January 8, 2008

Ballet Nouveau Colorado Chooses Three Finalists for Its 21st Century Choreography Competition

Sometimes I look back at posts I've written and wonder what on earth I was thinking. Back to that thought in a second.

The Ballet Nouveau Colorado (BNC) has just selected its three finalists for its 21st Century Choreography Competition. The first stage of the competition consisted of choreographers uploading their dance videos to BNC's YouTube channel. There were 28 video submissions and the three finalists were chosen from these videos.

You can access the bios of the finalists on the following BNC page - I've embeded the three videos of the finalists below. The finalists were chosen by allocating 25% of the vote to YouTube voting and 75% to the artistic staff.

Now each of the finalists will have a nine-day residency at BNC where they will create their work - this process will be videotaped and documented for the web. The performances of these three works will take place April 11-13 and "celebrity" panelists will choose winner.

Reevaluating My Initial Criticism

I wrote this post last September when this competition was just getting started. I don't really understand why I was being so critical of a project that appeals to me on just about every level.

In any case, it looks like BNC did a good job of encouraging choreographers to submit their videos to YouTube and there were a good number of views, comments and votes cast. I think that it was a good idea to limit the weight of the YouTube voting to 25% because it is very easy for friends to skew results without too much work.

Now it will be fun to get a peek behind-the-scenes as the choreographer finalists create their work.

And it will be especially interesting and enlightening to see what the audiences are like for these performances. Will new audiences be attracted to ballet as a result of this open, YouTube-enabled, participatory process?

More on APAP and Curating

Yesterday I wrote a post Dance Forum on Curation at Dance Presenters Conference. In this post, I expressed my hope that the panelists and audience members explored new approaches to curation that used the Internet during this forum Friday morning. The BNC 21st Century Choreography Competition is an excellent example of new frontiers in curation and would be, I believe, a good springboard for discussion and analysis.

Finalist YouTube Videos

Heather Maloy:

Ma Cong:

Alex Ketley:

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