January 15, 2008

The Artistic Explorations of Dancers Should Speak for Themselves

For modern and contemporary dance to grow and prosper over the coming decade, there needs to be, I believe, a rethinking of how the Internet is harnessed to achieve such a successful outcome.

There are two overriding strategies at the heart of this re-evaluation:

1. All online forms of communication and outreach should be driven by the artistic work that has already been created or is in the process of being created. What is the nature of the work? What are the ideas being explored? What are the driving values, aesthetic, emotions, conflicts and other characteristics of this work? Simply following cookie-cutter "best practices" to Internet marketing does not serve the short-term or long-term interests of artists. In the end, artists are creating work that audiences can engage with in some manner. Why not embrace the art itself and use it as your primary or sole communications vehicle when developing your Internet presence? Then, you can develop an Internet marketing campaign around your artistic vision that you are sharing with the public.
2. When at all possible, creative work should be integrated into the larger cultural, intellectual, economic, spiritual, artistic and other conversations that take place throughout our society. For too long, dance has been relegated to its own silo without strong or any connections to non-dance conversations that address the same or similar topics that choreographers and dancers are exploring in isolation. The Internet is an absolutely wonderful medium for developing new types of multi-disciplinary exchanges that will enable the larger public to think of movement as one of the important ways to consider and engage with the world around us.

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