Last week, the Technology in the Arts blog posted a brief interview with Ella Baff - executive and artistic director of the Jacob's Pillow Festival, located in Beckett, Massachusetts.
http://www.technologyinthearts.org/2012/02/talking-about-the-virtual-pillow-ella-baff-executive-and-artistic-director-of-jacobs-pillow-dance-festival/
Today, she'll be giving a talk at Carnegie Melon as part of the Masters in Arts Management speaker series. Her talk will expand upon points brought up in the interview, and presumably go into more detail about Virtual Pillow - an online interactive hub for dance-lovers anywhere in the world to experience Jacob's Pillow.
Virtual Pillow is part of the Leading for the Future Initiative, a program of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with the purpose of investing in innovation. The program is innovative, indeed. It includes the Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive, which stores archives of dance performance highlights from the past and present. This component also allows participants to make connections between programs and dancers and engage in knowledge-boosting games. Pillow Talks is another component which features online lectures and discussions with world-renown choreographers, authors, dancers etc. It is available on FORA.tv, a global video network. Virtual Pillow Views is an email newsletter and archive that interested parties can sign up for as well.
While the goal of this initiative was initially meant for outreach and engagement from the depths of rural Massachusetts to the world, Ella Baff explained that it "is now being used for educational purposes and as a scholarly resource. ... It is an audience development vehicle for dance, and we can capture the results." Virtual Pillow stays true to the mission of Jacob's Pillow and acts as an extension of their program, catapulting an already world-renown dance festival into a worldwide virtual tour de force.
Other arts institutions can have success with similar programming initiatives. Social media is one thing, of course, and most institutions are embracing that as a method of outreach as it is. But to establish an entire identity online, running programming through cyberspace paralleled with the mission and direction of an organization in real time? That is truly innovation, and one that we, as arts managers, should be excited to watch, embrace, and participate in as it grows as an archival tool and a source for audience engagement in the future.
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