By Lauren Warnecke
In a convening of some of Chicago’s great dance minds, Audience Architects’ half-day seminar “Technology, Dance Audiences and You” brought forth some interesting ideas and fresh discussion about a persistent challenge (or two) in our field. I’ve been to enough of these seminars about “persistent challenges in our field” to know that they typically consist of lots of coffee, schmoozing, and complaining.
Case in point:
last summer’s Dance/USA conference brought up “the diversity problem” over, and over, and over. We sat at round tables and panel discussions and talked about all the things that are wrong in our field, we vehemently proclaimed that we need to find solutions to our problems--and then we went home.
Friday’s seminar on technology and audience engagement felt different. Instead of spending half a day explaining the challenge, the assumption was that we all already know it. Audiences are declining. Technology is hard. Now, what are we going to DO about it?
For a change, I felt that this session was more solutions-based than bitch-fest. To borrow a metaphor from Audience Architects’ Executive Director Heather Hartley, describing the beautiful breakfast spread provided by Blue Plate Chicago: “No more stale bagels.”
The morning started off really high with Commissioner Michelle Boone’s welcoming address. As the lady in charge at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Ms. Boone spoke on behalf of the Mayor, confirming his commitment to making Chicago a global, cultural destination for dance, and proclaiming April officially “Chicago Dance Month.” What followed was a charged keynote address from Ben Cameron, Program Director for the Arts at The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
In a nutshell: he is awesome.
Many professionals in our field might be tempted to see “the audience problem” and “the technology problem” as separate challenges (myself included). For me, Cameron’s talk prompted me to think of audience engagement, butts in seats, and quickly advancing technology as complementary problems, and, subsequently, complementary solutions.
Cameron’s talk, plus an informative panel of technology savvy experts with ties to the arts steered the conversation around finding the best ways to incorporate technology into our artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors. Instead of any old Joe from M.I.T. or Google, the panel (Eric Eatherly of The Silverman Group, Timothy Buckley from IBM, Sean McGinnis with 312 Digital, and Links Hall’s Communications Director Marie Casimir) was carefully made up of tech-minded professionals who have artistic roots. As Heather Hartley noted, “This intimate level of understanding informed our curation of the building of the panel, and these folks were invited to speak in large part because of their arts backgrounds -- a rare trait in the technology field, yet one deeply valued for the purposes of our panel and the questions we will address.”
Technology might not actually be a problem, but rather a key to unlocking the mystery of declining dance audiences. Marketing and audience engagement are today largely focused on telling the audience why they should think the arts are important. But, as Ben Cameron inquired, “What if they already get it? What if they already love the arts, but not our delivery of it?”
Paper postcards and newspaper ads are the marketing schemes of the past, and we’ve entered a new era where our efforts are now concentrated in our Twitter feeds, our Facebook pages, Instagrams, Pinterests, and Foursquares. But it’s frustrating to see social media and engagement used as a blatant and thoughtless marketing scheme.
Here’s the deal: Technology won’t help you if you don’t use it smartly. And the secret is to choose the technology that works for YOU and your brand (that is to say, your company). If you can’t imagine anything but a link to buy tickets going on Twitter over, and over, and over, then don’t use it. Instead, focus your efforts on the tools that are going to not only promote but engage your audience to participate on a larger level than they ever could sitting in a dark theater with their cell phones turned off. Technology can be used to not only advance our marketing initiatives but to look at how we create our work in a whole new way. For some, this might be a video channel on YouTube; it could be a blog written by a company member while you’re on tour; it could be a Twitter contest to pitch ideas for a new piece. Whatever technology it is you choose to utilize, it needs to have a purpose beyond “buy tickets, because we think you should.” Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and energy.
We are a field of limited resources. This is not new news. Sometimes adopting technology feels like a problem more than a tool because it’s one more thing to add to our plates. To limit the drawing of resources away from the art itself in an effort to Tweet is counterproductive. So Cameron asks not what must we add to our current responsibilities, making our to-do lists even longer, but instead “What are we willing to let go of?” If the integration of social media and technology is The New Normal, it has to be bigger than signing up for a Twitter handle just because all the cool kids are doing it. The “Real New Normal,” as Ben Cameron stated, is not in what we do, but “how we gain the resilience to change again, and again, and again.”