Battle Jam

Starting from 2017, Battle Jam has been acting as an annual dance contest, encouraging not only Monday School participants but also anyone interested in performing arts to gather and come on stage. Instead of celebrating the ultimate winner, Battle Jam is unique for mingling the street dance battle format with open jam improvisation culture, and praising about the commons we share as individual human beings, the enthusiasm toward performing arts also the personal story in any self-discovery.

In 2019, National Theater & Concert Hall(NTCH) commissions Battle Jam to be the original program in Taiwan International Festival of Arts(TIFA) for the following four consecutive years to carry out its new mission 'Art for people, Inspire for all.'

The same year, Battle Jam starts bringing intervention together with fielding aesthetics by curating a series of open community workshops inside/outside of the National Theater & Concert Hall. As to the core of the participation mechanism, it starts to experiment on empowering general audiences to become an integral part of the system, expressing understanding and casting their votes onsite and offsite to decide the finals of Battle Jam. Until March 2022, there are already two and a half thousands of enthusiasts participating Battle Jam in person, it gradually becomes a private-public platform that reshapes the relationship between performing arts and society.

Challenge

When it comes down to sustainable value, it's not solely a matter of the two design challenges: 'How might we design a sustainable program that embraces the general public's involvement in co-creation that also meets the expectation of the professionals?' and 'How might we co-create a sustainable ecosystem wherein everyone becomes sharers instead of stakeholders?" The devil is in the execution. Battle Jam must utilize a limited budget from NTCH to overcome ever-complex and sophisticated program year after year; at the same time, transcend its limitation to facilitate long-running communities and improve the performing arts environment.

Strategy

In 2022, I propose a hybrid plan of Battle Jam to NTCH and get 90k(USD) funding to launch the new model. The radical part is I lead my team to design a digital performer village on Gather Town and transform the 2 hours physical contest audition into a 3-day digital gamified experience.

In the past, each contestant has only one shot, a 40 seconds to showcase themself on stage, and might not be able to attend the contest because it's far from their place and the stakes are high, now the digital audition lowers the participation threshold while enriches participators' aesthetic journey in choosing the next round contestants. The audiences are separated into different groups(contestants, venue owners, sponsors, community members, enthusiasts, and media) after logging into the village, being treated with customized tours to enrich both contestants'(domestic and international) and audiences' interaction quality.

Besides, the new model intends to transform the public money, the commission fee from NTCH, into the regeneration of public goods, thus most elements including but not limited to the digital character design, info on 'performer card', and the videos that contestants made are actually stemming from the mutual collaboration/agreement upon open data in accordance with the participatory flow.

Impact

With only 60 USD advertising budget, the new model of 2022 TIFA Battle Jam survived Covid and attracted 150 paid contestants and 677 audiences(113 were invited and the rest are paid audiences) from 11 countries, 28 cities, and 44 diverse styles, living up to its name as the 'international program.' According to the post-anonymous Likert survey after the live-streaming of the final contest, 120 people left us valuable feedback and comments. Statistically, 94% of all participants are highly satisfied(rated 7/7) with the whole experience; 100% advocate NTCH to support Battle Jam; 42% would like to receive more info about Monday School; 65% leave us 109 words on average and 98% of the comments are very positive to this innovation.

Following the last collaboration with TIFA, we received a commission from Taiwan Tourism Bureau to integrate Battle Jam with the grand opening of 23rd Taiwan Lantern Festival in Taipei, celebrating the grassroots communities development as the sparks in the city. Besides, after validating this hybrid performing arts community regeneration prototype, we discover that it can be applied to broader community themes such as art village and artist-in-residence. Now the team has rolled its sleeves to propose a creative regional revitalization plan to the National Development Council.