SOS Culture. Will the new media save theatre and live arts?

How does the use of new medias transform the daily life of theatres and acting companies and their relationships with the public? Can the free and open spaces of social networks become a concrete resource for artistic non-profit organizations during the economic crisis? The Web and Facebook have become almost an inevitable meeting point for artists, cultural organizations, operators, theatre enthusiasts or “simple” theatre-goers, particularly those interested in innovative and experimental forms of performance arts. Today in Italy the most important landscape of the performing arts is constituted by small and medium as well as non-profit theater groups and companies that, while being conditioned by a poor culture market, are now suffering dramatically from the heaviest cuts to public funding. The proposed paper rises from a research conducted in the autumn of 2009 in the theatres of Tuscany, a region owing a great part of its fame to its cultural life. The question to be investigated was whether the companies that are investing in digital technologies, by regularly attending social networks, are concretely benefiting from this kind of involvement in terms of social, cultural and economic capital (new contacts, new experiences, new incomes). The core of the inquiry is a compared study of the organizational life of ten theater companies of different Tuscan cities with active and up-to-dated Facebook profiles. They are all private non-profit organizations of medium and small dimensions, but benefiting by a solid continuity and a good notoriety, even beyond regional borders. Then , all these companies could be defined as “non-conventional”, “experimental” theaters, that are mostly attended by young and youthful people. The second part of the research was aimed at spreading light on the nature of organizations and the territory. It consisted of two actions: a monitoring of on-line activities of all thirteen Tuscan public theaters and the study of two companies living in metropolitan contexts, Rome and Milan. The research strategy blended on and off-line methods and tools: analysis of the websites of all the selected organizations, ethnographic observations-participation to their Facebook profiles, face-to-face and mediated interviews to the responsible of communication of all the companies, and to five cultural operators.