The same quality that makes live theater so unique and exciting also makes it very fragile and ephemeral: Once the performance is over, the art created by the performers is also gone, lost to the past. But we can save all the fascinating nuts and bolts of a stage production (scripts, scores, recordings) and store them online until the sun burns itself out. Creating a web archive for three decades’ worth of artistic collaborations between composer-musician Doug Balentine and Hip Pocket Theatre co-founder Johnny Simons (pictured together, left) is the aim of a worthy new Kickstarter campaign. Simons and the family of Balentine, who died in 2008, hope to raise some $27,500 to transfer analog recordings of individual songs and whole scores from Balentine-Simons shows at Hip Pocket to digital files and make them available to the public. Deadline to contribute is December 6.
I went to the kickstarter site to donate money but it would not allow me to pay by PayPal like other kickstarter sites I’ve been to, it insists that you sign up with Amazon and pay via them, which I’m not inclined to do.
Kickstarter has always used Amazon to handle their payments. They have to use someone, and most people already have an Amazon account which makes it even easier. It’s just an online purchase like people do every day, no hassle at all.