For years now, through conferences, articles and private conversations, we have been pondering how to bring dance to a wider audience. How can our art form, which can only really be appreciated live, be presented in a more distributable format? Video has had an impact obviously, but distribution is limited to those who know they want a dance video. Cable was supposed to save us but Celia Ipiotis’ program hasn’t made much of a dent in the nondance world and the one other cable channel that showed any dance, Ovation, has disappeared from my channel lineup. Dance films haven’t traveled much beyond dance film festivals. There have been some recent programming innovations that have had local impact: Fall for Dance Festival, Dancing in the Streets… These programs seek to gain the attention of the random citizen through exposure. However most of the technological innovations haven’t moved conversations about dance beyond the existing dance audience. We have come to believe that our only hope for broadcasting our art on a larger scale is through print reviews and an occasional Dance in America program on public television.
For those of you haven’t yet noticed, Doug Fox of Great Dance has been leading a call for a revolution. His white paper on dance companies and use of technology and his recent post on changing the inherent relationship dance companies have with print reviews and building audiences, is nothing short of revolutionary.
Now many of the dance bloggers out there are dancers or dance writers first, technological innovators second. Doug is really bringing technology to the forefront and I believe his ideas highlight how the Web may be the technological innovation the dance world has been waiting for. The beautiful part of it is that it calls for cooperation;that increasing your dance audience does not mean you have to take away from another company’s audience or that your company’s funding then limits the funding another company may receive. The phrase that keeps popping up these days is that the arts should not be a zero-sum game. Our current methodology has created just such a situation. Let’s look to the future where helping ourselves means helping each other.
UPDATE: Leigh responds.
UPDATE: Doug responds.
Is that an echo I hear?
