Sky Ireland launches ground-breaking digital project and on air programming to accompany Rough Magic and Opera Theatre Company’s Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Sky Ireland launches ground-breaking digital project and on air programming to accompany Rough Magic and Opera Theatre Company’s Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
28th May, 2014: Sky Ireland today announces the launch of a ground-breaking digital project and on air programming which will accompany Rough Magic and Opera Theatre Company’s much anticipated production of Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The opera runs from 13th to 22nd June at the Olympia Theatre.
The digital project is the first of its kind ever to be piloted in Ireland. Produced by Maverick TV on behalf of Sky, it consists of a specially commissioned series of online videos, blogs, tweets and photos woven together to tell a powerful online tale that runs parallel to the production Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The aim is both to bring Brecht’s fictional city to life to a wider audience - enticing people to follow the online narrative set in the debauched world of Mahagonny - and to continue Sky’s programme of investment in the Irish cultural landscape.
Playing the lead roles in the online narrative are renowned actor Liam Carney (The Commitments Angel’s Ashes, Gangs of New York), who plays Kurt Furey, and well-known face on the Irish theatre scene Kevin Shackleton who plays Paul Gallagher (Camelot).
Sky has also teamed up with Irish independent production company COCO Television to produce on-air content to support the forthcoming production. COCO TV will work with Sky to produce a ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary during the Olympia run of Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny to be broadcast on the channel from late June.
In addition COCO TV is producing a series of four 60 and 30 second promos which will air across Sky channels from early June promoting viewer engagement in the opera and the digital campaign. Based around Maverick TV’s online narrative Welcome to Mahagonny, the interstitials depict the ‘commandments’ of Kurt, including ‘Thou shalt not kill the party’ and will drive viewers to explore the online narrative at sky.com/mahagonny. Twitter will also be used as a major tool to amplify the campaign and the campaign hashtag will be promoted on the interstitials using #OnlyInMahagonny.
The development of the online narrative and the creation of on-air content, including the documentary, supports the overall Sky Arts Ignition programme, which saw €230,000 in funding awarded to Rough Magic to produce the opera.
Mark Deering, Director of Corporate Affairs, Sky Ireland said: “Sky Ireland is committed to nurturing and investing in local talent across a wide array of disciplines including sport, TV and film production, and the arts. One of the main aims of Sky Arts Ignition is toinspire new generations to broaden their cultural horizons. We believe Sky’s support will benefit Rough Magic’s unique and thought-provoking production, and help to engage a wider audience in the story of Mahagonny.
Diego Fasciati, Executive Producer, Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, said “All of us at Rough Magic and Opera Theatre Company are truly excited about this digital campaign and its potential to engage audiences online and connect them to the live performances. The scale and highly imaginative nature of this initiative perfectly complement our approach to bringing "Mahagonny" to the stage. This campaign is a fantastic opportunity to increase our companies' reach and presence.”
Claire McArdle, Executive Producer Multiplatform, Maverick TV said: “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a challenging opera that speaks to society today as much as it did to the Germany of the 1930s. Working closely with Rough Magic to capture the spirit of the city, we want to give a whole new audience the opportunity to explore Brecht and Weill’s creation through the eyes of Paul and Kurt.”
BACKGROUND
Appearing on the website of the fictional travel company ‘Threepenny Travel’ over four weeks, people are enticed to follow the unfolding stories of Paul Gallagher, a naïve young travel writer on a mission to find the mysterious city of Mahagonny, and Kurt Furey, the brilliant but unstable journalist he has been instructed to track down.
The backdrop of the debauched city of Mahagonny, also the setting for Weill and Brecht’s opera, is a hedonistic metropolis where the only rule appears to be ‘consume or be consumed’.
As Paul and Kurt’s worlds begin to entwine, a high-stakes game will play out, with destinies on the line, and the future of the city at stake. As the story evolves, they will find themselves on the fringes of key events from the real-life production of as the body count rises and the cracks begin to show in the city’s façade.
To follow Paul and Kurt’s stories and explore the world of Mahagonny please visit:
www.sky.com/mahagonny
@PaulGallagher92
@KurtTheFurey
#OnlyInMahagonny
- ENDS -
For information contact:
Niamh McCarrick
Communications Manager, Sky Ireland
E: Niamh.mccarrick@bskyb.com
T: 086 3809191
Harriet Mansergh
Slattery Communications
E: harriet.mansergh@scomms.ie
T: 086 839 0072
Notes to Editors
About Sky Arts Ignition: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
The opera was first staged in Leipzig in 1930. It tells the story of the creation and destruction of the city of Mahagonny, which was founded by three criminals and soon descends into chaotic scenes of gambling, fighting, debauchery and murder. The opera gained huge notoriety for its satirical bent, seeking as it did to subvert and deflate what many considered the pompous arrogance of traditional opera.
Ireland’s leading architects, Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, who recently designed the award-winning Lyric Theatre in Belfast, will play an important role in reimagining the use of the stage in the Olympia to ensure the most powerful audience experience. David Brophy, principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, who has also collaborated with artists such as U2 and Sinead O’Connor, will conduct Weil’s eclectic score. Oscar-nominated Consolata Boyle will design costumes, with lighting design by Aedín Cosgrove.
Sky Arts Ignition awarded €230,000 to Rough Magic to produce the opera, following a competitive entry process last year, facilitated by Business to Arts. Rough Magic is based in Dublin and is one of Ireland’s leading theatre companies. Opera Theatre Company is the national opera touring company of Ireland.
The Goethe-Institut in Dublin will curate a series of events to provide a context for the production and for the work of Kurt Weill.
About Sky
Sky is the UK and Ireland’s leading home entertainment and communications company, and is the UK and Ireland’s biggest investor in television content, investing more than €2.75 billion a year in channels such as Sky 1, Sky Atlantic, Sky Living, Sky Arts, Sky Sports, Sky Movies and Sky News. Around two-thirds of Sky’s content spend is home-grown and Sky is the fastest-growing source of investment in original home-grown programmes such as Moone Boy, Treasure Island and David Attenborough’s ‘Flying Monsters’. More than 2 million people tune into Sky channels each week in Ireland.
Alongside its commitment to offering customers a greater choice of high-quality content, Sky is a leading innovator. Customers enjoy total control and flexibility over their favourite TV through Sky+, watch TV on the move through Sky Go, and enjoy the best quality TV experience at home through High Definition and 3D. Sky also recently launched Ireland’s biggest Catch-Up TV service a total of 47 Sky and non-Sky channels, including TV3 now available to Sky customers in Ireland at no extra cost
Sky believes in making a wider contribution to the communities in which it operates by taking positive action on the environment, supporting grassroots sports and increasing access to, and participation in, the arts. Sky Ireland is located in offices at Burlington Road, Dublin and employs more than 900 people.
Sky is increasingly engaged in grass roots activities across Ireland: Sky became the title sponsor of the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny in 2013 where it held a series of workshops on TV programming and production; following a rigorous application process involving 100’s of organisations, the Sky Arts Ignition series saw a €230,000 fund exclusively allocated to Dublin-based theatre group, Rough Magic for their unique production in the Olympia Theatre next month of The Rise and Fall of The House of Mahogany in association with Opera Theatre Company; and the Sky Sports Living for Sport Programme will this year see up to 100 secondary schools across Ireland participate in life skills initiatives aimed at 11-16 year olds.
Sky’s commitment to the Arts
Sky Arts offers an eclectic mix of the best music, arts, biographies, chat shows, film, drama and comedy. Sky is the only broadcaster in the UK and Ireland with channels dedicated solely to the arts. Sky Arts now reaches more than 6 million viewers every month.
Sky Arts also seeks to connect with culture on the ground; creating and collaborating with the best of the arts in the UK and Ireland to bring new experiences to life. Sky Arts Ignition, launched in 2011, supports leading arts organisations in the creation of brand new works offering €230,000 (£200,000) and amplification through Sky’s programming, marketing and technologies.
The winner in 2012 was Sky Arts Ignition: Memory Palace, a multi-dimensional exhibition experience created in partnership with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and based on an original work of fiction by author Hari Kunzru, transformed into a walk-in story by leading graphic designers, typographers and illustrators including Le Gun, Oded Ezer, Erik Kessels and Luke Pearson. It was visited by over 30,000 visitors and also supported with an exclusive documentary airing on Sky Arts, and a digital Memory Bank available within the exhibition and online where the public shared over 13,000 memories.
Sky also supports young talent through Sky Academy Arts Scholarships, which support five young artists a year with a bursary of £30,000 each, enabling Sky to back the creation of their new creative work as well as offering mentoring to nurture emerging talent.
For more information, visit:
www.sky.com/arts
www.sky.com/academy
About Maverick TV
For two decades, Maverick has created hundreds of hours of award-winning shows from character-driven documentaries, factual and features series for all the major UK broadcasters from their UK offices in London and Birmingham. In 2012, Maverick launched an office in Los Angeles, USA and its first major series, Chrisley Knows Best, airs on USA Network in Spring 2014.
The multi-award winning company has enjoyed considerable success internationally, with its shows now sold to more than 130 territories.
Maverick's multiplatform team has been awarded four BAFTAs, an Emmy, five Royal Television Society Awards (including the 2010 Judges Award for Innovation) two Broadcast Digital awards, two BIMAs, two World Media Awards and numerous others.
2013/14 multiplatform projects include Was it Something I Said, an interactive panel show for Channel 4 hosted by David Mitchell; The You Generation, featuring Simon Cowell, for Syco; original formats and channels funded by Google including dating, cookery, fashion, sex advice and beauty; brand work including ASOS, Renault and Very; games for Channel 4 and a major charity; the new series of Fresh Meat; Film4.com and major releases including In A Field In England and a new series of Embarrassing Bodies.
Recently, Maverick has triumphed with programmes including International Emmy-winning Stephen Fry: Out There (BBC Two), Growing Up Down’s (BBC Three), BAFTA winning Operation Ouch (CBBC), Party Wright Around The World (ITV2), Billy Connolly’s Route 66 (ITV1), Embarrassing Bodies and Embarrassing Bodies: Live From The Clinic (Channel 4)
Previous output has ranged from Channel 4’s The Model Agency, How To Look Good Naked and Ten Years Younger, to Bizarre E.R and Bizarre Crime (BBC Three), Children’s Hospital and Kids With Tourette’s (ITV1) and the award-winning mental health documentary, Sectioned (BBC Four). In 2013 Discovery Networks International (DNI) commissioned Maverick for 20 hours of original programming in both factual and lifestyle genres, including Your Style In His Hands presented by Lisa Snowdon.
Maverick Television is run by CEO Jim Sayer and Chief Creative Officer Mark Downie and has offices in London, Birmingham and Los Angeles.