Four Indispensable Topics for the Dance and Movement Community
If I were conducting a conference, workshop or town hall meeting for the dance and movement community, these are the four topics I'd focus on:
- 1) How to write about, talk about and communicate information about dance and movement to the non-dance community.
- 2) The meaning of the Internet.
- 3) Implementing a grassroots campaign to promote dance and the performing arts.
- 4) New Revenue Streams to Support Dancers.
To me, these topics desperately need attention in the immediate future. These four areas of exploration all have to do with the health, viability and success of dance as a vital art form.
1) How to write about, talk about and communicate information about dance and movement to the non-dance community.
This may strike some as too basic and too insignificant, but there is a huge problem with the way information and ideas are communicated to the general public about dance. All forms of dance communications -- reviews, press releases, websites, blogs, email broadcasts, social networking sites, marketing collateral, fundraising solicitations, ads, videos and everything else - should be dissected and reevaluated.
This may sound like an extreme statement: I barely understand 70-90% of the communications I read about dance - seriously! The bottom-line is that a major overhaul of dance communications is needed.
To test whether or not you agree with my premise, visit ten websites for dance companies whose work you are not familiar with. Read the descriptions (if they exist) and watch the accompanying videos (if they exist), and decide to what extent you have been enlightened and informed. If you find something you like, please post comment.
2) The meaning of the Internet
I've been blogging about dance and the Internet for three years. So I'm sometimes startled by the lack of understanding among dance companies and presenters about what the Internet is all about and how it can be used by dancers. And when I do attend educational sessions about the Internet and the arts, I often find them very unenlightening.
I was stunned by the polling results from the Town Meeting at the recent National Performing Arts Convention in Denver. For the polling results for improving arts advocacy, only 5% of the voters thought the Internet was of any value and the item relating to the Internet was complete gibberish. I have no idea what this means - what is a "Google Arts - type resource"?
Explore interactive new media initiatives to increase access and relevance (e.g. create a "Google Arts"-type resource, blogs,YouTube) - 5%
Overall, new hands-on approaches to Internet education are needed with a strong strategic framework, or very little improvement will be made to how the dance community uses the online world. It's simply not enough to create a website, a Facebook profile and a YouTube channel and believe the problems of the Internet have been resolved.
3) Implementing a grassroots campaign to promote dance and the performing arts.
I've recently written two posts on this topic. My main point is that people involved in all forms of dance and movement - dancers, choreographers, dance companies, presenters, teachers, academics, librarians, researchers, notators, critics/writers, dance therapists, somatic instructors, certified movement analysts, publicists and anybody I left out - should get together and figure out how to leverage the online world on a large scale to build new and larger audiences. This is untapped territory that is just waiting to be exploited.
Dancers need new avenues for making money. Everybody is always complaining about cut-backs in grantmaking and other economic challenges -- all justifiable. But there is rarely fruitful discussion and action taken to actually figure out new approaches to making money for artists. I've written many times over the years about new possible avenues for generating revenue with a focus on online possibilities - the interest in these posts tends to be very low unfortunately.
That said, there are positive developments. The Field, based here in New York City, is launching the "Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA)" project. They will be giving grants to dance and theater artists who are pursuing new business models to support their creative work. We need more programs like this!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Conclusion: Revenue Opportunities for a Vertical Marketing Dance Strategy
In this final post of this series on creating a new vertical marketing strategy for dance companies, I would like to focus on the potential financial benefits of this gameplan. I outlined the key revenue opportunities in my first post about this topic on Monday. I would like to expand upon these opportunities now.
- Increased ticket sales: If a dance company is able to reach out to non-traditional dance audiences, this success will translate in to the sale of more tickets for upcoming performances. But this outreach is not limited to one specific geographical area. If the Internet is used to reach the large national audience of people within the neuroscience community, for instance, this means that the show can be brought on the road and performed in cities and towns where audiences and contacts have been developed and cultivated.
- New performance opportunities: The very nature of interdisciplinary projects that target specific market segments means that you will often be able to perform at events and venues that might not have been previously possible. Continuing with the neuroscience example, there are a large number of conferences and related events that take place throughout the US. Plus, most colleges and universities now have programs that focus on neuroscience. Since your performance would deal very directly on themes and topics of interest to this community, you would now have the opportunity to perform at these events and at these academic institutions. These performance opportunities would often not exist for dance companies without such an interdisciplinary focus--in this instance, one that combines dance and science.
- Video commissioning project: Part of this vertical marketing strategy for dancers is devoted to exploring how dancers can specifically generate revenue via the Internet as opposed to using the Internet to create revenue for offline activities. The idea behind the video commissioning project is to encourage organizations in different fields to underwrite the creation of dance videos that address specific themes and ideas related to their discipline. For example, how do we encourage commercial and not-for-profit organizations in the robotics field to commission dancers to create dance videos that relate in some manner to robotics. Dancers and dance companies would be commissioned to create these videos, which would be distributed through multiple online channels.
Individual Action Good; Collective Action Even Better
Dancers and dance companies can pursue the above opportunities on their own. But given the newness of this approach, collective action on the part of dance companies, presenters and others in the dance community may prove very worthwhile and, in some instances, easier to implement.
Consider the following scenario for an online/offline dance festival. In 2009, we decided to host a multi-day dance festival focused on robotics. During this event, 10 dancers/dance companies would perform works that dealt directly or indirectly with ideas from the latest developments in robotics. At the same time, we hosted an online dance video commission project where these and other dance companies were selected to create robotic-inspired performance video works for online distribution.
Sponsors would have to be found to support both the online and offline components. And considerable thought would have to be given to developing non-traditional dance audiences from the robotics field. But if this type of event were successful, then it could be replicated for a huge number of other fields.
While there are clearly obstacles to overcome, there are a number of elements for this online/offline festival that are very positive from the beginning:
1) Robotics is a very diverse, intriguing field with many new developments and inventions taking place on an on-going basis. So many ideas for choreographers and dancers to explore.
2) Corporate and organizational sponsors from the robotics field will be pretty much ensured of a large audience given the considerable reach of Internet distribution for these dance videos.
3) Sponsors will be underwriting art that specifically addresses the work and research they are engaged in.
4) The potential audience for the dance performance includes anybody and everybody involved in and interested in robotics which includes students in science and technology programs, practitioners, researchers, teachers and others.
Feedback
I would be delighted to get reader feedback about my proposed vertical marketing strategy for dance companies.
The overall goal of this series, as I outlined Monday, is to leverage interdisciplinary dance works in order to reach new audiences. These new audiences will not be traditional dance-goers but the themes and focus of your work will resonate with them. On Monday, I offered the example of a dance piece that explored quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity as a performance that would be of interest to the "universe" of people that make-up the theoretical physics community.
Three Additional Tactics for Reaching New Audience Niches:
1) Encouraging the Creation of User-Generated Media
The YouTube era has ushered in the age of user-generated media. Anybody and everybody can create video and other types of content and post it for the world to see.
The question I would like to address here is: How do you engage your target audience in a way that will encourage them to create and upload content that is related to what you do?
If you created a dance piece about chemical compounds, why would chemists be inspired to create this video of a chemical dance party:
I'm not much of a fan of the above video from the European Commission. But it is an example of the type of interdisciplinary performances I've been discussing and this clip has been viewed almost 13,000 times.
And a related question, if you were performing a dance piece inspired by organic chemistry, how could you encourage people from the chemistry community, especially bloggers, to come to your rehearsal and take videos and pictures for the purpose of uploading to the Internet afterwards? This approach could generate considerable exposure.
In 2006, I first recommended opening-up dance rehearsals for the purpose of generating user-generated media. See my post - and read the antagonism it generated from Article19 in the comments section.
It wasn't until this year that we saw the compelling results of what happens when bloggers are invited to create their own content of a dance performance and spread it online. See the pictures that Cedar Lake uploaded from dance bloggers who took pictures at the GlassyEssence performance. Dance bloggers also posted these images to their own blogs. The same can be done with video clips of a performance as well.
2) Teaching Dance Moves
Teaching non-dancers new dance moves is fun and an effective way to get people excited about your dance performance.
Here's the leading instructional dance video of all time (in terms of numbers). "Soulja Boy Tellem - How to Crank That". The embedding is turned-off so you have to watch it on YouTube. You'll see that there are 325 video responses - that's impressive! I can't say the responses are compelling, but they offer good food for thought.
Continuing with the chemistry theme, how would you go about creating and teaching a dance routine that made for a good YouTube video and inspired large numbers of users to create their own renditions? I think there are hundreds of possible approaches - some more artistic than others and some definitely cornier than others. In the end, it depends on how you want to present your work and what type of response you want to generate.
An SMPR is a deconstructed press release with a social media focus. It includes videos, pictures and links to helpful bookmarks and other resources. Most importantly, it gives bloggers and journalists instant access to the media and information that they need to write their stories.
Here's a video introduction to SMPRs that I came across in an excellent in-depth overview of this new approach to publicity in MasterNewMedia:
But today, I'm writing about SMPRs from the standpoint of targeting specific niche audiences based upon the themes and focus of your dance performance.
I think SMPRs, especially the inclusion of videos and their modular format, are ideal and essential for generating publicity within a specific non-dance community. Realistically, you can't send out traditional press releases to non-dance audiences because they won't make any sens and they will be completely irrelevant. As I've written before, my mind was never wired to read standard dance press release - I simply can't follow what they are about.
So to properly use the SMPR approach, I think that a specific implementation strategy has to be implemented for reaching your desired audience. To continue with the chemistry theme, why not create a SMPR that is updated once a week with a new dance video that highlights the latest chemical news in the form of dance? Once again, there are many possible approaches that you could take.
Yesterday, I wrote "A Vertical Marketing Strategy for Dance Companies," in which I recommended that dance companies consider the benefits of targeting specific market segments with a direct interest in the themes and subject matter of your artistic work.
In today's post, I would like to offer three specific approaches you might want to implement in order to cultivate these niche markets:
1) Dance Video Responses on YouTube
YouTube is the largest video sharing site. Yet, if you post a dance video, you may end-up with very little traffic.
One way to jump-start your viewership is to post your video in response to another video (preferably one with a lot of traffic). Continuing with yesterday's theme of a dance performance that deals with theoretical physics (relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory), you could post such a dance video in response to Brian Greene's Ted talk about string theory:
This way, when YouTube visitors watch Brian Greene, they may decide to view the videos that were posted as responses.
To make your YouTube video more attractive to this audience of theoretical physics fans, consider the image at the exact midpoint of your video - this is the image that will be displayed in the YouTube video window before somebody starts to play your clip. Is there a way you can make this image especially attractive to the non-dance audience you are trying to reach?
Also, the description and tags you add for your video are very important. There's both the short description and the "more information" description. Take time to write a compelling and clear description that speaks to the audience you want to reach. And, also do a little research to figure out which search tags others in the physics world use to identify their videos.
2) Blogger Cultivation
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has done a masterful job of cultivating dance bloggers in New York City. They reach out to us, they invite us to all of their performances, they set-up interviews, and seek our feedback and recommendations. Their work is a pleasure to see and, to put it simply, they care about us.
They're now performing in their NYC theater through June 15th. Here's a clip:
This same very worthwhile approach can be taken by dance companies that want to cultivate the goodwill and coverage of bloggers in a specific field. Say, you were investigating issues in your dance relating to neuroscience and creativity over the coming year along the lines of "Entity" from Wayne McGregor's Random dance - see my post.
One of the first things I would do is build a list of all bloggers who cover neuroscience, cognition, creativity and related topics. There are many blogs in this category. I would then link to these blogs in my blogroll, post comments on these blogs, and introduce myself to the bloggers.
I would also encourage these bloggers to use my content, especially, videos that were created with their specific audience of readers in mind. I realize that a philosophical and psychological jump has to be taken here on the part of these science bloggers. Some neuroscience bloggers will wonder why on each they would want to embed a dance video about cognition. I admit, that there is work to be done. But it is doable with persistence and innovation.
Consider the relevance of this "Making of Entity" video in which Wayne McGregor says that this performance is a result of collaborations with cognitive and neuroscientists at the 51 second mark:
Clearly, neuroscience bloggers will eventually see the connection and relevance of this video to the analysis and information they provide their readers.
3) Dance Industry-Specific News
If you want to make a huge splash with your target audience, simply dance the latest news related to this niche market. There are a huge number of news-related items everyday about neuroscience, for instance.
Why not create three very short dance pieces in the studio each week. Each piece is no longer than one minute and deals with a specific news story of interest to your audience. The relationship between your dance and the news item does not have to be that concrete -- just somehow covey the general idea of the story.
Then, you can create channels on YouTube, Blip.tv and Vimeo promoting these clips and also promote them to the bloggers who you've been cultivating.
The follow video clip is not directly related to this idea of dancing the news. I include it here because it has been viewed over 3 million times and it shows what a little creativity can do in terms of grabbing people's attention. I think that if you can find an interesting angle or innovative approach to your dancing the news videos, you'll be able to generate a lot of buzz. Plus, as with this video, you don't need a large budget or an expensive venue.
In continuation of this post, I'll include three more online approaches you can pursue to cultivate new dance audiences for your interdisciplinary dance performances and projects:
One of my aims for The Kinetic Interface blog is to highlight interdisciplinary dance performances that integrate movement with developments taking place in many fields such as architecture, design, science, technology, medicine, the environment and other disciplines.
From a marketing standpoint, these interdisciplinary dance performances offer unexplored opportunities for reaching out to new dance audiences -- people who may have had very little or no exposure to dance before.
Consider the Armitage Gone! Dance program at the Guggenheim Museum this past weekend (my preview post). 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 cosmology can connect to her work.
I admit upfront that reaching out to non-dance audiences can be challenging. At the "Unlocking Creativity" panel I attended Thursday (my write-up), I tried to talk to a guy about Bill T. Jones, who was on the panel. This audience member's eyes had this glassy, uncomprehending look that I've encountered before when discussing dance with people not familiar with this art form. It's hard to nail down the sources of this disconnect. So I just share this story of one of many examples of the challenges of reaching new audiences even when a direct connection between dance and other fields is made in a fairly concrete manner.
Vertical Marketing for Interdisciplinary Dance Projects
What would a marketing program look like for an interdisciplinary dance program? One that sought to grow audiences and financial support by reaching out to new and larger dance audiences? A marketing program that devoted significant efforts to connecting with people and organizations that were currently not dance-goers or supporters?
I'm going to offer very brief answers to these questions here. I plan to expand on these ideas and I look forward to the thoughts and recommendations of readers.
The driving premise behind this vertical-focused marketing campaign is that dancers and dance companies, especially modern and contemporary, need new revenue streams and larger audiences. (Read "How do we market artistry without losing the art?" post on the Dance Theater Workshop blog in which Megan Sprenger writes that ticket sales are down 15% and alternative approaches are needed to reach new audiences.)
By "vertical marketing," I mean a marketing campaign that is based on the content, theme, ideas and explorations of a dance piece. And that this focus of a dance work becomes the basis for reaching out to new audiences with whom these ideas are familiar and are likely to resonate. So returning to Armitage, just for illustration purposes (I have not spoken with her about these ideas and I don't know if she'd be interested), the audience for the sketches her dancers performed at the Guggenheim would be any and all audiences with an interest in theoretical physics: theoretical physicists, scientists colleges, universities, research organizations, associations, corporations, high schools, bloggers, discussion groups and the science-reading general public. This vertical market is quite large when you consider all of people and groups that might comprise this segment.
Gameplan
I'd pursue both an online and offline strategy:
- Online
The goal is to reach out to as many people and organizations who are influential in your target vertical market. This would include bloggers, websites, community forums, social networking sites, topic-specific video channels and, possibly others. You want to form relationships with these people and groups and encourage them to cover and promote what you are doing. (More about how to specifically generate this coverage in the tactics and implementation section that follows.
- Offline
While there's some overlap here, you definitely want to pursue the creation of partnerships with associations, universities, research organizations and corporations who may be interested in supporting what you are exploring in your dance piece. You might decide to target organizations in a specific geographical area or target possible partners on a national or international level - it depends upon your overall goals.
Tactics and Implementation
For the online component of your marketing efforts, a strong social media presence will almost be a necessity. In other words, you'll have a blog, video accounts on the large video sharing sites, social networking profiles on, at least, Facebook and LinkedIn, and the possible use of other social media tools such as micro-blogging, photos and bookmarking.
The creation of engaging dance videos that speak in a very compelling manner to members of your target audience will consume a large part of your efforts. Effective videos are by far the best way to make dance meaningful and accessible to non-dancers. And while it is tricky, it is definitely doable.
At the heart of this social media campaign and video-making initiative is this basic question:
"How do I present dance in a manner that will enable non-dance audiences to connect with it, and derive meaning and enjoyment while not creating content that is so watered down that it compromises my artistic aims and sensibilities?"
I don't have a magic answer to this question. It's just a topic that most artists will probably want to address.
The successful implementation of a social media campaign means that your videos, in particular, will have large-scale viral success. That bloggers and others in your vertical market, will embed and share your videos with their colleagues and friends and you will generate large-scale interest in your upcoming dance performances and related programs.
Here's just one specific idea. Take a look at this YouTube video of physicist Brian Greene talking at a Ted conference. Why not upload a dance video that touches upon string theory and post it as a response to this Greene video and other videos that deal with similar topics? You will instantly be creating a new audience for your dance.
I've only provided the most cursory overview of a possible implementation plan. I could elaborate on many fronts. But the general idea is to create content and connections that will generate interest in your dance that leverages all social media channels that are at your disposal. And then work toward converting these initial conversations into long-term relationships that can help grow your dance company and success.
Vertical Marketing Opportunities
As a result of implementing this vertical marketing plan, you might benefit in the following ways:
- Larger audiences: As a result of targeting non-dance audiences, you may be able to sell more tickets. And as a result of cultivating new dance audience in different geographical areas, you may be able to perform your work in new cities and towns where you've already created a following.
- New performance opportunities: As a result of building relationships with associations, universities and other institutions, you may find that there are opportunities to perform and conduct workshops at the conferences and events of these groups.
- Content creation: Many organizations and associations are involved in public awareness and educational campaigns. Your dance work, in video format and in live performance settings, may prove to be an excellent way for these organizations to highlight what they do and thus can be integrated into their public awareness campaigns.
- Corporate sponsorship: By reaching out to new partners both through online and offline channels, you are likely to find new corporate sponsors to help support and underwrite your performances that deal with topics related to this companies.
Conclusion
I think that the vertical marketing plan I outline above for dance companies can help address some of the serious funding challenges faced by the dance community.
This marketing approach won't work for all dance companies, but for those who take an interdisciplinary approach to art-making and are willing to jump into embracing an aggressive social media campaign, I think there are some very worthwhile avenues to explore.
