April 17, 2006

Embracing the Inventive Spirit of the Internet

The dance community has a serious challenge on its hands:

If the Internet culture is marked by interaction and contribution, and the dance culture is marked by observation and passivity, how can dance presenters and dance companies expect to grow audiences for future performances?

My short answer is that it will be very difficult unless the dance community seeks new ways to engage audiences.

The Internet is a very vibrant form of communication. Millions of Internet users are creating content, building upon what others have contributed, and collecting and organizing their favorite movies, songs and pictures. On the other hand, audiences at dance performance sit in their seats as passive observers without any opportunity to contribute to a performance. Can the performing arts world survive this stark contrast?

A New Framework for Audience Participation

In last Friday's post, "Word of Mouth Marketing Builds Audiences," I wrote about two educational sessions that will be moderated by arts marketing and management consultant Alan Brown at the upcoming National Arts Marketing Project Conference.

Alan has written some very insightful articles and studies including a July 2004 report, "The Values Study, Rediscovering the Meaning and Value of Arts Participation" (PDF).

In this report he creates a new framework in which arts participation is divided into five types or modes.

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Here is how these five categories are described:

"- Inventive Arts Participation engages the mind, body and spirit in an act of artistic creation that is unique and idiosyncratic, regardless of skill level.

- Interpretive Arts Participation is a creative act of self-expression that brings alive and adds value to pre-existing works of art, either individually or collaboratively.

- Curatorial Arts Participation is the creative act of purposefully selecting, organizing and collecting art to the satisfaction of one’s own artistic sensibility.

- Observational Arts Participation encompasses arts experiences that you select or consent to, motivated by some expectation of value.

- Ambient Arts Participation involves experiencing art, consciously or unconsciously, that is not purposefully selected -- art that happens to you."

In the context of this arts participation framework, how would you describe the way in which audiences participate in the performing arts and other cultural events?

Andrew Taylor, in his September 14, 2005 write-up about this report, wrote:

I'd suggest that the predominant (perhaps disproportional) emphasis of professional cultural nonprofits is the fourth mode on the list (observational). Have we been ignoring or discounting opportunities in the rest of the spectrum?

To see how different types of arts experiences are plotted within this framework, click on the following graphic (dance is in the bottom right-hand quadrant):

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Contrast the observational nature of most dance performances with how the Internet is used today. To use Alan's framework, millions of Internet users are either inventors, interpreters or curators. Anybody who shares a video, a song or a picture is an inventor. Likewise, the large majority of bloggers are inventors. A person who creates a video mashup by combining two or more videos is an interpreter. And every user of Apple iTunes is a music curator.

Here's a chart the shows the increase in the number of blogs tracked by Technorati. Currently, 35.3 million blogs are tracked and the blogosphere is 60 times bigger than it was three years ago - that represents a huge increase in the number of online "inventors":

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And here's a chart from Alexa that shows the millions of daily users for YouTube, Flickr and MySpace - all highly participatory and interactive communities:

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So with the help of Alan's framework and Andrew's question ("Have we been ignoring or discounting opportunities in the rest of the spectrum?"), I think the path for dance and the performing arts in general is pretty clear:

If Internet users are active participants and contributors (in other words, they are primarily "inventors" and "interpreters"), they will expect nothing less when they participate in arts programs. Thus, arts organizations will have to explore ways to move the predominant mode of participation away from the outer layers of the circle ("observational") and toward the heart of the circle where everybody can contribute, share and have their voice heard.

I don't think this process of broadening the available modes of arts participation is easy, but it is necessary.

Technorati Tags: arts, marketing, web2.0

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