October 11, 2007

In Art and Business Fluidity Trumps Clarity

In my beginner modern dance class last night at the 92nd Street Y, my teacher Susan Cherniak made the point during one of the exercises that she wasn't interested in our arriving at the right point in sync with the music, but was more interested in the process of our getting there. This is simply another way of saying that the quality of movement or the process of moving is more important than the goal of reaching a specific destination.

This need to focus on the fluidity of movement as opposed to the desired outcome might be a good metaphor for many of the conversations and developments that I've been following on the Internet. An emphasis on process, I think, forces us to be more aware of change over time in all spheres of our life, and limits the tendency to become glued to fixed notions about the way things work or ought to work - maybe I'm pushing this point a bit, but here are some examples of what I'm trying to get at.

Here's a TV ad from Zurich Financial Services that I've always liked - it's part of their series of ads with the tag line "Change Happenz":

The point of the ad is straightforward: Don't get locked into fixed ways of thinking because if you do the world will pass you by. So the only survival strategy that makes any sense is to accept that we live in an ambiguous world and that we can't become too attached to specific ways of living and working.

TED Talks Blends PR and Advertising

Last week I received an email from Natasha Dantzig a PR representative with Galloway Media Group that represents the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference. She emailed a number of dance bloggers encouraging us to embed and promote the following video of hip-hop dancer Kenichi Ebina who performed at a TED event this past March:

You'll notice even before watching this video that it's sponsored by BMW and once you click "play," you're presented with a brief BMW video ad followed by a longer one after the dance performance. So Galloway Media Group is in part a public relations firm that builds awareness and audiences for its client, but it's also building an advertising distribution platform for TED at the same time - a nice synergy at no extra cost. In essence, they are encouraging bloggers and others at no financial benefit to themselves to host ads from their sponsors. TED is using the VideoEgg platform to host, distribute and, I assume, monetize its video content.

I think the blending of the PR and advertising functions is an interesting one - something that is not possible to replicate in the same way in the offline world - especially the part about encouraging the embedding of viral videos with sponsorship messages.

Publicity in the Dance World - Pursuing a Traditional Path

I continue to be surprised by how few publicity people in the dance world make personalized pitches to me and other dance bloggers to write about or feature either stories and especially online videos in our posts. I do get an increasing number of press releases. But there seems to be no basic understanding or interest in how bloggers "see" the world. There's not much we can do with press releases in most instances. But if you write us a short personalized email and say, "We just put up this new video that I think you'll like. If you find it of interest, you might want to include it in an upcoming story or yours," we'll be happy. You don't really have to say much more than that except to provide a bit of context for the video and making sure you include links to the video.

What I'm recommending that dance PR people do is really simple, but almost nobody does it. This to me means that many PR people are stuck in a time-warp with very traditional notions and inflexible definitions about what publicity means. Or, to be fair, maybe their clients or bosses are in the time-warp and have very fixed ideas about how to measure PR success. If getting bloggers to write about dance performances doesn't provide concrete benefits to PR people, why should they waste their time pursuing this type of exposure?

In the Dance World, We Can't Even Define Dance

Even when we're creating and discussing dance, nobody is certain how to categorize and define what we're doing any more, even though this is not really a recent development.

At the beginning of July, I had just taken a week-long workshop, "Generating and Crafting Movement" with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (my write-up). So I was inspired to create a dance with my 6-year old nephew. So I asked him what he had done over the past week. He said he took a karate class. So I made a karate movement with my arms. He protested and said that karate wasn't dance. I then told him about Paul Taylor's famous "Duet" that's performed in complete stillness. That seemed to put an abrupt end to our artistic collaboration. The next morning, my nephew pointed to a curtain and proclaimed, "That's not dance!". I figure I must have made an impact.

There are two current blogging conversations that highlight the continued uncertainties about how to categorize dance.

In "Viva la dance dance revolution!," Anna Brady Nuse considers the popular Dance Dance Revolution game and ponders whether it is indeed dance - read comments on this post and Matt Gough's response on his blog as well.

In another post, "What's in a Name," Anna highlights the many terms that are used to try to define what I'll call for now videodance. In a nutshell, there are a huge number of different terms and many people describe this art form in different ways.

A Final Thought...

Of course, we've probably been deluding ourselves for decades and centuries. There's never been as much order as we imagined and all our neat little, seemingly-logical categories were simply created to convince ourselves and others that we lived in a sensible, coherent world. That said, I advocate reinstating the Great Chain of Being:

OK, scratch the Chain of Being idea. We do live in a very fast moving and rapidly changing world and maybe our challenges in defining what happenz around us and our difficulties in creating usable frameworks in which to operate and do business will create new ways for dance, with its fleeting and fluid qualities, to speak to these uncertainties in tangible ways???

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