I won't be blogging over the coming week. I'll be back on Monday, July 7th and blogging about many topics including the Melt dance and movement classes that I'll be taking at Movement Research.
Enjoy the July 4th holiday and imagine what this holiday might feel like next year if it is ushered in by a President Obama!
The overall goal of the recommendations I've included below is to get people interested in, excited about, supportive of, financially vested in and participants in any and all aspects of the performing arts.
1) Linking to Other Performing Arts Blogs: For current and future bloggers, the easiest way to help the performing arts is to ensure that performing arts bloggers and arts organizations have websites that appear toward the top of Google and other search engine results. The way you can make this happen is by linking to other performing arts blogs and websites. It's that simple. The more in-bound links you have, the more likely your web pages will be listed at the top of search results.
So this is my recommendation: Link to more blogs, especially blogs that cover different aspects of the performing arts. Why not link to opera, theater and concert music blogs? And hopefully bloggers from these fields would link to dance blogs.
2) Interdisciplinary Blog Carnivals: How many performing arts blogs are out there? If you add up the dance, theater, concert music, opera and related blogs, would you reach a thousand, two thousand blogs? I'm not sure. Let's be conservative and say that there are a thousand. If we conducted a series of blog carnivals -- asked fellow bloggers to address a specific topic in their blogs and then aggregated these results on multiple blogs -- we could generate large-scale conversations about important issues facing the performing arts community. These blog conversations would reach all of the readers of these blogs and the audience would be magnified many times over because of the distributed nature of this conversation.
3) Improving the Quality of Storytelling: This suggestion may not sound like it has anything to do with grassroots marketing. But before we can talk about viral marketing, see next recommendation, we have to consider how the Internet is used to tell stories about what dancers and dance companies actually do and create. Overall, my opinion is that a large percentage of dance websites and blogs do a very poor job of telling the arts-going public what they do. This is very unfortunate. The way that dance companies describe their repertoire, their educational programs and their outreach efforts can be improved considerably so that it reflects the quality and scope of what they actually do. I think that local educational sessions about this topic would be very beneficial. I have the same criticisms about how dancers upload their videos to YouTube and other video sites. Not enough compelling context and insight is provided about these videos so the audience ends-up being too small.
4) Viral Marketing Campaigns: Encouraging your online fans, supporters and funders to spread the word is not especially difficult if you implement a word-of-mouth campaign. For four years, Drew McManus of the Adaptistration blog has been running the Take A Friend To Orchestra (TAFTO) program. To spread the word about this audience-building initiative, he has encouraged supporters of this program to take the banners he's created and place them on their respective blogs, social networking pages and websites - here are the many different size banners that he has created.
5) Integrating Dance Into Non-Dance Conversations: One of the perennial questions about the performing arts is how do you make it relevant to non-traditional arts audiences. One approach is the national advocacy strategy where you tell everybody how important the arts are and you demand that they embrace the arts. The other approach is to show relevancy by example. And one very specific way to do this is to upload a video to YouTube in response to a video that is popular and relevant. I've never seen this done before and it's not difficult to do. For example, if you create a dance piece about the Iraq war, why not post it on YouTube in response to movie trailers promoting films that deal with the Iraq war? This way, audiences will see your video in the context of important issues that we have to grapple with. What are other ways that dance and the other arts can integrate their work online into non-arts conversations?
6) Grassroots Mobilizing: A complaint about my suggestions above is probably that they are focused too much on performing arts bloggers. A nice way of putting people like myself at the center of these recommendations! But in fairness, bloggers tend to be passionate about the topics and focus of their blogs and, collectively, they have large audiences of readers. Plus, they are easy to mobilize for grassroots efforts. But let's expand the circle a bit. It would be great if somebody with the inclination worked toward organizing all of the bloggers in the performing arts field as well as people and organizations with social networking pages. That should cover just about everybody in the performing arts. How long would it take to capture basic demographic data about this audience of hundreds of thousands or millions of people? What financial and technical resources would actually be needed? In the online world, costs simply do not have to be that large?
7) A Mobilized, Organized Performing Arts Community: Well, now let's say that we were organized as I said in item six. What next? What would we want to achieve as an Internet-organized, fast-response team of performing arts supporters and activists? Should we revisit the voting results from the AmericaSpeaks Town Meetging sessions at the National Performing Arts Convention (Link to results - scroll down a bit when you go to this page). I find it difficult to believe that an Internet audience of performing arts activists would embrace all of these recommendations -- it strikes me at least as way too top down and traditional. So maybe we would create a new agenda from scratch that leveraged the distributed, low-cost nature of the Internet and the ability of people to react quickly in response to whatever they thought was important. Also, has any of the associations in the performing arts field created such a mobilized, interdisciplinary group of empowered arts supporters? My guess is no. Even with the advocacy programs I've seen in the performing arts, energy always flows from the bottom up. It does not flow from the bottom out. A campaign to lobby congress for more money for the arts would be an example of energy flowing from the bottom up. A distributed campaign to promote the arts through a large-scale blogging carnival on blogs and social networking sites would be an example of energy flowing from the bottom out.
8) A Mundane Series of Suggestions: You can email one million arts supporters in a matter of moments. What would we do? What simple steps could we take online that would start improving how people thought about the performing arts? We could recommend improving pages on Wikipedia that deal with the arts. We could mobilize to post large numbers of comments on popular newspaper website dealing with dance, theater or music. We could wage a grassroots effort to support innovative online educational programs and outreach efforts. There are thousands of possibilities -- some that will seem very basic and ordinary. But collectively, they will make a huge difference. I'd like to know what readers would recommend that we do with instant access to such a large focused audience?
9) NetSquared: I encourage readers to visit the website for NetSquared, an organization that consists of people with non-profits and NGOs and whose "...mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available - tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support." I've always found it intriguing how NetSquared supports it audience both online and through real-world Meetups. And I think that this might be a good model for the performing arts.
Many of my suggestions above are pretty straightforward - although the mobilization component obviously is a large undertaking. Overall, it strikes me that the performing arts community, particularly the national associations that represent different parts of the performing arts, are fairly indifferent about the possibilities of harnessing the Internet on many fronts. And the national associations, in terms of their membership bases, only represent a small percentage of the artists who are out there.
Am I wrong about the national performing arts association in dance, music, theater and opera? Are they embracing the grassroots nature of the Internet to reach new audiences, promote their respective arts forms, integrate their art into broader conversations about politics, war and social issues? Happy to be proven wrong - I just haven't seen any examples.
Dance Class at Movement Research and Creative Tango
After a hiatus of four months, I'm back to "real" dance. That's about the most unfair characterization of different types of dance I could possibly come up with. Starting in January, I became obsessed with Argentine Tango--taking classes, going to practicas (practice sessions) and dancing at milongas.
However much I enjoy tango, for me it's not the "real" thing. It's social dancing. It's not the same as taking modern or creative movement classes. I'm sure everybody has their own notion of what's "real" when it comes to dancing. My definition is related to freedom of movement and experimentation and not being tied down to very specific rules and structures. But even tango can cross-over into the more creative dance realm. I've really enjoyed the Tango-X workshops with Fayzah and Kendra that take place once a month at DNA in downtown Manhattan. They'll take a concept from tango such as sacadas (displacing the weight of your partner) and developing a creative approach to experimenting with this idea.
At the about the 42-second mark of this Argentine tango video, the leader executes a back sacada with his left leg, which requires that his partner move her left leg as well -- this is what is meant by weight displacement:
What I like about the Tango-X workshops is that they are much more experimental than regular tango classes and part of the focus might be on how many different approaches you and your partner can create to doing sacadas. Unfortunately, their classes are only about once a month. I'd like to take the Tango-X workshop once a week.
Movement Research Class with Jennifer Monson
I didn't mean to go into my tango digression. I meant to write about my Saturday class with Jennifer Monson at Movement Research. Jennifer was subbing for K.J. Holmes' Saturday morning class, which is called "The Athletics of Intimacy, Improvisations."
Jennifer is involved in a number of dance programs and research initiatives that are very interdisciplinary in nature. Just the types of projects I'm fascinated by.
Here's an overview of her two-hour class that had eight students:
In the early part of the class we explored the relationship among our kidneys, spleen and heart. How we could move our body from each of theses organs and what the connection was between these organs as we warmed-up.
We then partnered with a fellow dancer for the rest of the class. I partnered with Amy (she said I could use her name if I wrote about the class).
The first exercise was a ground-based contact improvisation exploration where we interacted with our partner while continuing to think about moving from our kidneys, spleen and heart.
Then standing-up, each person would dance for a few minutes while one's partner used one or two hands to press against the location of the different internal organs we were concentrating on for this exercise.
I told Amy after I danced that I would have had a completely different focus if I danced the same exercise again. When Amy danced and I put pressure against her different organs, we were much more engaged in a duet and she was not just using the exercise to be notified of the location of her kidneys, spleen, etc., she was also using this contact to respond to my movement as well. Which in retrospect seems obvious to me but I wasn't thinking about it at the time. It might have been partly that I was warming-up and partly that I was concentrating very much on the specifics of moving my body from each of my organs. Next time, I'll try to be more in a collaborative mind-set.
Energy Lines
Then we moved on to what I believe were exercises based on Skinner Release Technique. While an organ focus was more of a grounded, heavier dance, thinking about energy lines was more outward-directed and flowing.
To get started, one partner would stand still and the other would lightly draw straight energy lines on their partners legs, arms, back, chest and head. In other words, imagine lightly dragging your fingers starting at the bottom of a person's back, and quickly creating a line with both of your hands that goes up between your partners shoulder blades and then moves up into space. You're trying to give your partner a sense of a line of energy that moves beyond the body. This way when they are dancing, they can think about how these lines of energy can direct the flow of their movement.
Then once we generated these energy lines from a standing position, one of us would dance and the other one would continue to generate lines of energy on the different parts of our partner's body. This exercise is a bit awkward because you're trying to draw these energy lines while your partner is moving in unpredictable ways.
Then during the final exercise, we each did about a five-minute dance improvisation while our partner watched. The goal was to think about, in an active or passive manner, the different qualities of either dancing from the organs or moving with energy lines in mind. And to also be conscious of the transitions.
It took me awhile to warm-up for this exercise and I was thinking very analytically about what dance mode I was in and how and when I would transition to the other mode.
When I was watching Amy, some of the time I could tell which mode she was in and when she was transitioning from, say a more weighted organ-focus to the larger movements of energy lines.
I really have to take more classes at Movement Research - I find all of their classes fascinating and I have much to learn!
The Metropolitan Opera Fills House with Sanskrit Lovers
Summary: The Metropolitan Opera sold out performances of Philip Glass' Satyagraha this spring despite the fact that the libretto is in Sanskrit and season ticket subscribers opted-out of this obscure opera. They ended-up selling a large number of individual tickets by creating a series of marketing initiatives "designed to attract specialized audiences. New-age magazines, yoga groups, anti-apartheid organizations, India groups, South African organizations, et al." These audiences, it was determined correctly, would be attracted to the theme of non-violent resistance and the life of Mohandas Gandhi. These ticket buyers were definitely not traditional opera fans.
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One of the important and often overlooked ways of selling tickets to dance performances is by connecting the content and themes of a dance work with the interests of the audience. The beauty of this approach is that it can be used to promote performances to audiences with a lot, a little or no connection or understanding of dance whatsoever.
This content-specific approach underlies my recent series of posts on how dancers and dance companies can develop a vertical marketing strategy (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3 and Post 4).
In the introductory post to this series, I wrote about the interdisciplinary explorations of choreographer Karole Armitage and how the themes of her work would resonate with non-dance audiences:
Consider the Armitage Gone! Dance program at the Guggenheim Museum this past weekend. Here was a wonderful program where Karole Armitage choreographed a series of dance sketches that were inspired very directly by Brian Greene's popular book "The Elegant Universe." Armitage briefly introduced each new section of the program and Greene offered the most concise explanation imaginable of the guiding principles of theoretical physics. The simple fact that Armitage is exploring quantum mechanics, the curvature of space time and string theory means that there is a new gateway through which non-dance audiences with an interest in physics can connect to her work.
In very clear and specific terms, he describes how the Met recovered from its financial woes after the glory days of full houses in the '90s which were followed by financial troubles on all fronts:
But in the last six years, everything's gone awry. Attendance has declined sharply. Costs have risen every year. Philanthropic contributions have flattened out. The endowment is woefully inadequate. Competition for the cultural dollar is soaring. There are signs of organizational complacency. And even though your audience is disappearing, you have no marketing organization in place to try to offset the decline.
Then the turnaround started to happen under the direction of Peter Gelb. The new gameplan consisted of three major initiatives:
(1) improve the product, (2) create a major marketing effort, and (3) add new sources of revenues and audience development.
My favorite story deals with the new marketing strategy of the Met for selling tickets to Philip Glass' opera Satyagraha. I'm going to quote from Rosen at length because I think this is an excellent example of how the themes of an opera can be embraced in order to reach non-traditional opera audiences:
An example from the past season, the marketing of Satyagraha, illustrates how inspired marketing can work. Philip Glass's work is, for many, an acquired taste. If you add to that hurdle the fact that the Satyagraha libretto is written entirely in Sanskrit and that Met Titles are not used during the performance, it provides a marketing challenge of the highest level.
As the 2007-08 season began, here's what happened: Seven performances of Satyagraha was scheduled for the spring of 2008. Many subscribers who found Satyagraha included in their series decided to opt out of the Glass opera -- they traded in their seats for other operas. And single-ticker buyers turned out to be equally cool to the prospect of watching a Sanskrit work. Normally, as a season progresses, single-ticket sales start out filling up the house. But a funny thing happened in this case. The forecasted box office of Satyagraha started declining, and at an alarming rate. The more time that passed, the worse the box office ahead looked. If this continued, there was a chance the opera would play to near-empty houses.
So a marketing task force was put together. For a modest budget, aided by contributions from a board member, the team was able to create dozens of different marketing initiatives designed to attract specialized audiences. New-age magazines yoga groups, anti-apartheid organizations, India groups, South African organizations, et al.
It worked. By the end of its run, Satyagraha had sold out its run. (By the way, it was a terrific production. I like to quip that Satyagraha is now my favorite Sanskrit opera.) Next year, the same team will have an opportunity to apply its narrow-focus marketing techniques to selling the John Adams opera, Doctor Atomic -- a contemporary work about the creation of the atomic bomb.
According to Rosen, "The Battleship Has Turned on all fronts." Ticket sales are improving strongly, sell-outs are increasing rapidly and subscriptions are growing.
I encourage everybody to read Rosen's post. It's an excellent case study that documents the specifics of the Mets turn-around.
Reaching Non-Traditional Dance Audiences
Will this content-specific approach to marketing prove effective in cultivating new dance audiences? I think it will. I'd be very interested in hearing from dancers, dance companies and presenters who have embraced this marketing strategy.
Participating in Active Blogging Conversations about Dance and the Performing Arts
I've been participating in a number of active blogging conversations on other blogs and here on The Kinetic Interface. Many of these posts deal with the recent National Performing Arts Convention (NPAC) and its Program Notes blog. Other topics include new approaches to dance writing, strategies for marketing dance online, and how to convert dance audiences into cheering fans.
I'm sure the other bloggers as well as myself would appreciate your contributions to these on-going conversations.
The bulk of the blogger conversations I followed last week dealt with NPAC:
- Drew McManus offers a wrap-up of the NPAC conference in "The Good, The Not-So-Good, And Everything In-Between." While Drew has a number of positive things to say about the conference, he writes that the AmericaSpeaks town meeting results "seemed to center on "Messiah-centric" solutions in the form of creating some national figure to step in and solve everyone's problems."
- Molly Sheridan in "The Government We Deserve" writes that NPAC "left me both incredibly inspired and intensely frustrated by the state of the arts." Regarding the Town Meeting: "...the AmericaSpeaks process was a lesson in everything that seems wrong to me with democracy--many people making decisions on topics most don't have the time to fully grasp before voting requires them to take ill-formed stances."
- Greg Sandow in "Hall of mirrors?" writes that the results of the Town Meeting reflect a lack of practical considerations and demonstrate a glaring instance of "unfocused amateur enthusiasm." He continues: "People in the arts won't talk about what the outside world is really like. What they like to do is go running down a hall of mirrors, shouting out in great excitement. The arts are wonderful! If only people knew that! If only people were exposed to the arts, then they'd love us!"
- Greg Sandow also posted "Misleading democracy" in which he says he is heartened by the comments he received to his "Hall of Mirrors" post and reiterates his believe about the town hall meeting that it was "silly...to assemble a group of well-meaning amateurs and ask them to solve a serious problem that needs the attention of professionals."
- From Theatre Ideas, Scott Walters writes that attending the conference was "eye-opening" and that "theatre programs across the nation must expand their focus to include more than teaching the skills to create art. Artists must learn to tell the story of the arts in a compelling way, and doing so requires that they understand (and devise themselves) a powerful expression of theatre's purpose and theatre's power..."
- In "The Failed Internet Strategy of the National Performing Arts Convention," I explain why I believe that the online efforts of the conference organizers were ineffective: "...they [conference organizers] didn't understand that 21st Century technology (the Internet, blogging, social networks) could be used to propagate and build upon their initial ideas and agenda. And they didn't reach out to the hundreds of passionate performing arts bloggers who would have been delighted to brainstorm about, discuss and share the ideas generated during the conference's townhall meetings.
- Drew McManus in his Adaptistration blog responds to my post about the NPAC Internet strategy in "Can't Bloggers Get A Little Love?": "I thought Doug captured what many conventioneers were feeling: a lack of support for bloggers and a cloistered environment for the handful of bloggers who were featured."
Considering new approaches to dance writing:
- Tonya Plank in her Swan Lake Samba Girl blog asks readers to consider "The Power of Words Versus Pictures Versus Videos" in terms of how bloggers and critics write about dance: "Do you think if a writer is really good and can convey the beauty of a dancer or of a dance, that pictures are unnecessary?"
- In my "Writing with Video - New Approaches to Internet-Based Dance Writing and Criticism," I offer specific ideas about how video can become an integral part of how critics write about dance for online readers, and start with this premise: "...given the ever-improving quality and greater availability of online dance videos, I think it is now a good time for dance critics and writers to consider new, alternative approaches to writing about dance for an Internet audience...Specifically, that when critics write about dance for the Internet, that they incorporate dance video clips in a very direct fashion into their posts or articles."
New Approaches to Marketing Dance
- In "How do we market artistry without losing the art?" Megan Sprenger of Dance Theater Workshop says that new approaches to engaging dance audiences ought to be explored: "There must be a better way. With ticket sales down 15%, we need to find a way to work together to approach new audiences in a language that does not intimidate and does not read like a text book." An active conversation follows.
Are Sports and Ballet That Different?
- And in a post to the new dance blog Culturist, "I went to the theater, and all I got was this lousy bobblehead doll...,," Claudia La Rocco wonders why can't dance fans be more like the loud, engaged audiences at baseball games: "The audience culture is one of my favorite things about baseball. The raucous, festive, participatory nature of it is in such sharp contrast (gross generalization alert) to the often joyless audience culture for the fine arts (I'm thinking symphonies, museums and ballets here, not burlesque halls), where it seems that glaring at your neighbor for breathing too loudly and destroying the sanctity of The Experience is often as much the focus as watching, in silence and stillness and the dark, what happens on the stage."
Did I miss other active conversations taking place in the dance and related blogospheres?
In today's post, as an alternative response to the results from the AmericaSpeaks 21st Century Town Meeting, which was a centerpiece of the NPAC conference, I would like to propose the creation of a grassroots Internet campaign to promote, strengthen and expand the performing arts in the United States. This bottom-up strategy would embrace the large-scale, distributed nature of the online world to reach, engage and energize audiences, artists (professional and amateur), teachers, children and arts supporters.
To review the results from the Town Meeting, you can visit the conference blog, Program Notes or visit the results for the main topics: diversity, education and advocacy.
As you look at the results of this participatory idea-generation process (read Andrew Taylor's, Drew McManus' and Molly Sheridan's description of this process -- and also read the interesting reflections of Greg Sandow who was not there), you'll notice that the delegates tend to support top-down strategies for improving the success of the performing arts in the US. Here is how the audience voted to the following question about arts advocacy:
What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the NATIONAL level?
The audience using electronic keypads voted, in what strikes me as a very traditional and conservative fashion, for their favorite answer:
Organize a national media campaign with celebrity spokespersons, catchy slogans (e.g. "Got Milk"), unified message, and compelling stories - 27%
Create a Department of Culture/Cabinet-level position which is responsible for implementing a national arts policy - 23%
Lobby elected political officials for pro-arts policy and funding; demand arts policy platform from candidates - 14%
Create a coordinated national performing arts policy campaign involving artists and organizations - 12%
Collect, analyze and disseminate data demonstrating the value of the arts (e.g. economic, intrinsic, developmental/educational values) - 12%
Establish a National Arts Day/Festival with free performances, open houses, and art-making opportunities - 8%
Explore interactive new media initiatives to increase access and relevance (e.g. create a "Google Arts"-type resource, blogs,YouTube) - 5%
...my impression is that the majority opinion seemed to center on "Messiah-centric" solutions in the form of creating some national figure to step in and solve everyone's problems.
Drew's "messiah-centric" description is confirmed by the two most popular answers above. The audience wanted famous spokespeople and a cabinet-level position for the arts.
Well, to put it simply: This desired top-down, hierarchical approach to advocacy and communications is just one possible approach that can be taken by the performing arts community. There are other avenues that can be considered and, I believe, there was a real missed opportunity to consider these other possibilities in a more meaningful way.
Democracy in a Vacuum Doesn't Really Work
The last option of the results above deals with "interactive new media initiatives" and "Google Arts" -- I really don't know what this means -- and only received 5% of the votes. Does this mean that the delegates thought that the Internet was irrelevant? Or is this poor formulation a reflection of what Molly Sheridan wrote about this AmericaSpeaks process:
That said, the AmericaSpeaks process was a lesson in everything that seems wrong to me with democracy--many people making decisions on topics most don't have the time to fully grasp before voting requires them to take ill-formed stances.
I'm an advocate of this (or other) participatory initiatives to seek ways to improve the performing arts. But, if as Sheriden might be recommending, pre-conference materials were created to prepare delegates for this Town Meeting, the generated strategies might have been more thoughtful and comprehensible. For example, one of the pre-conference briefing papers could have provided an analysis of successful online grassroots efforts. This way delegates would have formulated a better question about using the Internet and would have had more background information before choosing which of the advocacy strategies made the most sense to them.
Performing Arts Organizations Already Support High-Level Advocacy
The leading organizations within the performing arts community in the US already devote time, money and resources to support The American Arts Alliance, which is an
advocate for America's professional nonprofit arts organizations, artists and their publics before the US Congress and key policy makers. Through legislative and grassroots action, the American Arts Alliance advocates for national policies that recognize, enhance and foster the contributions the performing arts make to America.
Why don't these performing arts organizations make the same investment to support grassroots advocacy via the Internet? One of the reason why the Howard Dean campaign and now the Barack Obama campaign have been so successful is that they understand that enthusiastic supporters, in the millions, can be reached and energized via the Internet. And these supporters will, in turn, connect with their friends, family and colleagues to encourage them to vote for Obama.
This grassroots approach to advocacy is no longer new or novel. And it's time for the performing arts to jump on this bandwagon.
Next Post: An Implementation Strategy for a Grassroots Campaign
Next week, I'll continue this discussion by writing a post that will offer a specific implementation strategy for how the performing arts community can go about the process of creating a grassroots campaign.
Writing with Video - New Approaches to Internet-Based Dance Writing and Criticism
Dance critics write reviews for the Internet in the same manner as they write for print publications. This similarity of approach is understandable given the relative newness of the online medium.
But given the ever-improving quality and greater availability of online dance videos, I think it is now a good time for dance critics and writers to consider new, alternative approaches to writing about dance for an Internet audience.
I would like to propose that dance writers begin "to write with video." Specifically, that when critics write about dance for the Internet, that they incorporate dance video clips in a very direct fashion into their posts or articles. So, for example, instead of indicating, in passing, that a reader can watch a clip of a dance company that is performing this evening, they explain in their article how a reader can view this clip in order to gain more insight and understanding about the performance they are about to see.
I've seen almost no examples of what I'm proposing except when it comes to dance on the camera or dance films--Anna Brady Nuse takes this approach in her Move The Frame blog.
I think that since there are a large number of videos for most types of dance and that it's easy to embed these videos in stories, that it is time to rethink the balance between words and video.
Also, by emphasizing the video watching experience, dance writers will be making the experience of reading dance articles and posts more self-contained. As things stand now the full potential of a dance review cannot be realized by a reader until he or she actually sees a live dance performance. The truth, of course, is that only a small percentage of review readers will see a specific performance. So the review, for a large percentage of readers is often about an experience that they will never have.
By focusing on the video, as I've proposed above, dance journalism for the Internet becomes an enjoyable and educational experience in and of itself (I'm not saying that readers can't enjoy well-written reviews if they don't see a performance. I'm simply saying it's a different type of experience). Say, a critic writes a video retrospective of Merce Cunningham using the many available clips on YouTube as source material. This online article will likely provide me and others with invaluable insights, historical background and questions to consider as I watch the curated clips. As things stand now, I think I'm the only one who has ever put together an online video retrospective of Merce Cunningham's works and I'm not the ideal person to be doing this.
For me, such an article would instantly improve my knowledge and understanding of Merce Cunningham. This article might further be enhanced if videos of other choreographers and dancers were included that showed what specifically influenced Cunningham and which choreographers he, in turn, influenced. The key to the success of this piece, I believe, would be the analysis and commentary that helped readers gain a better understand of Merce and helped readers better enjoy future live performances of his work.
By "writing with video," there are many paths that dance critics can take to writing about dance in new ways that will be invaluable to readers and will likely be read by larger audiences as well.
Before highlighting examples of different approaches to using video to write about dance, I would like to mention Tonya Plank's post from yesterday (also read the comments) in which she addresses the topic of dance writing and the relationship of words, pictures and video.
Possibilities for Writing With Video
Here are different approaches that can be taken to writing with video. As you'll see from my first suggestion, there are indeed many possibilities, but also challenges.
1) Dance Reviews
If you follow the recommendation of this post and decide to "write with video," the first question is how do you use videos in your reviews. Writing reviews with video happens to be problematic because writers will want to include video clips of the work or works that they saw performed. But these clips might not be available. And if they are available, they may be very short and, thus, not include the material you would like to highlight.
Here's a video clip uploaded by Jacob's Pillow to YouTube promoting a summer performance of Hofesh Shechter Company, which will perform "In Your Rooms" and "Uprising." But what is the name of the dance featured in this clip? When and where was it performed? I believe that presenters and dance companies ought to do a better job describing the videos they post online so that it's easier to write about this content.
By my questions about the above video, it may sounds like I'm saying it's too difficult to "write with video." That is not the case, I'm simply pointing out that of all the different types of dance stories that can be written for the Internet with video that reviews (followed by previews) represent the most challenges because critics need very specific video content for these articles and posts.
2) Dance Previews
Since there are many ways to write previews, dance writers have more flexibility than with reviews in terms of their search for optimal video. A writer, could for example, find two or three excerpts of different recent performances to highlight various aspects of a choreographer and provide context for thinking about the dance one is about to see.
Here's a clip of Keigwin + Company, uploaded by the Joyce to promote another summer performance. By the way, the Joyce did not indicate what this performance is, when it was performed and the names of the dancers. I think that these are glaring omissions that should be fixed. Given that prestigious presenters such as the Joyce and Jacob's Pillow are making the same mistakes, it would probably be helpful if we came-up with recommended guidelines for how video should be uploaded to video sharing sites (there are a host of other issues, of course, such as music licensing that have to be addressed).
My question for critics would be: How could you incorporate the following clip into a preview? What would you ask your readers to think about and examine about any and all aspects of the dancing, choreography, music and other elements of the performance?
3) Dance Interviews
Dance critics, with their wealth of knowledge and experience about dance, can provide invaluable context for video interviews with choreographers and dancers.
Consider that you are writing a post about this Christopher Wheeldon interview, which is part of the "Remembering Jerome Robbins" series from the New York City Ballet. How would you use this clip to tell your story and provide insight to your readers? What additional Wheeldon videos might you include in this post?
By the way, click the "more info" link on the YouTube page for this video. New York City Ballet does an excellent job of providing the important details and uses this clip to promote specific performances.
4) Dance Documentaries
Dance documentaries are very similar to interviews. Here is a mini-documentary about American Ballet Theater star Angel Corella. Once again, you'll find an excellent description about this video.
While this profile is very good as a free-standing video, how would dance critics go about writing about it to provide more insight, context and analysis for readers? Or would they, instead, write a review of this Corella profile?
5) Historical Dance Videos
Here's a three minute video of Giselle with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. I'm sure that dance critics could write an excellent viewer guide for this clip:
6) Dance for the Camera
Dance for the Camera or video dance is, by definition, self-contained and especially worthwhile to write about when you can embed an entire dance on camera performance directly into your review article or post.
An excerpt from DV8 Physical Theater's "The Cost of Living":
7) Choreographer Retrospectives
As I mentioned at the outset of this post, historical retrospectives were made for the Internet. I think it would be great if dance critics wrote video retrospectives for the leading choreographers and dancers. In one article or post, they could pull-in, say, their top five favorite videos and provide readers with analysis, comparative insight and historical progressions.
Here's Merce Cunningham's Biped, one of many Cunningham videos available on YouTube:
8) Mixed Media Performances
One of the advantages of Internet video is that multiple types of video can be pulled into a single post or article. Take Capacitor's Biome, which consists of both a dance performance and a projected video. Excerpts of the performance and the entire video presentation are on YouTube. The availability of these clips makes it much easier to write about this performance -- as a review, preview, or in any other format you wish.
Biome performance:
Projected video:
9) Site-Specific Performances
Site-specific performances can be written by dance writers who have seen the performance and by those who are writing about the performance based solely on their experience of the video.
Here's a performance from Project Bandaloop:
10) Choreographers and Dancers in the Studio
Dance videos go well beyond the stage, as clips above show. Here's rehearsal video footage of Mark Morris working with his dancers in preparation for last year's performance of "Mozart Dances." How would dance critics write about this clip?
Conclusion
I figured that I'd limit this post to ten videos. But I've barely touched the surface. There are many other types of dance to write about in online articles and posts.
Gesture, Movement and the Body Control New Interfaces
Today's post is an update to my video background page, "Movement Is at the Heart of Scientific and Technological Change." Below, you'll find eight videos that demonstrate how gesture, movement and the body are being coupled with new technologies and interfaces for manipulating, viewing and controlling art and objects:
Using Your Body to Manipulate an Art Installation
Light Rain from wowlab is an art installation that users manipulate with their hands and body - text in Japanese, but you'll find pictures and a video clip:
And watch this earlier clip from the creators of the above video to see how they set-up the Wii balance board to control these applications.
Manipulating Computer Animations with Your Feet
LM3Labs developed Catchyoo Sprites, which allows users to manipulate animations on large-screen display with their feet and hands:
Gestures Control Toshiba Notebook
Hand gestures, without physical contact with a computer, can be used to control
Toshiba Qosmio G55 notebook [via Laptop, Trend Hunter and Fresh Creation]:
FlicFlex
The Flicflex concept is based on a bendable, flexible computer interface created by Chris Woebken [via Fresh Creation]:
Take A Seat
Jelte van Geest, a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, created these movable, robotic chairs with embedded RFID chips that follow the owner around in preparation for the next seating -- one or more chairs can be controlled simultaneously [via momeld, technabob and Grinding] :
TelePresence in Action
Here's an example of telepresence: a business meeting with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco:
The Failed Internet Strategy of the National Performing Arts Convention
Thursday, June 19th: Correction, update and bloggers linking to this story at end of this post.
Overview: In today's post, I would like to explain and demonstrate how the Internet strategy of the National Performing Arts Convention, which just wrapped-up in Denver, Colorado, failed to embrace one of the most important elements of online communications: the transmission, evolution and sharing of ideas - in Internet parlance, this is called a "meme." To put it another way, NPAC held a conference in a brick-and-mortar setting to create an agenda for the 21st Century, but they didn't understand that 21st Century technology (the Internet, blogging, social networks) could be used to propagate and build upon their initial ideas and agenda. And they didn't reach out to the hundreds of passionate performing arts bloggers who would have been delighted to brainstorm about, discuss and share the ideas generated during the conference's townhall meetings.
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The National Performing Arts Convention took place last week (June 10-14) in Denver, Colorado. Leading US-based performing arts organizations representing music, dance, theater and opera joined forces to create this joint event with the theme of "Taking Action Together":
NPAC will lay the foundation for future cross-disciplinary collaborations, cooperative programs and effective advocacy. Formed by 30 distinct performing arts service organizations demonstrating a new maturity and uniting as one sector, NPAC is dedicated to enriching national life and strengthening performing arts communities across the country.
A centerpiece of this event (as presented by the conference website -- I unfortunately was not at this conference) was the 21st Century Town Meeting, which had an ambitious goal of setting a common agenda for the future of the arts:
During NPAC, participants will create an agenda that activates the performing arts community in America. This process will engage every single convention participant in a series of dialogues held at caucus meetings on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, culminating in a 21st Century Town Meeting on Saturday morning. While contributing to a blueprint for action for our emerging performing arts community, each delegate over the four days will collaborate closely with some 35 other participants from all aspects of the performing arts in energized, focused discussions in which all ideas are welcomed. Make sure your voice is heard: join as many of these sessions as possible. Play a part in building a vital performing arts future!
A team of professional conveners from the renowned group AmericaSpeaks will guide participants through the process, using the latest technologies. Discussions will build upon the previous day's work, building momentum that will culminate at Saturday morning's closing session, which should not be missed!
The Limitations of The NPAC Internet Strategy
The purpose of NPAC is to create a shared vision and agenda for the future of the performing arts. To build momentum for this vision and to create large-scale buy-in and discussion, you need to engage a large audience of passionate people who will discuss these ideas and share their insights with others on an on-going, long-term basis.
Yet, the organizers of NPAC made no effort to reach out to the thousands of arts bloggers, especially the hundreds, maybe thousands of performing arts bloggers. (The performing arts bloggers consist of bloggers who cover dance, concert music, theater, opera and related interests).
By "not reaching out," I mean the following:
- Nobody bothered to create a comprehensive email distribution list of performing arts bloggers.
- Bloggers did not receive news items or releases before, during or after the conference.
- The official conference blog, Program Notes, which is written on a volunteer basis, is haphazard, poorly-formated and barely provides any factual details about what actually happened at the conference. But I do appreciate Sarah Baird's response to my comment in which she provides details about what happened at the blogging-focussed sessions. Overall, this blog simply offers a smattering of disconnected ideas and experiences and there is very little follow-up in response to comments.
- Also, Program Notes has a short, arbitrary blogroll that consists of just nine blogs. Why and how were these nine blogs chosen?
- And, most importantly, at this late date in the game, there is no information on the Internet about what happened at the 21st Century Town Meeting. What did delegates decide were the most important agenda items? How will this agenda be refined, discussed and implemented? Why was this information not shared in real-time, or at least the same day, with the global Internet audience?
Yesterday, I emailed the publicity person for the conference, Ross Moonie, asking just these questions. He emailed me back at 2:30 AM my time saying that press releases are coming soon and that the outcomes from the Town Meeting were "complex (and wonderful) and the figures from that will take some time to breakdown and organize. It became the central strong core of NPAC, as thousands very actively and thoughtfully participated in the caucuses, so you can imagine the effort to put that raw material together...."
I'm not at all criticizing Moonie in what I'm about to say; I'm criticizing the organizations who are hosting this conference. When it comes to the Internet and blogging, time matters. If a joint conference representing all major arms of the performing arts really wants to build momentum for its ideas and plans for the future, then it has to think about how the distributed online world actually works. In concrete terms, there should have been professional (paid) bloggers on-site who were reporting developments as they were taking place. While I'm sure Moonie was right about the complex data that was captured, I'm sure that summarized data was presented for the approximately 3,000 delegates to view and process. These summary results could have easily been written about in the conference blog. And many other topics could have been written about as well.
The bottom-line is that the opportunity for momentum to be created among performing arts bloggers has largely dissipated, especially among those bloggers who were not at the conference. By the time the press releases come out in the next few days, bloggers will be moving on to other topics that happen to capture their interest and imagination.
Data Sources for Evaluating Websites and Blogs
You can decide for yourself how successful or unsuccessful the Internet strategy was for NPAC. In terms of building an audience for this event, the Internet strategy appears to have been successful. And blogger participants at this conference have written about their experiences to a limited extent. But as I said above the key ideas and the agreed-upon agenda have not percolated through the blogosphere and this is a huge missed opportunity:
Imagine what might have happened if the performing arts community had decided to reach out to the dance, theater, concert music and opera blogging communities before, during and after the conference?
From the beginning, bloggers in large numbers would have been discussing, debating, disagreeing and agreeing about issues and ideas that are important to the organizations that put together this conference and the delegates that attended. And the readers of these blogs would have been engaged in this dialogue as well. And among those readers are arts audiences, conference delegates, journalists and many others who could continue these discussions both online and offline through their own networks of friends and colleagues.
The most important point is that momentum would have been created. Memes would have spread and the best ideas would have bubbled to the top. In addition, there would have been more "access points" into this conversation for people who are outside of the performing arts community or are only tangentially connected. This is an important point. The performing arts community wants to be more relevant to the culture and economy of the United States. And this integration into the larger social fabric of a community will not happen if developments and discussions take place in an insular fashion.
But the opportunities for these ideas to grow and propagate online were barely given a chance. The energy went primarily into the face-to-face experience in the confines of a physical environment and members of the digital world were largely not invited to participate.
I'll end with this question: Is the failure of the conference organizers to embrace the online community in a compelling way the same type of failure that performing arts organizations are making today? In other words, in their obvious need to sell tickets for traditional live performances, are arts organizations (theaters, artists, performing arts groups and others) failing to address the important topic of how to engage online fans who may never attend their in-person performances?
Correction, Update and Links to this Post
Correction: I wrote above that nobody bothered to make a distribution list of bloggers to keep them updated about the latest posts to the NPAC blog. I was incorrect. I received two emails from the Program Notes blog manager prior to the NPAC conference. Once each time that a dance-related blog post was made.
But my main point about reaching out to performing arts bloggers is that it was not done in a fashion that would increase buy-in and drive traffic to the NPAC blog. They could have, for example, linked to hundreds of bloggers and have asked these bloggers to, in turn, link back to them. This would have driven more traffic, improved search result rankings and, probably, lead to great levels of participation.
Update: On the conference's Program Notes blog, you can now access the results from the AmericaSpeaks townhall meetings. These results are published on separate blog entries (Diversity, Education and Advocacy).
Bloggers writing about this post: Thanks to fellow bloggers for writing about this post:
I'm heading back this morning to NYC after a couple fun and informative days here in Washington DC at the Dance Critics Association Annual Conference.
I found the sessions very interesting and informative, especially panels featuring artistic directors of ballet companies and another panel focusing on the training of dancers. Then, Saturday night I saw the Ballet Across America program with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Kansas City Ballet and The Washington Ballet. I especially enjoyed PNB's Jardà Tancat, choreographed by Nacho Duato; and the third couple, Erin Mahoney-Du and Luis R. Torres, performing to "One For My Baby" in Washington Ballet's Nine Sinatra Songs, choreographed by Twyla Tharp.
I was on a panel about new media yesterday afternoon. My primary recommendation was that dance critics ought to consider new ways of writing about dance for the Internet, one that puts much more emphasis on video. And that it is important to explore how critics can create new revenue streams from this type of Web-based writing in light of the paucity of traditional dance writing positions.
I'm heading down to Washington, DC this morning for the annual conference of the Dance Critics Association. I'm speaking on a panel Sunday afternoon, "New Media and Dance: Opportunities and Obstacles."
I'll write about panel and event over the weekend or when I get back next week.
Choreographic Nibbles from the Tech and Science World
If I were a choreographer, I'd want to use the following stories as the basis for new dance works. If you've created something along these lines or know of others who have, I'd be delighted to hear about them.
- Build your own bionic body with this Flash-based application. Automaton
- The GPS functionality of the new iPhone could lead to an increase in location-based services. Mashable
- Developing successful social web applications that are people-centric and where content changes based upon input from large numbers of participants. Robin Good
Applying Laban Movement Analysis to Interaction Design
How can movement analysis and documentation systems contribute to the creation of new and better interfaces?
In other words, how might Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) be used to enhance and better understand the user interactions in the following two videos?
The first is a trailer for the new Nintendo Wii Fit:
The next video is a demonstration of the Catchyoo application from LM3labs, which lets developers use "Sprites" to create animations for large-screen displays that, as this example shows, can be manipulated by users with their feet and hands:
A premise behind the creation of The Kinetic Interface blog is that there is or ought to be a strong nexus between dance and movement, and developments in the field referred to as human-computer interaction (HCI).
Laban Movement Analysis
The strongest connecting point, I believe, results from linking a system of studying and analyzing movement such as Laban Movement Analysis with the process of interaction design (creating new interfaces).
LMA is a system for observing, describing, notating, and delving deeply into movement. It looks at movement through the primary lenses of Body, Effort, Shape, and Space.
First developed by Rudolf Laban in the early 1900s and best known for its notation system, LMA is continually expanded by the people who use it. These people include anthropologists, choreographers, yoga teachers, martial artists, actors, physical therapists, psychologists, dancers and political consultants.
Applying Laban to Interaction Design
It wasn't until yesterday, that I came across actual research that used Laban Movement Analysis as a framework for studying and documenting products in the human-computer interaction field.
It was great to find the paper, "Understanding Movement for Interaction Design: Frameworks and Approaches," which is available as a PDF file. The authors are L Loke, AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, and the paper appeared in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 11, no. 8, 2007, 691-702.
I'm going to quote a number of passages from this research paper that analysis the human movement used to control the Sony Eyetoy computer game because these passages shed light on the specific application of LMA to interaction design:
First the abstract:
The results of a study of two computer games, that use human movement as direct input, were analyzed using four existing frameworks and approaches, drawn from different disciplines that relate to interaction and movement. This enabled the exploration of the relationships between bodily actions and the corresponding responses from technology. Interaction analysis, two design frameworks and Laban movement analysis were chosen for their ability to provide different perspectives on human movement in interaction design. Each framework and approach provided a different, yet still useful, perspective to inform the design of movement-based interaction. Each allowed us to examine the interaction between the player and the game technology in quite distinctive ways. Each contributed insights that the others did not.
Quotes related to LMA:
[LMA] continues to be used in fields traditionally associated with the physical body, such as dance choreography, physical therapy and drama. It has also been applied in anthropology and industrial design. It can be used for analysis and choreography of all forms of human movement.
The aim of this analysis was to investigate how Labanotation might be used for describing movement-based interaction with technology. We used Labanotation and its system of movement analysis to analyze and transcribe the movements of individual players interacting with the two Eyetoy games.
...Labanotation gave us a language and vocabulary for describing or talking about human movement, with the moving body as the central focus. It provided us with a systematic approach for observing and describing the moving body in space and time. Some of the value of using such a system of movement analysis and notation lies in the doing, in the work of transcribing, as it forced us to perform rigorous observation of bodily movements and to understand how these movements related to the context of interaction.
Labanotation and its system of movement analysis was the sole approach that focused specifically on the moving body. In this study we attempted to investigate how Laban movement analysis and notation could be used in the design of movement-based interaction with technology. The movement transcriptions in Labanotation of player activity contained visual, graphical representation of the interaction with the movements of the human body as the central focus. Extending the movement transcriptions to include aspects of the interface, provided a way of representing movement that retains its reference to actual, lived movement as performed through interaction with the Eyetoy interface.
Looking for Input and Other Examples
I'm very interesting in feedback and thoughts on how Laban Movement Analysis can be used in the interaction design field.
I'll soon post a message to The Interaction Design Association discussion list, an online community with over 5,000 members. I did a search for movement, laban and gesture. The only results that were returned was when I did a search for gesture.
I especially enjoyed the opening of the above interview during which Stewart discusses how the sounds of the biological process informed "Magnification." I'm paraphrasing a bit:
It's about turning the body inside out through the amplification of the sounds of the biological processes of the body. The blood circulating, nerves synapsing,
bones and ligaments creaking and crunching as they take the weight of body. Also, it's an interesting moment when the body breaks down or is under stress, that's when we notice our bodies the most...The invisible becomes visible through technology, especially electron-microscopes which have allowed Twentieth Century medicine to understand the intimate secrets of how the body functions.
Here are video highlights from ADT's "Devolution," which features dancers and robots performing on stage together (my 2007 post):
Held
"Held" was a collaboration between Garry Stewart and famous dance photographer Lois Greenfield (my 2007 post). Here's a brief clip, which gives you a flavor of this piece:
One of the crucial questions for dance and the performing arts community is how to reach out to new audiences. Or, as the title of an article in yesterday's Denver Post puts it, "How can arts thrive in increasingly digital world?"
The Kinetic Interface blog's answer to this question is to grab the attention of new audiences by relating dance to their knowledge, experience and passions. In my second post "Commissioning Dancers Through 'Movement Score' Initiative," I describe my idea of creating topic-specific dance movement scores as a way to bridge the divide between dance artists and people in many fields including science, technology, architecture, design, medicine, wellbeing, gaming and other disciplines.
As an illustration, I'm saying that a person in the robotics field might create a video featuring robotic ambulatory questions. And this video then serves as a movement score for a choreographer who makes a dance video in response to this robotics clip. The movement score video might look something like this:
Then, dancers might be asked to explore specific topics when creating their video in response to the latest robotic advances highlighted in the above video.
The advantage, I believe, with my approach to building new dance audience is that I'm connecting dance directly to the work of roboticists, in this instance. And it makes the inevitable jump that these technologists will have to make into the realm of performance art smaller than it often is.
Reaching New Audiences Through Video
My idea of topic-specific dance movement scores is just one approach to engaging new audiences about dance. There are many other approaches that can be explored.
For starters, I'm convinced that Internet video ought to be at the heart of these explorations. Dance, to offer a traditional definition, is movement through space and time. And the optimal way to convey this artform is clearly through video.
So, I believe that it is invaluable for everybody involved in marketing dance and creating sustainable business models for dance artists to consider the following questions:
How dance videos are currently being used and can be used?
What makes them viral and shared with others?
What makes them participatory - leads others to create video responses?, and
What makes videos successful - leads to achieving a concrete measurable goals such as selling tickets or increasing sponsorship support?
To begin the process of answering these questions, I'm including a number of dance videos below that have been successful on YouTube in terms of their viewership numbers. These numbers have their limits: they simply offer a relative measurement of success. And we don't have demographic data about who is actually viewing these videos. But even with these limits in mind, I think these videos shed light on what captures the attention of viewers.
These are my questions as I watched these videos:
Does success always mean lighthearted, a fast tempo and very accessible?
Which of the below videos would you say are the most original and unexpected?
Are videos of stage performances always going to attract smaller audiences?
Does a video budget have any relationship whatsoever to the success of a video?
What do you think is the typical audience for each of the following videos?
If you used variations of any of the following videos, do you think that they would help you build an audience?
How would you create an innovative dance video that captured a large audience of viewers and, hopefully, of ticket buyers and supporters?
Videos for Exploration
This Chemical Party video was uploaded last week. I start-off with it because it falls in-line with my idea of bridging dance with different disciplines:
This video, one month old, of guys backflipping into jeans has been a sensation:
The Daft Bodies video has been a sensation as well and has spawned 40 video responses and 13,000+ comments:
Dancing construction equipment has had a decent level of success - also see this Renault commercial:
This "Tecktonik" dance video has chalked-up nine million views:
And Feist' "1 2 3 4" music video has nine million views as well:
And I leave with the work of Ohad Naharin and Batsheva Dance Company. Why does this video only have 7,000 views? What could make the videos of Betsheva a YouTube sensation? -- I think it's doable:
I don't think that there are easy answers to my above questions. But I do think that we would all benefit by collectively exploring these and other videos and trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work and what approaches dance artists might want to take in terms of their online dance videos.
