Following up to my last post about ballet audience development...
THE WINGER has a post about the lines that wrapped around the building when New York City Ballet gave out free tickets to its open dress rehearsal of Romeo & Juliet. Giving away stuff for free is certainly one way to entice audiences into the house. Not necessarily new audiences though - the people who got up and went to the theatre at 7am to wait for three hours in line were the dedicated fans, not the uninitiated newbies. Still though it's a great program. A similar program: LA Opera will have local school children for a free afternoon dress rehearsal of The Merry Widow later this week - that's a great opportunity for those school kids!
Also, Andre sent me this link to DanceChannelTV.com, which has online features about all sorts of dance events in Los Angeles. There are wonderful video features on Los Angeles Ballet, the Joffrey, the Kirov and a bunch of others. Web sites like this are one great way that dance can reach out to new audiences. It's a great web site worth checking out. The most interesting segment is an interview with Los Angeles Times dance critic Lewis Segal. He says a lot of very interesting and informed things through his interview. He even responds to the highly controversial LA Times article that he wrote earlier this year, which was provactively titled "Five Things I Hate About Ballet". You can tell from the interview that, despite the LA Times article's title, Segal really does care passionately about ballet - get a load of the photos on his wall - and dance as an art form.
Relating particularly to my last blog post, at about 12 and a half minutes into the interview, he says the same thing I did about what dance can do on television - I swear that I didn't see this before I wrote my post last night (Andre only sent it to me this morning)! With more dance on TV, people might much more easily discover it casually, flipping the channels or whatever. Web sites like Dancechanneltv.com are great, but the viewer has to seek that out and take the extra effort to watch it. But if its on TV, it comes in with minimal effort for the viewer. Doug Fox's Great Dance Weblog keeps a running blog about dance popping up in new technology - youtube, performance technology, etc. It's worth checking out regularly to keep up on this topic.
1 comment:
This is all really interesting -- I just found your blog through the Winger. Thanks for linking to the dancechannel -- I'm definitely going to check it out. And the Siegal clips as well -- I don't think he's as bad a guy as people think -- I think he was consciously trying to be somewhat inflammatory with that Times article partly to get people thinking and talking. And thanks for pointing out that NYT article in your last post -- I'd missed it, but it's such a compelling issue -- and is one that is going to be talked about for a while...
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