Dance/USA presents its fourth series of biweekly webinars on community and audience engagement, made possible by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. In spring of 2018, Engaging Dance Audiences (EDA) Round Four grantees shared the engagement practices and methods used in their projects. These interactive webinars began with grantees live on camera and segued discussions and questions. During each webinar, a shared whiteboard captured a summary of speaker comments, resources, and answers to questions posed. The goal was for everyone to leave with fresh ideas, new resources, and guidance. Webinars are appropriate for artists and administrators in the areas of marketing, education, and fundraising, as well as teachers and even those working in other art forms who want fresh ideas for engaging audiences.
Recordings of each webinar and links to each whiteboard are available below.
Some of the EDA grantee projects are designed to expand young
people’s views not only about dance, but about themselves, so that they feel
comfortable in arts venues, develop artistically, and speak their minds. Hear from artists who strive to understand and address the needs of youth: Dancing Grounds, whose Dance For Social
Change Festival trains young people to create and tour work; Destiny Arts Center, whose African Roots of
Hip Hop is created and performed by professional artists with their youth
company; and TU Dance, who trained youth ambassadors to orient the adults in
their lives to contemporary dance.
Hear from artists who will take the ideas that inspire them and traditions they study and practice to new places: Dayton Contemporary Dance Company,
whose Young, Gifted, and
Black, tours to Historically Black Colleges and Universities; Urban Bush Women,
whose new work, Hair and Other Stories draws upon
their use of storytelling, processionals, and nontraditional spaces to engage
African American women and other audiences; and Viver Brasil, whose Samba
in the Streets brings Afro-Brazilian carnival dance forms to Los Angeles,
CA and Birmingham and Selma, AL for processionals and discussions about the history
of civil rights activism in the United States and Brazil.
As concert dance broadens its notions of physicality in the performers onstage,
audiences’ perceptions are expanding as well. Hear from Dance/NYC
about its Disability. Dance. Artistry. initiative
with six physically integrated dance companies; Heritage Works,
about its Cultural Scripts series
on the historic and contemporary role of the Black body within Detroit, Muslim,
African, and African-American contexts; and Holly Bass|360,
whose Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company (TATTCO),
in collaboration with court-involved African American teen girls, explores the
metaphor of time travel as movement between enslavement and liberation.
Hear from artists who choreograph in places
and ways that raise awareness of social issues, rallying neighborhoods to
action: Forklift Danceworks, whose new work around Austin Parks’
city pools, engages Parks staff and residents in the Eastern Crescent
community; Cleo Parker Robinson
Dance, whose ArtBursts for the African American community in the
Five Points neighborhood of Denver explore issues and community stories
affecting neighborhoods; CONTRA-TIEMPO, whose engagement
with the Community Coalition in South Los Angeles, includes choreographic labs,
leading up to the premier of their new work, joyUS; and Ping Chong and Company, whose Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity uses dance as a vehicle for exploring Muslim American identity.
Hear from
artists whose projects are designed to speak to and embrace the LGBTQ
community: Abraham.In.Motion, who
developed a pre/post engagement strategy for multigenerational LGBTQ audiences
during the tour of the new work Dearest Home and Sean Dorsey Dance, about audience engagement work with transgender, gender non-conforming, LGBQ people and people living with HIV/AIDS during the tour of his work, The Missing Generation.
