January 29, 2007

Stories and Links for 1/29/2007

- Swan Lake Samba Girl on the challenges of finding the perfect dance shoes.

- Wheelchair Dancer on the art of contact improvisation in a chair.

- Ballet Austin's blog documents construction of Butler Dance Education Center.

- Arts Marketing blog on how to improve the success of your email campaigns.

- Listen to audio interview with Trisha Brown about her latest work, "I love my robots," recorded on January 19th in New York City. Podcast on the Cal Performances site - part of University of California, Berkeley where she performed this work last Friday. (Trisha Brown website. Review of "I love my robots" in New York Times by Jennifer Dunning).

- "Behind the Curtain at the LA Opera" is a nicely done series of podcasts from the LA Opera. Found the story on Pdcasting News with misleading title, "LA Opera Expands Reach 400% With Podcasts." It's hard to imagine that podcasts wouldn't reach many more people than attend opera performances.

- In "Enough," first published in Dance Now, dance writer Tobi Tobias offers advice on how to avoid seeing the great dancers perform after they've passed their prime. I found parts of this article distasteful. She writes, "If the artist who probably should retire won't, the viewer must decide when enough is enough and retire the artist."

- Judith Mackrell in "Up close and personal" addresses the challenging topic of whether dance critics should remain detached observers. She writes: "We play a double game as critics. We do our best to erase personal loyalties from our writing, yet we are hired for our personal opinions and our personal knowledge. We aspire to being objective, yet it's our involvement with the art form and the practitioners that makes us do the job." [Via ballet.co]

- Memphis Ballet receives grant to study challenges facing regional US ballet companies in midsize cities. I'm curious to know if they'll explore how the Internet can be used to enhance marketing, fundraising and revenue-generation efforts. [Via ArtsJournal]

- Fun dance video to watch: "Weapon of Choice" by Fatboy Slim with Christopher Walken. Is that all Christopher Walken? Background on Wikipedia.

- "Making Video Dance," by Katrina McPherson (2006) now has a DVD companion. I'd like to take a look at this book.
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- Search for dance videos across multiple video sharing sites with Vdoogle.

- vSocial is yet another video service that lets users identify sections of a video, tag them and generate direct links. As I've written before, these applications offer great opportunities for dance writers and educators. [Via Mashable]

- Kevin Nalty in his "Will Video for Food" blog points out that if Jud Laipply of "Evolution of Dance" fame - watch video - launched his video after YouTube started paying content owners, Laipply would now be a millionaire. Maybe modern dancers can follow in his footsteps?

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