November 26, 2007

Distribution of Dance Coverage in New York City

Now that I've been linking to dance reviews for performances in New York City for the past two weeks, I'm curious to examine what does and does not get coverage.

If you look at the right-hand column of the NYC dance review blog, you'll see that there is a significant imbalance in terms of what is written about. New York City Ballet (8 reviews) and Batsheva Dance Company (7 reviews) followed by Complexions Contemporary Ballet (4) and Pennsylvania Ballet (4). All the others have one or two reviews. (I should point out that I probably have links to about 80+% of reviews in newspapers and blogs and that this data covers only a two-week period).

Why do some dance companies get more coverage than others? Popularity? Prestige? Venue? Or is it that the mainstream media (in this case dance critics who write for newspapers/magazines) has certain favorites? Actually, the mainstream media angle doesn't really work. If you take a look at the reviews for Batsheva Dance Company in particular, you'll see that a good number of the reviews are from bloggers.

And on another front, do dance critics with the New York Times, The Village Voice and other papers only write about the most popular companies performing at the largest/best-known venues? Yes, to a certain extent but definitely not always. I link to three reviews of New York Times' writer Jennifer Dunning. Two are of the New York City Ballet and the other one is of Gesel Mason at Joyce SoHo. Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice, on the other hand, reviews Douglas Dunn & Dancers at Dance New Amsterdam and Monica Bill Barnes & Company at Danspace Project.

There are many ways to examine this aggregation of dance review data from over the past two weeks. But one thing is for sure: Most dance companies get virtually no coverage whatsoever - maybe one review or blog write-up if they're lucky. And the readership of dance reviews in the traditional media has been going down. The Village Voice would not have cut-back its coverage of dance if readership was increasing. And the New York Times would not have removed the link for "Dance" from its home page navigation bar (left side) if dance readership was steady or increasing.

Given this overall paucity of coverage and shrinking readership, what then is the best publicity strategy for dance companies?

Trackback Pings

2 Comments