January 7, 2008

Dance Forum on Curation at Dance Presenters Conference

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters 51st Annual Member Conference from January 11-15th here in New York City. There are lots of dance performances to see and educational sessions to attend.

One of sessions I'm looking forward to is this Friday morning's "Dance Forum: Curating Dance - Ideas and Innovation." Visit this page and click "Dance Forum" to read complete description and see list of panelists. And here's part of description:

The Dance Working Group (DWG) hosts an open forum on the somewhat perplexing subject of curating dance. Artists, companies, peer mentor networks and presenters all engage in a challenging process when curating a dance season that can strongly impact audiences and communities.

Topics will include:

Overviews of diverse curatorial criteria and practices;
Risk, in terms of content, and how it shapes programming;
Responding to world situations through dance curatorship;
Curatorial influence on how dance is contextualized in community;
Strengthening the artist/presenter relationship;
Factoring practical considerations into the curation process.

I'm hoping that some of the speakers or at least audience questions address the issue of the Internet and its impact on the curatorial process.

In other words, the Internet is obviously a participatory medium and online users are very much accustomed to being at the heart of the action. Internet users can vote, discuss and let their voices be heard. This participatory inclination is even stronger among young people.

When it comes to dance, I think the two biggest examples of large-scale online involvement have been on the discussion boards dedicated to popular TV dance shows (here's just one example of a forum dedicated to "So You Think You Can Dance.") and the viral nature of the Soulja Boy "Crank That" instructional video (see my post). In the case of the latter example, this dance video has been watched by millions of people and hundreds of fans have uploaded videos of their own take of this dance routine.

I do start with the premise that the concert dance community cannot really ignore what's happening in the popular and social dance space as they explore current and new developments in curation. My simple answer is that the public (dance enthusiasts) simply have to be a bigger piece of the equation.

So my question for presenters and dancers is how specifically are you now or planning in the future to develop new approaches to curation that incorporate, in some manner, the online public? And what specifically will these new approaches to curation look like?

It strikes me that there are many possibilities as well as challenges:

- What types of risks are established performing arts venues and dance companies willing to take in terms of opening-up the curatorial process to online dance enthusiasts? Would you present on your website a list of dance companies who you are considering presenting and allow website visitors to vote on their preferences? Would a dance company allow online voters to determine which of their works are performed? What are other variations of this idea? And how can such programs be implemented that protect the artistic values and approaches of your organization?

- What are new ways of presenting dance altogether that rely heavily or entirely on online audiences? For example, how would you go about curating a series of site-specific works that featured dancers and dance companies selected by Internet users? How would such programs be structured and implemented?

- How could you go about creating a completely open-ended curatorial process that started with a simple question to Internet users such as "What pressing world issues do think need to be addressed? And then based on the issues that are determined to be the most pressing, a dance program could be built around these ideas with lots of user involvement.

- And, finally, curation can be very much connected with audience engagement. If online audiences know that they are in some way part of the equation when dance programs are being developed, they will also enjoy taking advantage of other ways to be part of the dance program. Take the Soulja Boy "Crank That" video above. How can more dance programs give audiences a way to actually learn parts of the choreography and then enable users to upload their videos if they wish? Is this something that you'd value?

There are many opportunities and challenges when it comes to opening-up the curatorial process. To date, I'm not sure I've seen any actual examples in the concert dance community. This is something I hope to see develop over the coming year and I hope that the dance forum at least touches upon these issues.

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