The dance history video wiki…This is a great project for a dance history major. Are there such animals yet?

I totally agree with you about the dance world choosing door number 1 when they have been told that there is cash behind door number 2. This seems to happen again and again in dance history. Whatever. Let's move on. I have been searching the web for video, and it is pretty scant. I love the stuff from Katrina McPherson here: http://www.videodance.org.uk/pages/works2.html

Can you connect us to more dance online examples? I really enjoyed article 19, too. I would love to be able to see these full screen.

Another aspect of this is straight ahead audience development. I posted one of the article 19 video clips on a community forum where people blog about art and environment and economic development issues. None of these folks had ever heard of modern dance except for caricatures of Martha Graham. They were blown away! Comments like, “wow this is so cool – I have never seen anything like this! Are there people doing this sort of thing in our area?” So already you can see that tossing a little piece of video out into a different crowd on a blog starts a pattern of interest and audience development. It is extremely difficult to get people who don’t have any idea what it is to go sit in a theater for two hours. In the 60s some choreographers had the good sense to take it to the streets, but streets can be hard on the joints. Here is another free way to get your movement before audiences, and there is less wear and tear on the joints.

Dance videos should be an option for APAP conferences. Presenters are sent packages of website links of the companies that will be at the conference and those websites have video clips so presenters can do their homework and then go directly to those choreographer’s live showings because they know that they are interested. What’s more, McPherson’s dance video could be exhibited in art galleries; they are so beautiful! Now that’s crossing over into a like field that has a much larger audience! I suppose dancers/choreographers don’t want to give their dances away because they want the live performance, but it is not unlike amazon and music selling cds, you get part of the song or in this case, part of the dance or one dance – just enough to make you want to go see the show or just enough to make you buy a ticket. It’s like movie previews guys! Duh! Let’s see more choreographers/companies get with the program. I would hazard a guess that there would be marketing dollars from foundations/corporations for launching this sort of marketing.

Hey dance world... get hip to technology!