Where are the audiences for dance? Getting butts in seats is step one for a healthy dance ecosystem. To assist in this effort, Pentacle is proud to announce our latest initiative, Metro STEP:  Supplying a Team Engagement Process— that will collaborate with presenters to more fully engage and expand their audiences during our Metropolitan Intersections artists’ performances and residencies, made possible through a generous grant from DanceUSA’s Engaging Dance Audiences (EDA) program.

Central to the Metro STEP project will be a portfolio of tools presenters can use to promote, educate and create bonds between their communities and Metropolitan Intersections Artists, including:

• Dance Trailers of each Metro artist’s current touring work, that can be shared online, played before other presentations (like a movie trailer), or in theater lobbies.
• Video Interviews with each Metro artist to give context to their work and draw viewers into the artist’s dance experience.
• Talk Dance Podcasts. An audio or video interview will be conducted with Metro artists by another reputable artist—not necessarily a choreographer—and edited into finished programming.  These audio interviews will be available to be streamed online and downloaded on mobile devices.
• Opening Acts and Open Rehearsals. Metro STEP staff will work with presenters to identify a local performing arts group that would serve as a compelling opening act for the artist being presented.
• Performance Captures. Funding permitting, and in collaboration with presenters, Pentacle will coordinate high quality performance captures of the Metro artists’ work to be made available for broadcast, downloads, mobile viewing, archival and educations purposes.

Through strategic engagement thinking, planning, and collaborative implementation Metro STEP staff will join with a presenter to create an engagement team that can evolve unique and imaginative ways to enrich audiences’ and participants’ experiences of the Metro artist’s time at the venue, and to reach out to potentially new participant pools. We look forward to working with the Metro artists and the presenters to come up with creative strategies to increase audience engagement.

For more information on participating in the project please contact: Francine Sheffield, Artist Representative of Metropolitan Intersections at 212-278-8111 x305, francines[at]pentacle.org

 

Engaging Dance Audiences is administered by Dance/USA and made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.