On Regional Dance I've suggested the idea of Regional Dance here online and in the classroom and have gotten some strong responses. So, I thought I'd explore the idea some more here in this blog. The main points seem to be: a)yes, the dance world ignores the community - art making is about community and b)the community is too dumb to get what we do. I will try to make some points and then draw a conclusion. See if you can follow along as I grapple with some ideas. Where MySpace Failed.The fact that MySpace is so popular and yet only managed to be essentially a graphical e-mailing list is significant. People feel a huge need to connect. We don't live in towns where everyone works at the factory anymore, our neighbors don't do the same thing we do and we want to find people with who have common threads, thoughts and belief systems. The keywords MySpace provides is not utilized. That is where it fails; we want to connect with people of similar interests. We need to add to our blogs and websites keywords for locale; "santa clarita", "modern dance", "performance art." Leaving the house. We want to go out. Currently 43% of our "free viewing time" is now online as opposed to watching television. Soon enough we'll see major sports suffer as the impact of dwindling viewers takes effect. Already, after 30 years Monday Night Football has shifted to cable television. Dance On Cable will be another blog, I promise! Our online experiences are about meeting people who are like-minded. Already there are online groups being formed who meet in the community in "real life." Communal Experience. People love to get together in social situations. It's human nature. Currently we go in small groups to the movies, to dinner, to clubs and to sporting events. It's easy to find, always in the same place and the shared experience cements friendships. Dance Theater needs to be more prolific and stable to build local crowds. User Participation. The biggest lesson by far of Web 2.0 is user participation. Dance Companies need to use tools to allow people to feel invested and participatory in their company. Online reviews, donating money, chat, blogs, active websites. The performances need to engage the audience as well. That old "snob trick" of not taking a bow because its art -- is a rip off, pure and simple. Do the math. 1 dancer = 1 boyfriend + 1 parent + 1 friend = 3 audience members. If your company has 6 dancers, you are guaranteed 18 audience members. If you do 5 pieces using 20 different performers you have 60 people coming to see the show. Dance Schools have recitals with packed houses. The Nutcracker uses local talent and packs the house. One time I was in Hobbs, New Mexico touring the Nut (Art to the Sticks Grant). My waitress in the bar said, "If you hear "sic 'em, cowboy!" from the audience, you know I'm cheering my nephew." Dropped jaw aside, it proves my point! I think Regional Dance is a true possibility and at least a partial solution to the incredible numbers of artists coming through the studio and educational system. Like television, one starts by doing the local news and hopefully moves up to national or takes a tangent into cable news. Or even becomes a game show host. The strategy of using the online tools to bring the community of people who enjoy watching the arts together in a physical space is what everyone wants. We want to go to a place where we are welcome and we know someone and have an "inside look" at what is going to happen. I know I read reviews for movies before I go see one. Let's use our websites, keywords, groups, local talent, blogs and even MySpace to build local audiences to see our shows. Let's learn to be gracious hosts instead of aloof artists. I think it is a real possibility.

Unique and Powerful Voice Benoit in his Recycled Space Blog (click above for the permalink) makes some very good points. I think by his mentioning audiences initially, I automatically think about the large numbers of performers and creators in the art world. His response is that there are a lot of voices to be heard, plenty of established companies and there is a bevy of upcoming artists as well. Doug Fox in his Great Dance Weblog grapples with educating our audiences in this article by using video and online tools. I think we are all wrestling with the same issues. We believe that we have something to say as artists, there are plenty of performers for our talent pool, our technology to support our art is ... mostly affordable. The problem, it seems, is audience. Whether it's in dwindling numbers or educating them to understand what we do; we want them to come see our work. Better yet, pay to see our work. A lot of people went to see Riverdance. There is an audience out there. One might reply, "but that is not what we do." I agree! I don't want to see that stuff. I want to see modern, post-modern or contemporary dance. I'm not really interested in spectacle or even presentation dance, per se. Either we need a choreographer with a unique and powerful voice to lead us in a new direction or we need to re-direct our energies on wooing audiences. A lot of people don't like the art of the 20th Century. They are offended by blocks of red paint on a canvas and random honking of horns in experimental music. In our world, our art requires a certain sophistication by our audience to appreciate the work. (On a side note, I wonder if the only successful post-modern artists have been the comics like Andy Kaufman and that Borat guy.) Ladies and Gentlemen, the Riverdance of Modern Dance -- my dance company! I just can't imagine it. I do think there is a partial solution though. That is the idea of Regional Dance. Change the American model that all dance must flow through New York. It's an archaic model that is entrenched in Modern Dance. Even performers don't respect each other unless they can say, "when I was in New York." I'd like to suggest the model of Memphis Ballet. They decided to create new ballets that are American. Even more so, ballets based on their region! Sun Records was in Memphis so they used the music of Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley. They based one of their ballets on a local story that was almost folklore for the region. Now audiences could understand the work without the need to appreciate the technique. I like the idea. I can imagine a Modern Dance company with regional ties and civic pride. I can imagine building an audience who can appreciate the work because it's in the context of the local scene. Like rap music riffs on it's own neighborhood, modern dance could easily do the same. Perhaps we should look at this and begin asking more questions like the role of Choreographer as Producer and, as ever, the role of politics in art. To read the pdf file on the Memphis Ballet and regional ballet, click here.

The Bacchae Last night I attended The Bacchae directed by Mira Kingsley with very pleasing results. First of all, I will say that I think the classics can get "freshened" by the elements of modern or post-modern dance (or improv or some element of abstraction) and the show I saw was what I would comfortably call "movement theater." Re-considering a classic, one has a lot of latitude in representative elements. The show I saw last night reminded me of the fantasy elements of the movie Baron Von Munchhausen as well as the clever delivery of dialogue in the movie A MidSummer Night's Dream. The production team felt comfortably over-the-top with exaggerated elements in the costuming, broad splashes of color and outrageous angles in the lighting and a sound-scape that became another voice in the dialogue. I walked away with new respect for the Theater Director, realizing that one: Mira Kingsley is a smart, complex director and two: directors should be people who are smarter than me! How she successfully juggled all those elements and things(!) throughout a two hour presentation leaves me in awe. This show will come and go along with a long string of creations that are invented in the Walt Disney Modular Theater -- this unique place is a playground for directors and designers who, in the future, will never be able to create on this level again.

State of Affairs Benoit in his blog Recycled Space ponders the state of affairs concerning dwindling audiences. Click on the title of this blog for the permalink to his article. I think this is a fair question: to a point. I'd ask when was the heyday? Do these statistics reflect the growing population? I might think that overall attendance is higher than say 1950 or 1930 simply because there are more venues. I keep going back to the question, "when was it great?" If we can pinpoint when theater and dance was considered successful then we can have the conversation. Benoit mentions that the art forms may go extinct. I think it would be clearer to say that they will become Museum Pieces. Trotting out old classics in Ballet has happened for 100 years; the same is true for Opera. Many art forms are stuck in time - relying on the audience's nostalgia and simple awareness. It would be safe to blame Arts Education and it's lack in our school systems, no doubt. My guess is that the overall numbers of people attending Theater in it's broadest terms has stayed even for a century. So -- I will ask some questions. Despite the amazing numbers of artists graduating from college, is it fair to think that we'll have more than ten artists in each genre with a unique and powerful voice? Why can not anyone put the dwindling numbers of audiences in the context of television's impact for the past 60 years? Why are the arts not as "camera friendly" as sporting events who made the media transition easily? I think a lot of the question is really about intent. Artists -- are they really trying for an entertainment? I think that many artists have much more to say than "sit back and enjoy this ditty", they want to engage the audience. Asking the audience to engage is asking them to work, risk themselves, be vulnerable and grow. As ever, a duanting task, the challenge is to not make it so scary. Our audiences are used to the safety of the screen - be it computer, television or cellphone.

Improv, Jazz and Showtime I am not sure when I began looking at modern dance in the context of a broader art movement. Believe me it was a conscience raising experience -- I was stunned. I think it was when I went to see Dennon and Sayhber Rawles teach a work shop in Jazz Dance ... and they put the entire experience in the context of Jazz Music. Now I could suddenly see why Miles Davis might cover a Cole Porter song. Or John Coltrane might cover a song from The Sound of Music. I understood better what West Side Story was all about. I began to connect the improvisation which began in the 60's (very roughly) in jazz, modern dance and theater. I could see it echoed in shows like Pippin or the work of Richard Foreman. I had read an article (was it in BackStage West?) that was just trashing Improv and Contact Improv in modern dance. It said that Improv was asking the audience to be indulgent and by losing the presentational style of dance ~ it was killing the audiences. I bought into this completely, ignoring the cultural shift from the invention of television as the prime reason audiences were dwindling. Since then, I've changed my mind. I now see Improv in dance much the same way I might enjoy some of the later Miles Davis tunes. It seems that as the number of artists has grown that the major art forms have settled into almost undefined factions. Jazz music has splintered into areas like acid jazz and jazz fusion. Dance is splintered into modern, post-modern and contemporary. New work in Theater seems to be still based on improv or on a grand scale. The relationships of the main art forms don't seem quite so connected (perhaps because we are in the middle of it) and the artists are not responding to each other. Oddly, a lot of new work is spectacle. Is it wrong to expect some sophistication from our audiences? Must we create presentational dance as an entertainment to be commercial enough to succeed? Is it wrong to try an engage our audiences on some level that challenges their perceptions of Art and art-making? I hope that, someday, I can look back on this period in time and be able to put it into the context of a broader art movement.

Wikipedia and Self-Promotion One of the trends I've noted and thought I'd suggest to anyone who reads this blog is that more and more artists are putting their information up on Wikipedia. I recently was told a faculty memember from the Music School was going to use the theater that I am the Technical Director of and I decided to do a quick Google of her name to learn more about her. Her name is Anne LeBaron and her Wikipedia entry is here. Wikipedia is a Web 2.0-style site that allows user particiaption in generating entries. The idea that "one hundred eyes can find a bug better than one set of eyes" is the concept this type of participation relies upon. I've read recently that there are now classified sites created by the FBI and CIA that are of the wiki ilk where field officers are updating these sites with information about the bad guys they are trying to hunt down. Way back in the mid-90's I created three simple pages on Choreographers -- Ballet, Modern and Post-Modern that I created from using my notes from Dance History class, simply because at the time there was nothing online. I was surprised how quickly my pages became links all over the internet and embedded into classroom sites. People began to send more information to me to update my pages and ...how shall I say .... "new choreographers" demanded I post their information by way of self-promotion. The pages lasted about three years before it got way way way too big for me to handle and double-check the information -- I dropped the pages. Actually I was kinda sad I had to do that. Today wikipedia is filling that void with user updates AND people are using it for self-promotion. I can imagine wiki's beyond wikipedia to serve more specific areas and genres of information and assume this will be available very soon. Until then, go to wikipedia, add your name and profile, and do some reasonable self-promotion. Follow Up Links CIA - Wiki Article Unofficial Intellipedia Blog Web 2.0 Defined What is Wiki Wikipedia's Main Page

Our Cheating Hearts. Pt. II US News and World Reports has an editorial on cheating in America here. Since this is Part II, obviously it's a follow up to Part I, scroll down and read the other first if you want. When I was in college once upon a time, learning to be a lighting designer meant learning how to draft. I owned a drafting table, templates and pencils and practiced my lettering every day. It was hand-drawn and tedious beyond belief. It was a skill-level required to be a lighting designer. Today, this is entirely replaced by a tool -- a computer program generates the symbols and duplicates arrays of lights by the click of a mouse. I don't consider this cheating if I use this program. It is a tool that does the work for me. Why do we consider it cheating when a student uses the Internet to get their information? Even during a test? Consider if I asked the question: when was the first lighting computer used on Broadway? If they can jump online and get the answer: 1975, A Chorus Line designed by Tharon Musser straight from this article in Wikipedia. Do I want them to know this? Yes. If the information is easily found, why ask them to memorize it? I am beginning to think we need to change our education model as it feels out-dated. Our courses need to accept that the Internet is an immediate source of information. We need to emphasize in our classes the information we want our students to have on the tips of their tongues versus the information easily looked up. Personally I am beginning to drop dates from my exams. I am trying to re-focus on events of significance in history that have a contextual impact on today. I feel I am only partially successful in that my classes can feel like a mini-boot camp. Like a drill sargeant I believe that "repetition is a heavy key to learning." I have also found that the idea that the youth of today is Internet savvy is wrong. This is a myth pure and simple. College students may know MySpace and Instant Messaging -- but they are blank about blogs, wikis, forums and even search engines like Google, they have no idea how to customize a search. Just because a kid might be comfortable trying different ways than I would get get my freaking DVD player to work because they've grown up playing computer games with 1000 deaths does not mean they are taking a single step farther in understanding how the Internet works. As adults we assume they have taken the same steps we would have -- exploring the uses of a new tool. This is not so, they use the tool for its immediate need and then drop it. There is an abundance of tools available via the Internet -- now, we as instructors, need to pull them through their education using the Internet as well. I've been surprised at the resistance I've gotten at suggesting that our college students write using blogs. Why can't I ask that my students write in a public forum? Maybe next year my fellow faculty members and my future students will see someone else do this successfully and begin to wave the flag as if it were their original idea. We see it happening online, I believe that no one else is looking. Would I be a bad teacher to allow searches during an exam much like some offer "open book exams"? We need to update our teaching methods. If 70% of the students are cheating -- then how can we think that they are doing something wrong? They don't think of it as cheating. They think of it as using a tool to get the result. We must be asking the wrong questions in our tests.