Great Dance



June 22, 2009

Dance Vlogging, Will this Video Genre Increase in Popularity?

Boris Willis, one of the first dance vloggers (or video bloggers) curated Kinetic Cinema earlier this month.

The focus of Boris' program was on how professional and amateur dance-makers are creating and sharing their personal, informal, often improvised, and on-going video work with the global Internet community.

You can read Boris' program notes with links to the videos he screened. And read his Top Ten Vlogging Tips.

I've always been intrigued by this dance video genre, one which relies almost exclusively on the individual efforts of a dancer to create, shoot, edit and upload videos of their dance/movement explorations. And it strikes me that with the greater availability of higher quality and less expensive video cameras, more dancers would embrace this genre, but the numbers continue to remain small. A primary impediment to growth is simply that there is no economic model to support vlogging.

During Boris' program, I was especially interested in dancers who are currently producing vlogging projects. Boris highlighted a number of them including:

Lee Atwell creates dance videos inspired by Butoh. Here's Garden Shack:

Liz Roncka produces an on-going video series. Here's "56":

And here's "Dance and Clutter and Talk and Bathroom and Dog" from Ashley A. Friend:

Also, Clare Byrne continues her Weekly Rites video podcasts.

Posted by Doug Fox on June 22, 2009 1:40 PM



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2 Comments

Boris Willis said:

Thanks for posting this Doug and thanks for coming to the show.

Added: June 23, 2009 12:59 PM | Permalink

Thanks for this post Doug. I think that vlogging can have economic benefits for dancers as part of an overall marketing strategy. As Boris mentioned at his screening, he received thousands of viewers for each post he made, which was exponentially more than the live audience members he could reach through performance only. He also developed a following of devoted users who regularly commented on his posts. He got this gig curating Kinetic Cinema due to his efforts, and I wouldn't be surprised if other teaching, presenting, and performing gigs were generated as a result of his vlog.

To me the biggest impediment to vlogging for dancers and artists is time and commitment. Very few people have the discipline, desire, and scheduling ability to make a video every day. Even once a week is a big commitment. It takes a certain amount of obsession and desire to do this, but I think for those that do, the rewards are many.

Added: June 23, 2009 1:41 PM | Permalink

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