Acoustic Guitar Spectacular

27 Jan 2016

Details

In August 2015, Red Chair toured Acoustic Guitar Spectacular to eight regional Queensland communities in South East Queensland.

The line-up of guitarists included:

• Michael Fix – recently named as one of Australia’s Top 25 Guitarists of All Time
• New Yorker (now living in Austria) ‘fingerstyle funkmeister’ Adam Rafferty
• internationally acclaimed Sunshine Coast flamenco guitarist Andrew Veivers.

Concerts were structured so that each guitarist featured as a solo artist, as well as performing as an ensemble, allowing plenty of opportunity for spontaneity and improvisation.

Community engagement activities were delivered through a series of workshops, master classes, school based classes, and individual mentoring and performance opportunities for local guitarists and community-based guitar orchestras.

When

August 2015

Where

Mount Tamborine, Ipswich, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Caloundra, Dalby, Chinchilla, Pomona and Cleveland.

Key stats

• 9 community engagement activities
• Over 1000 attendees and participants

Arts Queensland contribution

$13,975 – Playing Queensland Fund   

Outcomes

• Audience numbers exceeded expectation with several sell out concerts. Feedback from audience members was positive.

Best concert ever – Audience member

Great gig, inspirational – Audience member

• Local emerging guitarists had opportunities to perform (via an expression of interest assessed by Acoustic Guitar Spectacular performers and the producer) at six of the seven tour concert performances, with the seventh featuring a local guitar orchestra. Mentoring sessions with the Acoustic Guitar Spectacular performers were provided to each of the participating local guitarists.
• Existing and new presenters have expressed interest in engaging Acoustic Guitar Spectacular in 2016.

Learnings and reflections

The Producer/Red Chair reflected on the tour’s critical success factors:  

The Acoustic Guitar Spectacular tour was an example of presenters, performers and producers working in excellent partnership. The combination of artistic excellence, meaningful community engagement processes, positive and enthusiastic presenter relationships, good communication across key stakeholders, an experienced tour producer and touring crew, and a targeted marketing campaign resulted in outstanding audience numbers, strong community engagement and legacy, economic success and opportunities for future touring and development

Social media played a large role in the tour:

In addition to regular social media, enews and website processes used for promotion of Red Chair tours, social media processes were ramped up for this tour with excellent results. This included active use of artist postings (including video posts), an Acoustic Guitar Spectacular facebook page, paid facebook advertising, individual event pages for each performance throughout the tour, individual webpages and facebook events for the guitarist mentoring projects and workshops, and active links to presenters’ online activities.

Although workshops and masterclasses have been a feature of past tours, this was the first time a structured local guitarist mentoring/performance project was incorporated. Feedback from participants, performers and audiences was overwhelmingly positive and a mentoring/performance project will feature as an ongoing component of the Acoustic Guitar Spectacular into the future.

Contact for further information:

Contact: Philip Dunbavan
Email: ontour@redchair.com.au
Website: https://redchair.com.au/production/87-acoustic-guitar-spectacular

A pdf version of the Acoustic Guitar Spectacular case study is available.

Images courtesy Red Chair.