cookie dough
doug misrepresents my position a little:
his main point is that the dance community should spend a lot more time thinking about how to improve the quality of dance performances and less time on how to use the internet to enhance marketing efforts
i wasn’t dismissing the value of the internet for marketing. i was suggesting that we have little of value to market. so, if we want to look at what the internet has to offer dance, we should first use it to develop our product.
the dance community needs to reach to itself over the net. to communicate and find a way to stop the rot in our praxis. if we can’t effectively communicate with ourselves how do we expect to communicate with our potential audiences?
take the wikipedia article anna started, just look at the revision history, is the video dance community contributing? … no. is there a functional and functioning website where screendance can be seen, up/down loaded and discussed? look at the lamentable state of the dance-tech community on the web.
greatdance will be 3 years old this sunday and is beginning to settle down after its second revision.
«article19 - contemporary dance online» seems to have had its first dance incarnation in november 2002. it has also been through various revisions (one of which i was part of) and has settled down (for the moment).
these two sites are the only new media (dare i say web2.0) dance sites. both sites lament the general quality of dance companies web presence. with a large audience share the dance community should be clamoring to get their work seen and linked to via these sites. it’s starting to happen … but s l o w l y.
doug said:
the distributed digital “conversation” that matt, i and others are currently engaged in, for example, would be difficult to replicate offline
i disagree, in the past this conversation would have been via journals or letters to the arts section of a paper. or we could have picked up the phone. what the internet has done is increase the speed and reach of communication.
given the speed that the dance sector is embracing the internet, we may as well be writing letters to each other.
dance (product) is like a cookie
works in progress (wip) are not a good solution. i have yet to see a truly effective online r&d process for dance. and it is not always the audience that does not engage in feedback. the loop driver blog is a great example of a dance company requesting audience engagement .. but failing to engage with the audience themselves.
given the lack of posts during, and more tellingly after the nyc residency its clear the blog was marketing. not a real attempt at engagement. lily allen still uses her myspace blog/page. we can’t expect to retain our audiences found via the internet unless we maintain our presence on the internet.
nor should we shill them with astroturfing, and sock puppets.
works in progress are like cookie dough:
- you like the process better than the product
- you like the product better than the process
- you like the process and product
does anyone have statistics on audience conversion rates from work in progress sharings? i would expect it to be low. some people only goto wip’s as they are free/cheap. (or just to snoop).
the internet is still a poor way to workshop live danceworks for the stage. even with hd online video sharing the context is missing atmosphere. yes you can make structural or conceptual comments, but thats about it. wip online would (possibly) be more useful for screendance.
How can we create online forums coupled with real world equivalents where being vulnerable is not a terrifying?
artists should get used to being terrified, if you are worried about the response to your work don’t show it.
that is one of the first lessons i try to teach my students. the whole safe space agenda is one of the reasons dance praxis is so poor. the safe place i provide my students is the to chance to mess up, badly. sometimes very badly … and then i help them learn from their experiences. when they leave the university setting they are more aware of how and what they do.
as professionals we need to be willing to screw-up at times, to take those risks … or play it safe by not taking them.
so perhaps, before we try to make online only models of dance income we need to find a model of developing dance praxis that works online.
if we want to talk about marketing dance online … lets talk about drm (can we agree to do without it … please) and building a shared (open) platform that the whole dance sector contributes to. current (online) media distribution models are broken or in a state of flux, we need tread carefully.
it is obvious that the internet offers a market opportunity for dance, as i said … the net is about communication. distribution is another way to share what you say (communicate).
what is not obvious is how dance practice will develop out of it’s stagnation. or what aspects of dance praxis are best suited to exploit / sell / market on the internet. to understand that, we need a better understanding of what it is we do. a way of communicating those things between ourselves. and then, we can communicate them clearly and consistently with our audiences.