10 Ways to Engage Internet Audiences with Your Dance-Making -- Great Dance

March 9, 2009

10 Ways to Engage Internet Audiences with Your Dance-Making

There are many creative, fun and participatory approaches that dancers can take to engaging online audiences with their dancing, choreography and teaching.

Here are a number of ideas that I encourage dancers to explore and build upon. Please share similar projects. I'm very interested to know how dancers are connecting with their Internet audiences. What new avenues and possibilities are you considering?

Ideas and examples to consider for your own explorations:

1) Dance Mashups: Post video and music excerpts of your performances. Encourage your audience on YouTube and Vimeo to create video remixes of your work and add their own footage as well. See Martha Graham's Clytemnestra Project:

Clytemnestra from Martha Graham on Vimeo.

2) Make Me a Dance: Encourage your Twitter followers to tweet a description of a dance they would like to see. Pick your favorite dance tweet every day or every week and create a 12 second dance with your webcam.

3) Interactive Performance Technology Explorations: Many dancers are experimenting with real-time graphics and animation. Set-up a lab in the studio before a performance and allow participants/audience members to experiment and create their own dances. Post videos of audience members using these tools (with permission, of course). See eMotion and Animata.

Animata demonstration:

Reverse Shadow Theatre from gabor papp on Vimeo.

eMotion demonstration:

Labo#1, jour 2 : CNAC from Adrien Mondot on Vimeo.

4) Seek Thematic User Generated Content: Encourage your audience to submit content in text, picture, audio and video formats that will be incorporated directly into your performance. See Off-Broadway show My First Time and somewhat related to this idea Wikipedia Loves Art.

5) Dance Contests: Develop your own dance and choreography contests where participants create and upload dance videos following guidelines that you create for your competition. See Ballet Nouveau Colorado's Dancemakers 2.0 and battles on Dance Jam. A Ballet Nouveau Colorado video submission (See YouTube Channel):

6) Get Everybody Texting: Use Twitter, texting and chat to get your live and online audiences talking about your performances. See "Live Tweeting at the Theater" at Portland Center Stage and see SCREENtxt, a museum example from the Mattress Factory.

7) Orchestrate a Flash Dance Mob: Create your own flash mob dance event by bringing together apparent strangers at the same time and location for a spontaneous dance. See Third Rail Projects February flash mob and T-Mobile's January flash dance mob:

8) Fusing Master Classes with Online Instruction: First, create videos that demonstrate your technique to beginning and intermediate dance students. Second, integrate this online content with in-person master classes for amateur dancers. See my January 2008 post "Rethinking Master Classes" to Engage Larger Dance Audiences."

9) Dance-Focused Alternative Reality Game: Create an ARG, a participatory, story-telling narrative that fuses online clues with real-world adventures. Make dancing and improvisation part of the adventure. See "Top Secret Dance-Off."

10) Create Community and Topic-Specific Dance-Making: Help communities, in broadest sense, create dances based on their interests and passions. Watch videos of science students who created dances to represent their areas of study:

There are many possibilities. Please let me know what you create.

Posted by Doug Fox on March 9, 2009 6:15 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://greatdance.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/3067

4 Comments

Melissa Fendell said:

Thanks for this post! Lots of intriguing ideas here. I wonder how I can translate this into theater - though I see you touch on theater a few times. This will be one of my projects for the spring - my own Top Ten list for The Anthropologists.... Thanks!

Added: March 9, 2009 8:55 AM | Permalink

Doug Fox

said:

Melissa, I think your approach to theater and creativity is very conducive to social media-based approaches to engagement. Why don't we discuss different possibilities.

You can learn more about Melissa's The Anthropologists and see Facebook group for info. on upcoming Jam Sessions.

Added: March 9, 2009 9:15 AM | Permalink

Tom Pearson said:

Great post Doug, and thanks for the inclusion. A few years back Noemie LaFrance did a call for audience participation via an online video which taught a few simple dance steps and then gave them a cue for when to join in the dance (which they would be attending live). Then at one point during Agora II, the audience members appeared in the work and performed the simple phrase of choreography with the rest of the cast... sort of a more orchestrated flash mob, coordinated online to factor into an already existing piece. I thought it was a great way to give people an insider opp and really engage them on multiple levels. Don't know if that video still exists somewhere on her site.

Added: March 9, 2009 1:23 PM | Permalink

Doug Fox

said:

Tom, good to hear from you. I did quick search and found Noemie LaFrance's Agora video of dance step instruction that you mentioned.

Watch clip.

I like this idea. I'm going to write about it. Thanks!

Added: March 9, 2009 1:44 PM | Permalink

March 9, 2009