Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Economic downturn

Too bad "downturn" is the recession instead of a dance move, isn't it?

How are you all being affected by the economic hard times? Most of us don't dance because it's lucrative anyway, but is the slow economy making things more difficult? Students and individuals having a hard time affording dance classes? Organizations having a harder time with funding from grants (the Georgia Council for the Arts has cut its funding by 58%!)?

Please comment with your experiences, and then, rather than just making room for complaints--can you offer any suggestions for how we could work together to overcome some of the hardships?

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Starting somewhere...

I've started by putting up lists of classes and dancers/companies that I know about. Along the side of the page are just the ones I could type in today, I'm by no means saying this is a comprehensive list. So please let me know if you're not listed in a comment or email and I'll be sure to add your site!

Let's get things moving, Atlanta!

Hi Atlanta Dancers and dance-lovers!

So Houston has Dance Source Houston, Washington DC has Dance/MetroDC, Philadelphia has PhiladelphiaDance and North Carolina has the North Carolina Dance Alliance, just to name a few. None of their programming is identical, but all these organizations help communication among dancers and about the dancing in their regions.

We have so much dance to talk about, Atlanta, but where is the conversation? In the past, there have been attempts to get talking with the Atlanta Dance Initiative and Dance Georgia, among others. There are still murmurs of these, but not loud enough! The momentum just didn't last. Of course it didn't, most of us are dancing in addition to other jobs and so many other things in our busy lives, so fitting in that one extra thing is hard. So I'm putting this blog out here as an attempt to make it easier to try to get the conversation moving. Have two minutes as you drink your morning coffee? Throw in your two cents in a comment about someone else's post. Have a lot to say about something? Let me know and I'll post your thoughts!

I'm not trying to make this my own personal blog, but if someone doesn't start talking on a blog, there's nothing to say! So consider this an online ice-breaker, in hopes that things will take off and I don't have to be the only one yammering away! And to clarify, this is Claire at Several Dancers Core, but it's not exactly a SDC project--we want to make space for everyone else to speak up, to open it up to ALL the dancers in Metro Atlanta: studios, companies, individual artists, in any and all genres. That's a lot of folks, so there should be a lot to talk about!

Will we ever have something as structured as those other places? Maybe not, but if we don't start talking, we'll never know what needs we have as a community that a service organization could fill! There are so many things going on in Atlanta dance! But how much do we actually talk to each other about what we're doing? Speak up and let's get this conversation moving!