New Strategies for Booking Dance Companies
Performing arts booking conferences serve to bring presenters and performers together for business, networking and educational purposes. In the world of dance, this means that presenters (performing arts venues, dance festivals, tour organizers and promoters) have an opportunity to see performances and book dance companies.
To explore an example of an upcoming performing arts booking conference, you can visit the site for Performing Arts Exchange, an event that will take place in Baltimore, Maryland from September 27-30, 2006.
While these face-to-face encounters and performance showcases, offer excellent opportunities for assessment, interaction and learning, they are just one component of what could be a much larger and richer collaborative endeavor to book performances for an upcoming season.
What these booking conferences lack is large-scale, structured input from audiences (or potential audiences) about the types of dance performances that are of greatest interest to them. And until the emergence of what is now referred to as the Web 2.0, there was not really a mechanism whereby dance enthusiasts could contribute in a meaningful way to indicating their preferences for specific dance companies and preferred types of performances.
For a good introduction to the Web 2.0, you can read this week's cover story in Newsweek, "The New Wisdom of the Web."
Here is my scenario of how the more collaborative culture of the Web 2.0 can play a role in helping presenters book performances that are appealing to larger, more diverse audiences:
- Imagine that all dance companies participating in an upcoming performing arts booking conference created a profile on a social networking site - I'll use MySpace as an example, although the young demographic profile of this site's users is not completely on target for the purpose of dance performances. On their MySpace profile page, dance companies can describe their upcoming performances and include links to performance video clips on YouTube and pictures on Flickr.
- In addition to or instead of MySpace, some dance companies may have their own blogs where they write about their dance company and performances.
- Now web surfers with an interest in dance start viewing the MySpace profiles and reading blog entries as well as watch dance videos and view pictures.
- Dance enthusiasts can respond to this dance company content in many different ways. Maybe a dance fan posts a message to his or her blog about one of the dance company's videos. Another dancer saves the link for a set of dance photos to the collaborative bookmarking site Del.icio.us. Another adds a MySpace profile of a dance company to their friend's list on My Space. Another saves a dance video to their YouTube favorites and posts a comment.
Tag Cloud from Flickr
Cloud show more popular tags by size
- Even more fruitful is that as dance fans explore, write about, comment on, save and evaluate the online dance content, they are constantly categorizing (tagging) the pictures, videos, links and other resources that they like. A video might be categorized, for example, by tagging it "moderndance" and "environment" - I'm assuming that a modern dance piece happens to deal with an environmental theme. Once this video is tagged, it is then possible to find this clip by using either tag as a search term. So if you enter "moderndance" into the video search engine, you'll see a listing for this environmentally-focused modern dance work.
And now to jump way too quickly to the end result: Let's imagine that the above collaborative activity has been taking place for two months preceding a booking conference. What kind of new insights would presenters and dance companies have?
- They could explore the social networks created around specific dance companies on sites such as MyFriends. Why are some dance companies very popular and have hundreds or thousands of "friends" while others do not? Is this just a popularity contest or are there meaningful insights that can be gleaned from these explicitly expressed connections? Are certain styles of dance, themes or creative intent more captivating than others?
- By accessing the blog search engine and analysis tool Technorati, they can find out what types of conversations have emerged around the blog postings of specific dance companies and dance fans. What are the hot ideas that are being debated? What do people like and dislike? What are the challenging, disruptive questions?
- On YouTube, videos can be searched by the number of views and comments can be reviewed to determine how viewers reacted to the dance clips. What are the most popular dance videos and why? Do the top 10 most popular videos share something in common? What key terms have been used to categorize different types of dance videos?
- On Flickr, as with YouTube, dance pictures can be considered by popularity and reviews can be scanned to understand viewer reactions.
- And on bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, saved links can be analyzed by what tags dance fans used to categorize their favorite videos, pictures and other resources. Do the tagging schemes of users indicate that there are specific themes that especially capture their interest? And which of these links have been bookmarked by the largest number of users?
Above I'm just scratching the surface in terms of the range of ways that Web 2.0 data and connections can be evaluated and analyzed to gain an understanding of what dance enthusiasts are looking for in terms of dance performances. But hopefully, it offers a glimpse into what some of the possibilities are in terms of the emerging collaborative web.
Posted by Doug Fox on March 31, 2006 11:50 AM
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I fear dance needs a much more sophisticated approach than relying on Flickr and especially You Tube which is full of so much pointless junk clogging up it's band width that anything remotely of any use or professionally made is lost in the noise.
Using 'social' media networks assumes that dance can professionally produce video and photo material in-house which, from my point of view, isn't going to happen any time soon.
The tools exist to produce content rich websites with professional media contained within them, on the company's own web spaces, so the companies can create their own unique identities. However, they need to be taught the skills or buy them in to be able to fully exploit the potential of the Internet.
Flickr is probably the best user media site on the web but You Tube and My Space! If both of those websites were shut down tomorrow then few professional web editors would lament their passing.
I do agree that dance needs to embrace new technology to get the word out about 5000% more than they do it right now, but the way forward, sadly, is a lot more complex and will take an awful lot longer to achieve.
peace ;o]