Virtually Live: LIVE

After a successful online series throughout the start of 2021 where we played a variety of repertoire and discussed a range of topics in our concerts, we secured funding through the Royal Philharmonic Society Enterprise Fund in association with Harriet's Trust to continue the series.

Here's what we wanted to do:

- create a hybrid online/in person concert series as restrictions were loosening

- appeal to an audience that wouldn't usually watch a classical concert

- memorise pieces and choreograph them

- promote this series to a wider audience on our social media

The funding would allow us to:

- rent spaces for three Virtually Live concerts

- purchase Final Cut Pro to make sure the virtual element was delivered to as high a standard as possible

- receive choreography sessions

- experiment with paid advertising on social media platforms

Virtually Live: LIVE was the first concert Chameleon had ever put on off our own back. This was incredibly exciting as it meant we could make all the decisions.

We booked The International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for one evening in August 2021, ready to start putting our vision of curating our own concerts into action. We could choose the rep we wanted to play, the time of the event, how long we wanted to play for... BRILLIANT!

But it did have a pressure to it we weren't expecting!

- how much should we sell tickets for?

- should we have student tickets?

- how do we get people through the door?

- how will people that aren't our friends hear about the concert?

These questions ran through the entire Virtually Live: LIVE series and I'm sure will crop up again. Talking about pricing led to really interesting conversations about our worth as a group and trying to widen our audience led to us creating a mailing list at the start of 2022 and posters, business cards and stickers by summer 2022. (I got particularly over excited about the stickers!)

In this first concert, we chose a list of repertoire that were firm favourites from the online concerts - we knew this from comments on the Facebook Live videos (very handy!). We recorded the concert live and streamed it at a later date. (Eleanor talks more about this in her post about the tech side of Virtually Live).

Although we still had to have social distancing and advised mask wearing for the audience, the excitement that people were at their first gig back was palpable. I remember being really nervous prior to going back on stage - it had been so long!

*It was also the first time we wore our new Chameleon suits - and we felt incredible!*

Some learning we took from this first Virtually Live: LIVE was that we reverted back to our old "concert mode" where the chatting between pieces was back to being just about the repertoire. We reflected on this after the concert.

It wasn't a bad way of presenting, far from it.

But it wasn't the ethos of Virtually Live.

In a Virtually Live concert, we wanted the audience to feel part of an experience, to get to know the group better and to feel relaxed. We also want the chat about repertoire to be relatable and educational; not just "this composer wrote this piece during this time and in this place" but a story about what the music means to us, or what they could imagine whilst listening to it.

This is something we decided to work on for the next concert; we suggested going back to choosing themes to talk about, which is how we'd structured the online concerts, and plan the talking between pieces as part of the flow of the concert, rather than an added bit before each piece.

At this point we'd also started some choreography sessions with the incredible Jonathan Ainscough. This made us think about how we wanted the audience to perceive the music we play; are we telling a story, does the piece feature a particular voice?

These thoughts start to come together for our concert "Sound and Space", (or otherwise concisely named Virtually Live: LIVE 2.0!) - click the blog posts below to read more!

by Jess