A New Sense of Value at the Core

This article originally appeared in the Dance/USA Journal, Vo. 25, No.1, Spring 2009, as part of a series of comments on the state of the field from a diverse set of DUSA Trustees.

Recently, my family entered the 21st century by getting a DVR. Suddenly, we are able to choose and enjoy any entertainment offering when and how we want it. We have been freed from the past, where the only way to experience culture was communally, joining with others at a set time to partake in what was being offered.

This change has been coming for a long time. Television, like radio before it, fostered a regular presence for the performing arts that one could enjoy in private. As is inevitable, technology has continued to advance so that information and experiences are now available on demand, at any place and any time. The result, epitomized by the DVR and like devices, is that each of us can act as a curator, determining our own personalized entertainment, obviating the need for communal experiences, which is inherently a part of what we in the dance community do best.

Studies show that the most reliable predictors of commitment to the arts are continued exposure and education, whether in a formal setting (such as at school), or in a private setting (such as in the home). Those who make the commitment are guided to it by their own private curator(s). It is not surprising, then, that as individualization has replaced community, we have lost the innate appreciation for and valuing of the live arts, which we as a nation should hold dear. Even worse, life is often experienced today through simulacra, replacing real experiences with ones that we believe are real. Umberto Eco would say, rather than using these representations to invoke previous memories, we now take them as the real thing without yearning for the lost original.

As a response to this individualization of experience, engaging audiences - meeting them on their own terms to empower their individualization - is currently a high priority among funders and administrators. Recent studies conclude that although more people participate in dance and classical music than ever before, fewer and fewer experience these arts in the theater or concert hall. In a world of individualized experience, culture is falling prey to the elevation of the individual over the communal. Opera and theater director Peter Sellars, at the American Symphony Orchestra League (now known as the League of American Orchestras) annual conference two years ago, described how he and Music Director Esa Pekka Salonen moved the Los Angeles Philharmonic out of the concert hall. Others have embarked on similar efforts to redefine the relationship between audiences and classical arts.

Last spring, impresario Gerard Mortier, at his keynote address to Opera America, implored us to remember that performance is truly unique and transcendental when it is experienced live. Peter Gelb, who as general manager redefined the Metropolitan Opera by offering performances around the world in high-definition video transmission, believes that his program's success depends on audiences in Des Moines, Palm Beach, San Antonio, and Edinburgh knowing that they are simultaneously watching a live performance along with 3,600 others sitting in the theater in New York.

Curious about how younger people feel about live performance, I asked my son (for whom technology and on-demand access to information and experience are innate) about it because he periodically asks me to take him to a ballet or opera performance. He told me that live performance is all-enveloping and cannot be matched by a two-dimensional version of the same experience. It might be satisfying in a different way, but it is not the same.

Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report on the state of theater around the country. It concluded that we have successfully stimulated the supply of theater performances and spaces over recent decades, but put little effort into stimulating demand. The result is an over-capacity of theaters and theatrical offerings with insufficient demand to draw adequate audiences.

At New York City Ballet, we perform seven times a week for 23 weeks in our home theater each year. Like many of our Dance/USA colleagues, we are suffering from decreasing demand and outlets for our artistry. We now sell 330,000 tickets annually in New York, a decline from the 400,000-plus tickets we sold 25 years ago. Increasing costs are conspiring with these diminishing audiences to threaten our very business model. I spend much of my day learning to address this challenge - whether through exploring ways to increase audiences or re-imagining how we present our work to make it more available to more people in more places.

But these efforts, and those of my colleagues, will be for naught unless there are audiences who appreciate and value the live performing arts we esteem. Sufficient demand for our art is essential to our future and the future of the field. And it is the only way to assure the future of our artists' unique work and its relevance. Herein, then, lies the crux of the matter: unless we are able to inculcate a new sense of value for the live performances we all believe so deeply are core to our dance experience, we are in danger - in danger of losing our relevance and our very future,.

This is the greatest challenge we face and I urge all of us - government, foundations, administrators, and artists - to face it head on and with all earnestness. I am unsure of how to accomplish it or what the answer is, but, one way or another, we must all commit to what we have neglected over recent decades: stimulating demand and appreciation for live cultural performances.

Dancing With a Digital Presence - The Time To Create Digital Dance Content Is Now

I was asked by Dance/USA to write an article about the importance of dance companies participating in the digital world. This is a topic I feel very strongly about. For most companies, the dilemma is how to allocate resources to this new need when they are stretched so thin already. The article was published in the DUSA e-journal on June 28, 2011 at: http://www.danceusa.org/ejournal/post.cfm/dancing-with-a-digital-presence



I am evangelical. Evangelical about the need for every dance artist and company to have a digital presence and footprint. Evangelical because any artist who does not plan and implement such a presence or footprint can only expect a diminished audience in the future

In 1995, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive technologies” to describe unanticipated technological changes that fundamentally alter the markets in which they are introduced. Such changes disrupt a then-existing market and the way consumers interact with that market, requiring companies to quickly and radically adjust their businesses. Some examples include the Ford Model T, which made the horse and buggy obsolete, or, more recently, downloadable digital media, which marked the severe decline of CDs and DVDs. Faced with such a change, a mature business must find the resources to adapt its methods to the new technology while, at the same time, maintaining its existing customer base and revenue stream.

Our younger and our future dance audiences, born into a world where digital content and communication are ubiquitous, have already incorporated these disruptive digital technologies into their lives. A soon-to-be-released study by WolfBrown finds that younger audience members have a significantly greater interest in technology-based dance engagement activities than older audience members.¹ Therefore, I am unequivocal about the need for most artists and companies to find the required resources to create digital content. Unfortunately, this demands a complete rethinking because most non-profit dance company business models allocate resources to creating work for the stage and for marketing those works, with little, if any, surplus remaining to invest in creating media content.

In our metric-driven arts environment, which demands measureable results, the proposition of reallocating existing resources for media development is a challenge because there is minimal guarantee of a measureable return on that investment. Even those, such as the Metropolitan Opera, who have plunged into this new world wholeheartedly, have reportedly invested a level of resources beyond what even our largest dance companies or most prominent artists can afford. One would expect, then, that our younger, newer companies and artists, who have not yet allocated all of their resources and who are more naturally predisposed to living in the digital world, will more rapidly and completely adapt to the possibilities of the new technologies, incorporating such work into the essence of what they do.

And then, as always, the aesthetic questions of how media intersects with dance and choreography become paramount in considering presenting dance in a media format. The three-dimensional space a dance occupies differs fundamentally from the space a dance occupies in a virtual or digital medium. The rules of these spaces differ from each other, and achieving desired aesthetic results requires approaches uniquely appropriate to the performance medium. At the least, this requires modification to adapt the work to the space in which it appears. During periods when concert dance was regularly seen on television, choreographers adapted their works to capture their vision on camera in a way that was, arguably, successful in the choreographer’s mind’s eye.² Unfortunately, that model -- adapting dance works in a studio with a media team whose expertise was in the aesthetics of the virtual space of television -- became economically unsustainable as the funding environment changed. Since then, the vast majority of dance (as well as theater and opera) is captured in live performances,³ and generally results in what are felt to be disappointing two-dimensional viewer experiences.

Paradoxically, the ease of creating and distributing digital content today has resulted in large amounts of available dance footage and a diverse set of viewing options of varying quality. Unfortunately, little of it seems to have the high professional standards we might wish to see representing our artform and our artists digitally. Currently, quantity seems to be trumping quality, partially due to the continuing stratospheric cost of creating high-quality digital performances. Recent data, however, seem to provide some clues about how audiences are using digital media to access dance and suggest an approach that may be helpful to those struggling with these issues.

In February, the NEA released a research report that provided deeper analysis of the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.⁴ One of the critical findings for our field is that “the vast majority of participation in theater and visual arts is through attendance, whereas the majority of participation in music and dance occurs via electronic media.”⁵ Compared to the small portion (8 percent) of the U.S. adult population who participates in the arts solely by attending performances,⁶ “over half reported viewing or listening to a performing arts event or a visual arts program (via recorded or broadcast media), or accessing arts performances or programming online (via Internet).”⁷ However, other data indicates that active or serious dancers are the only cohort to express a real interest in watching a dance performance on a digital device.⁸ This relatively limited interest in watching digital performances, contrasted with the large portion of the audience participating in dance digitally, argues i) for creating digital content that is ancillary to the core business of putting dances onstage, and ii) for not investing the significant resources required to make acceptable digital performances for audience viewing.

In the face of this data, it is hard to deny that companies and artists must engage with digital technology in some fashion, the greater the better, or face diminished audiences for their work in the future. It may well be, however, that the best use of resources is not in the digital capture or presentation of performances but in areas of marketing opportunities and audience engagement programs. Despite this, it is possible to imagine the balance shifting toward reallocating resources for aesthetic issues as technology and audience tastes continue to evolve.

Of course, as the argument above implies, the key to success in the age of digital media is articulating a clear strategy, the goals desired, a plan for implementation, and the benchmarks to measure that success. With such a framework in place, any dance organization or artist can properly evaluate the need for and scale of acceptable allocation of limited resources to this endeavor. However, there is no question that such resources must be spent and that participating in the digital realm is essential for communicating with audiences and capturing their imaginations and support in the future

Footnotes

¹ WolfBrown. (2011). How Dance Audiences Engage: Summary Report from a National Survey of Dance Audiences, July 2011, Draft made available June 1, 2011, p. 49.

² There have always been artists who have attempted to incorporate media into their dance and movement work as one element of the total work they are investigating. Given the focus of this piece on the challenge for artists and companies in utilizing digital media or incorporating it into their business model, incorporating media as another element of a creative work is outside the scope of the discussion.

³ “Live” here refers to the method of capture of the dance performance, thus including simultaneous broadcast (Live from Lincoln Center, e.g.), as well as live-captured post-production edited versions of dance performances (Dance in America, e.g.).

⁴ Novak-Leonard, Jennifer and Brown, Alan. (February, 2011). Beyond attendance: A multi-modal understanding of arts participation (Research Report #53). Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts http://www.nea.gov/research/SPPA-webinar/Novak-Leonard.pdf

⁵Novak-Leonard and Brown, p. 16.

⁶Ibid. p. 83.

⁷Ibid. p. 71.

⁸WolfBrown, p. 61. Given the greater interest in younger audiences for digital dance performances, an interesting question is whether the aesthetic disappointment is more or less important to artists dependent on the state of the digital environment in which they matured.