November 8, 2006

Introducing "Funny Uncles" Dance Blog

I'm delighted to announce the launch of the Funny Uncles blog. "Funny Uncles" is an upcoming performance of Takoma Park, Maryland-based Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

What's great about collaborating with Dance Exchange on this project is that their approach to dance is and has always been very participatory and community oriented. (You can read my account of participating last week in their "Still Crossing" performance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland.)

Liz Lerman is the company's founding artistic director and for thirty years Dance Exchange has been creating multi-generational programs that integrate movement, music, imagery and the spoken word. You can visit the "Who We Are" page on Dance Exchange to learn more.

I've been working with Producing Artistic Director Peter DiMuro to develop a participatory blog that provides audiences new ways to engage with this upcoming work. Peter is the artistic director for Funny Uncles and if you visit this blog you can listen to a number of audio podcasts to learn about the origins of this piece. I'd recommend that you start with this audio program. I also found it especially interesting to hear how Peter described the Dance Exchange approach to generating a movement vocabulary for each work. (You can also register for free access to the Dance Exchange Toolbox, which covers this creative process in-depth.)

Soon dancers who will be performing in Funny Uncles will also be posting to this blog. For a list of dancers, you can visit the Bios page. (This is not a complete list. I still have to add a few more names and their bios.)

There are a number of ways that we will be using this new blog and a number of ideas we plan to explore. Here's an overview:

- First, we want to provide transparent access to how Peter DiMuro and the participating dancers work together to create the choreography for the vignettes that will comprise Funny Uncles -- in other words, we want to provide access to the process of creation. If you visit the post, "Rehearsal Video 'Trio Duet Overlay' with Artistic Director's Commentary," you can see an example of the Dance Exchange approach to choreography. In the first video, you can watch the "generative" phase of movement creation with music. And in the next video, you can watch the same movement but instead of music you can now listen to Peter's audio commentary.

- Next, we want to provide future audiences with on-going opportunities to share their thoughts and feedback about this work-in-progress. As with any blog, you can post your comments at the end of each post. Plus, if you have your own blog you can use the trackback feature to notify us of posts you've written about Funny Uncles. In upcoming posts, we'll share specific questions about the types of feedback we'd appreciate receiving from blog visitors. In the end, our goal is to explore new ways that audiences can have a real say in the evolution of a dance piece.

- One of the things I'll be writing more about in Great Dance and on Funny Uncles is the software and technology we'll be using to develop the Funny Uncles blog and to produce on-going content. That way if you want to explore similar projects for your dance company, you'll have an idea about some of the tools we've used.

- As we look down the road a bit, one of the great opportunities of blogs, video-sharing sites and the emerging participatory culture of the Internet, is that everybody can be actively involved in creating and contributing content. So we will soon be uploading video interviews and stories that relate to the themes of Funny Uncles, which revolve around being an outsider and non-traditional families. We'll then be opening a video library to which you can contribute. Your video contributions could be in the form of movement, spoken word programs or a combination of the two - we'll be providing a lot more information about this topic. Also, we'll be adding a mashup component so that you can create your own video mixes of, say, video clips of the Funny Uncles' dancers with user-generated content submitted by the public.

- Finally, we want to explore the potential synergies between a more collaborative Internet (often referred to as Web 2.0) and live performances. For example, how do you go about creating a hybrid dance performance that integrates company dancers on stage with video submitted (or mashups) in an online library?

We look forward to your thoughts about this project and we encourage you to share your comments.

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