Access New York City Dance Reviews from a Single Blog
I'm about to launch a series of new blogs that will feature brief excerpts from all online dance reviews within a specific geographical area.
The first blog in this series, which will launch this week, will be dedicated to dance performances in the New York City area. Essentially, you'll be able to visit and subscribe to this blog to access brief excerpts of online reviews in newspapers, blogs, community forums and on other sites. If a review interests you, you can click a link to be take directly to the entire article or post, whether it resides on Great Dance or any other website.
I'm creating this centralized dance review resource for a number of reasons:
- There is no single website that dancegoers can visit to gain quick access to all reviews for a specific city or town.
- There has been a sharp increase in the number of people writing about dance, especially on blogs. And I think the number of people writing reviews about dance will continue to increase. These new Great Dance blogs that aggregate dance reviews will make it easy for people to find all of these reviews.
- Part of my mission for the expanded Great Dance, now that we're hosting blogs from different dance-makers, is to reach both the existing dance community as well as occasional dancegoers and newcomers to dance. By creating a centralized gateway for accessing a diverse range of voices sharing their thoughts about local performances, it makes it much easier to capture the attention of this larger dance-going public.
- Fourth, many choreographers, dancers and dance companies simply do not get enough or any coverage through traditional media outlets. Given the expansion of online dance reviews, there's no reason for this situation to continue. Even the smallest venue or emerging choreographer should have an opportunity to have their work discussed and reviewed online.
What Dance-Makes Can Do To Build Audiences
A central location of links to all dance reviews, I believe, will be helpful to dancers and dance companies as they work to build their audiences. But dance-makers also have an opportunity to rethink how they work with dance writers for mutual benefit.
One of the perennial problems with traditional dance reviews is that by the time these reviews are published, the dance performances are over. So even a spectacular review won't sell more tickets if there are no more performances to see.
But what would happen if dance-makers increased the number of days between the writing of the first review and opening night? Say there was a four to five day time-frame during which reviews were being written and dance enthusiasts were talking online about your upcoming performance even before your first show? The inevitable result would be that you would be getting much more free publicity than ever before and many more people would be talking about your dance company. The odds are that you would sell more tickets.
There is a catch however. Are you willing to invite dance writers--critics with newspapers, dance bloggers and others--to write about works that probably are not finished? If you invite writers to see your work 5 days or so before opening night, you may have quite a ways to go before your work is ready for the stage.
So the basic question is: At what point are you willing to show your work to people who will write about it so that you can build in as many days as possible for conversation about your upcoming performance to peculate throughout the online world before the curtain goes up? You might decide, for example, that you'll invite writers to your dress rehearsal but not before than.
In addition, I think that as part of this process of expanding the "perculation time-frame" it's worth cultivating relationships with non-traditional dance writers who are blogging about the performances they see or posting their reviews to message boards. For starters, is your publicist reaching out to these writers and encouraging them to cover your dance company? Are they being invited to rehearsals and opening night?
Are You Writing About Dance in New York City?
I already know many people who write about dance in New York. But you may want to drop me an email in any case to let me know about your website/blog or other online writings. I'd like to put together a comprehensive list of writers that I can share with dance companies, presenters, publicists and others who might want to reach out to you. You can email me at doug@greatdance.com.
Advertising on Great Dance
With the launch of this centralized dance review service, first for New York and then for other cities, I'm going to start selling ads on Great Dance to presenters, dance companies and other organizations connected to the dance world. If you'd like to discuss advertising possibilities on Great Dance, I'd be delighted to hear from you. Since I'm in the beginning stages of structuring various ad programs, it's a perfect time to hear from likely advertisers about the specifics of how you would like to benefit from your participation in our advertising programs. You can email me at doug@greatdance.com.
Posted by Doug Fox on November 14, 2007 7:41 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://greatdance.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/1693
Cool!