makes a huge difference to have all that behind-the-scenes support and you feel pretty assured you are in good hands too!
