Saturday, July 9, 2011

Gear up for conference time

So I'm getting emails about the service council that's meeting at the Dance/USA conference later this week. Compared to the more organized orgs out there, I feel like we almost don't count, but I'm hoping to get some ideas from what those who ARE organized are doing that might help us on our path forward.

I read some of the notes sent from discussions for DanceNYC and it strikes me how the landscape compares/contrasts. Always people feel like there's not enough money for anything, but I think that's across the board, no matter where you are or how big/small you are. If you're small, then you're dealing with really having no money at all, and if you're big, you have the problem of being stretched to keep doing all the things you've already built. This is the same sort of difference between what we're doing, on the small end, and what they do in NY on the big end. They have expectations to fulfill, with people traveling there to dance from all over the world and not enough opportunities to do so. We make our own opportunities, often in places you don't expect dance to be. There seems to be a big movement here and now that dance pops up where you almost least expect it, mostly because more dancers have made the choice to take it to the audiences that don't want to come to us (because they don't know we're here).  The NY folks say they have no lack of people making dances, but also feel like they have problems drawing audiences.
So we'll see how the conversations go this week. If you have any questions you'd like me to ask or keep in mind, leave a comment and I'll see what I can find out!

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