If you're new to the wacky world of dance then there is a pretty good chance you will turn to the internet looking for information about this most beleaguered of professions. What is it? Why is it? Where is it? Are probably just a few of the questions you, as a newbie, will want to ask and you may just want to watch something using the magic we call "video".

As you would expect this is where the train runs off the rails and falls down a very large canyon where it inexplicably explodes into a huge fireball despite being powered by electricity.

The problem is this. Dance is a world that doesn't really like to share. As a whole the profession has heartily embraced social media, with emphasis on the word "social", but when it comes to talking about dance and dance companies in more general terms the powers that be revert to "bubble" mode and pretend the other guys don't exist.

Were you to browse the website for DanceXchange, located in Birmingham and one of the UK's National Dance Agencies*, you will find barely a mention of Motionhouse Dance Theatre, one of this country's most enduring dance companies, based just 30 minutes away in Leamington Spa.

They don't seem too interested in telling you about ACE Dance and Music either and that company lives in the same city.

Dance East were very proud to tell us all about the "world premiere" of Arthur Pita's new work 'God's Garden' despite the fact the show was on several days beforehand in Birmingham at the British Dance Edition and that was the third "preview" performance of that piece. The Ipswich based NDA* seemed unconcerned about sharing that information with anyone.

Since the performance has taken place, not a word on the company and where they are now.

Exploring their site you can find local listings for up and coming shows but apart from press release blurb there is not one single bit of background information on the companies themselves. Not even rudimentary links to websites, or videos, or photos. Nothing but silence in written form.

Dance City, our own hamstrung nemesis in the bitter north, is still stumbling about in the dark and can't muster the energy to tell you about Ballet Lorent, a dance company based in their own building or the numerous other small companies they play host to. Never mind spreading the word on any other dance company in the UK or beyond because sharing that type of information couldn't possibly be useful, could it?

The other dance agencies, large and small, follow a similar pattern. If something isn't directly related to them as an organisation they won't tell you about it. No national listings, no background information on the profession overall, no sharing of information in any way shape or form.

We can probably give a pass to the smaller ones mind you, since having two or three part-time staff doesn't give you a lot of time to get with the sharing. We have no sympathy for the bigger fish though.

Venues are just as culpable in all of this. Find a listing for a dance company on their website and you get the usual press blurb, a pointless quote from some newspaper hack and nothing else. One notable exception is Warwick Arts Centre that does actually take the time to embed some video along with the listing but that's one out of hundreds.

Herding Cats

Something as straightforward as a national listings database might sound grandiose and complex but the online tools exist to set that up in a week. The dance infrastructure and their employees just need to sort it out. You get the feeling however that organising a bag of cats to walk in a parade would be an easier task.

Several weeks ago Article19 contacted each of the NDAs* to offer more than 30 high quality videos to them, via our channel on the video sharing site Vimeo, so they could build their own video sections and perhaps better inform their users about dance companies and the kind of work they are making and touring.

It was free, it was easy, there was no advertising to speak of. All they had to do was make an effort, we did all the heavy lifting creating the material in the first place.

Apart from one reply from the smallest NDA* of the lot (who declined our offer for technical reasons!), once again, all we heard was nothing at all.

On The Same Side

We, here in TheLab™, would argue that education and awareness are the cornerstones of building interest in a particular subject. The more information people have and the easier that information is to get at the more likely the uninformed are to develop a lasting interest in something.

Throughout the dance world there are many who may disagree with us and how we do things here. Different agencies and venues may disagree on the best way to move this profession forward but we can all at least agree on one thing. We all like dance! We're all the same side, it's not a fight to the death for audience share, this isn't NBC vs Fox!

The powers that be need to start thinking outside the box and get over their apparently ego driven protectionist attitude and start telling their website users, and the visitors to their physical buildings, about the profession as a whole. It may come as a surprise to some but the internet, that thing you're on right now, is quite a big deal.

Sharing information online and through other means is only a small part of their overall job but it's an important part of their job and they're not doing it very well, if at all. So get a tighter grip on your horses and open up a little, would you please!

[ Photo by Jason Kuffer ]

*we know they're not called NDAs anymore but we'll stick with that for the moment absent a better description.

File this one under "It's Funny Because It's Sadler's Wells Which *Is Dance* But They Didn't Read Their Funding Guidelines Properly So Let's Laugh Near Them, Not At Them!"

Over the last year or so a question has been niggling away at us, here in TheLab™, regarding just why the self aggrandising London theatre didn't have an Arts Council logo anywhere on their website indicating they are in receipt of public subsidy (the theatre is an RFO).

For a time we thought they were independent, free from the grasp of the public purse strings and all the associated nonsense that goes with it. Good for them we thought, at least their spending their own money to book "Swan Lake" over and over again.

Finally we had to scratch the itch and ask the question.

ACE's own guidelines, which come with your funding agreement state;

"If your organisation has a website, the relevant grant award logo must appear on the home page."

Organisations large or small, fat or thin have to play by the same rules, no exceptions, as ACE told us today.

Ironically "The Wells" was recently given over £700,000 from the ACE "Sustain" programme to shore up its finances and develop its website. As expected the theatre thanked us profusely, well.... they thanked us, for pointing it out and the logo will be added in "due course".

The guidelines also stipulate that:

"If you use other web-based platforms to publicise your work, such as My Space or other networking sites, you should display the grant award logo/Lottery grant award logo."

Yes, you guessed it, the logo isn't on their Facebook page either, we forgot to point that out though, maybe they'll notice all on their own!

Unfortunately ACE told us that the punishment for failing to include the logo does not involve Alistair Spalding being taken to a scary castle dungeon for "re-education" by a giant hammer wielding troll called Olaf!*

The funding giant has recently been getting a little huffy about people not acknowledging their "help" enough so to retaliate they made the funding logo even more annoying prominent.

A cynical person might suggest the logo was left off the site on purpose to give users the impression that "The Wells" was an independent commercial theatre. But we're not that cynical and shame on you for thinking it.

*We should point out that the troll is giant, as is the hammer, it's not a "giant hammer" being wielded by a regular sized troll.

It sometimes comes up in conversation why things are different for professional dancers compared to other folks doing their particular, non dance, job. Why do we focus on dancer's pay and health provision so much, what's all the fuss about?

There are many reasons why the work of a professional dancer is "different" but here are a few examples focused on just one category;

Broken foot, broken leg, broken arm, dislocated shoulder, dislocated elbow, torn rotator cuff, dislocated knee-cap (particularly nasty that one), spinal cord damage, broken neck, concussion, torn knee ligaments, torn hamstring, separated hamstring, multiple bone fractures, fractured ribs, broken ribs, micro fractures (usually associated with a point of multiple impacts like shins, knees or forearms), sprained ankles, sprained wrists, multiple variations of neck injuries, viral infections (caused by other physical injury), lower back pain (various levels of severity), upper back pain (various levels of severity), hip-flexor damage, crepitus, cuts and bruises (various degrees of severity), arthritis, broken toes and fingers (and multiple variations thereof), exhaustion......

Need we go on? These injuries and hundreds more like them are a real possibility almost every working day of a professional dancer's career.

If you're a dancer or you work in this business alongside them there is a pretty good chance you know someone who has suffered one or more of the injuries mentioned above.

A professional athlete will train strenuously to be good at just one thing, running down a track, vaulting over a pole, etc. Dancer's on the other hand have to train strenuously to deal with a multitude of physical challenges very few of which are natural in any way, shape or form.

According to Dance UK 83% of dancers will get injured at some point compared to just 16% of rugby players. A comforting thought in an industry with no viable health care protection. If a dancer gets hurt and a physio can't help quickly enough then they are out of a job and on their own, end of story.

DanceUK is still struggling to raise £400,000 after more than three years to kick start a dancers health insurance and research project. It's a very strange situation because ACE have, by their own admission, spent more than £100Million on new dance buildings.

Perhaps the problem is we can't cut ribbons or have press photo shoots for the processing of health insurance forms.

There was a time when ACE, and others, cited dancers as, very obviously, the most important cog in the professional machine. We'll venture that the words were easier to conjure than actions to back them up.

Being a professional dancer is very very hard. Being a professional dancer can be very very dangerous. Being a professional dancer is very very different.

Writings and rambling in the press are telling anybody that will listen that the current crop of dance shows on television, 'So You Think You Can Dance' and their ilk, are cheap and nasty but they're good for dance.

The aforementioned BBC "talent" show is doing a contemporary dance bit this coming weekend with choreography by several contemporary dance makers (most of whom are male but that's another argument).

Rafael Bonachela is quoted in the Guardian newspaper as saying his appearance on the show has been good for ticket sales for his company's current tour. Newcomers to the fold might be a little bit surprised to find out that his work is not set to over the top power ballads as demanded by television producers.

Considering the quoted seven million audience for 'So You Think You Can Dance' it is perhaps not too surprising that some people will be curious enough to go to an actual theatre to see an actual show. This is a good thing. The more people getting off their backsides and coming to the theatre the better no matter how they found out about it.

Internet search giant Google, however contemptible they may be on some issues, do provide some interesting insights into what people search for online at any given time.

On the above graph the blue line represents searches for 'So You Think You Can Dance' over the last twelve months inside the UK. The term 'Contemporary Dance' is illustrated by the red line. What should also be on the graph are two lines showing search terms for Mr Bonachela and Mark Baldwin (who has also appeared on the show).

The lines for those two terms don't show up because there is not enough data for Google to plot a graph meaning there was no measurable uptick in searches for either of those two dance makers, at least using Google's metrics. There is a tiny uptick in the general searches for contemporary dance but it's barely above the point from previous months.

Our second graph again shows the BBC programme in blue with searches for "dance classes" in red. The graph does indicate a spike of interest in line with the airing of the programme but looking at the previous 12 months (illustrated by the graph) that particular search term was always between 2 and 4.

Also, you would expect to see a drop in interest during December and early January (when most dance classes are off) followed by a spike later in January when classes resume.

It's probably safe to say that although these programmes might bring a few people into theatres to watch a full evening of contemporary dance in general the interest is in the television show itself and viewers are showing very little interest in either the participants or the dance makers chosen to appear.

Over the long term the BBC, Sky, et al will keep these programmes on the air as long as people keep watching them but like all light entertainment shows it's probably going in one ear coming straight out of the other and little or nothing is getting stuck in anybody's head.

If major networks were really committed to dance and the arts on television, as they are always saying they are, then instead of putting on forgettable competitions they would simply feature actual work, be it theatre, dance or music in prime-time.

When they do feature dance on television, sans phone voting and ex Muppet Show choreographers, it is of course relegated to BBC4 in the middle of the night.

The above video features author Ken Robinson making a presentation at TED (Technology, Education, Design) discussing the importance of children being taught to be creative rather than purely academically. Quite a bit of the presentation is concerned with dance.

It's insightful and incredibly funny and reminds this writer of the time when an art teacher of all people said; "no you can't be a cartoonist you have to sit there and draw this dead bird instead!"

Never did find a practical or creative use for being able to draw dead birds! The video is from 2006 but still holds true today.

Thanks: Shantala Pepe

[ TED ]

BBC News is reporting that the BBC (it's always a bit weird when they do that!) is shelving plans to run all four acts of 'In The Spirit of Diaghilev' from its Christmas schedule.

The four acts of the performance, all created by different dance makers, run as one show but the segment created by Javier De Frutos is causing "The Beeb" some headaches because it features scenes of, and we're not kidding, "a pope abusing an altar boy and strangling a pregnant nun."

It all sounds pretty normal to us, especially coming from Mr De Frutos as he featured a pregnant woman being beaten up is his last full length dance work for Phoenix Dance Theatre 'Cattlecall'. He's either got issues with the Catholic Church, pregnant women, obstetricians, or all three!

Because the BBC is running the performance before the, so-called, watershed time of 9pm they will not show that particular segment but will show the other three segments created by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant and Wayne McGregor.

When asked why not can the whole show for the sake of humanity and the very future of creativity the BBC's answering machine declined to comment.

It's all a bit of tempest in a teacup because the work will run on BBC4, a television channel only marginally more popular than the Knitting Channel (no offence to people who knit intended!)

Sadler's Wells Theatre makes it back into the headlines, well here at least, after it was discovered they have the "best dance video on the web"! Seriously? Our editor laughed so hard he fell of his chair and broke a hip!

The London theatre is apparently not content with declaring that it "is dance" (whatever that means) they have universally declared that their online video material surpasses all others. Apparently it's someone's job to just sit around in that building and make sh*t up! (isn't that our job? Ed!)

Here in TheLab™ we can only imagine that the onscreen graphic, culled from londondance.com and shown above, was written by the same marketing type that came up with the "is dance" nonsense. It sounds good in your head but when you say it out loud small children point at you and giggle.

It would appear that if you want to watch the "best dance video on the web" then said video must include Mathew Bourne, Akram Khan, William Forsythe, Christopher "man-child" Wheeldon or that bloke from the Royal Ballet who wears funny hats.

We're assuming that "The Wells" is splashing out using some of the £700,000 in sustain funding they needed from ACE because they're either a bit crap or all the rich people who used to give them money are now learning about the business end of a can opener.

A word to the wise, instead of splashing out on the ludicrously expensive Brightcove platform (the one they are using to show the video) you could have used a myriad of free(ish) options like Vimeo for $60.

The brightest minds, the most learned thinkers, none of them working at Sadler's Wells apparently!

[ The Best Dance Video on the Web ] (seriously, stop laughing at the back)

As the world gets metaphorically smaller thanks to the wonder/curse of the internet, online video, free communication systems and the PDF document making print material almost redundant British Dance Edition (BDE), in the eyes of some, is struggling to remain relevant.

Next years event, hosted by DanceXchange (DX) in Birmingham from the 3rd to the 6th of February, is perhaps the first BDE to take place under a full frontal assault from the web so what have DX done to pull the proverbial rabbit from a hat?

As far as relevance goes there is no substitute for actually being there when it comes to live performance. Yes it's corny and yes Article19 pushes out thousands upon thousands of dance videos every month to viewers the world over but dance is a live medium, for the most part, so gathering folks together to watch work is as important as it ever was.

Facebook and others like it have made befriending someone into an exercise in cold hard numbers so meeting actual people is something we should all seek to do more of and this is a big part of the BDE "experience".

DX is also bringing in a lot of new work from new dance makers and they are using a wider variety of venues (galleries, cafe's, etc). The 'Dance 3' event showcasing three new dance makers from across the UK is particularly welcome, but why aren't there more of these triple bills during the festival?

The Birmingham based NDA (National Dance Agency) then runs straight into a brick wall with their showcase performance at the Birmingham Hippodrome on the final day of the event.

Titled 'In The Spirit of Diaghlev' the work, ironically the show is produced by Sadler's Wells Theatre, is some form of tribute to Sergei Diaghilev. The four separate works are created by Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Javier Du Frutos and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui notable for the reason that they are all male.

In total there are seventeen male choreographers on show at BDE compared to just eight female dance makers.

Responding to that point DX told us;

"...we considered work from 210 companies in total, of which 89 were proposing work by male choreographers, 104 were proposing work by female choreographers and 17 were proposing work by both male and female choreographers. The total numbers of work programmed at this point are 19 pieces by male choreographers, 11 by female choreographers and 2 pieces with co-choreographers of both genders.

These include work-in-progress performances, work for children and families and site-specific work, as well as traditional theatre shows. Whilst the majority of the theatre-based work at the Small Scale in BDE 2010 has been choreographed by male artists, a large proportion of the site specific, work in progress and middle-scale work has been created by female choreographers.

As [we are] sure you will have noticed, 2 out of the 3 middle scale shows at the Birmingham Rep are by female choreographers, although there were many more applications to show work at this scale from male artists."

Given the controversy surrounding the AD of the theatre producing this particular show (Alistair Spalding) and his comments about female dance makers earlier this year it is perhaps a surprising inclusion especially as the grande finale.

DX declined to comment on Mr Spalding's remarks.

As BDE is a platform event intended, for the most part, to be used by promoters to see new work the Diaghlev show is also a strange inclusion because it probably doesn't need the exposure. It might sell tickets to the public, it's one of the few shows on general sale, but it probably won't suffer from a lack of exposure at BDE.

One other curious event is the bizarrely titled 'Breakfast with Akram Khan' where delegates (those that attend the festival in an official capacity) will have a chance to see excerpts from the anointed one's new work 'Vertical Road'.

The publicity text for the work mentions a staggering array of overseas touring venues for the show. So, once again, why does this work need the publicity and what's it doing at BDE at all given that it won't even premiere (at Sadler's Wells) until October 2010?

There is much to like about BDE2010, mostly the new work that will be on show, but there is much to make the dance profession roll its collective eyes and say "business as usual". The inclusion of Messrs. McGregor, Maliphant, Du Frutos, Cherkaoui and Khan and John Ashford as a debate moderator (stop laughing at the back) is a step too far toward playing it safe.

Finally, the Independent Dance Managers Network will be hosting a debate with the spectacularly dull title of "Getting Dance Out and About in the 21st Century". Said debate will almost certainly include references to both Facebook and Twitter with regard to promoting work. Let us, here in TheLab™, save you the trouble, they don't work, we'll prove that in a future piece.

BDE 2010 runs from February 3rd to the 6th 2010.

Updated Oct 25th with response from DX.

In a spectacular display of ignorance Arts Council England's, so-called, "Dance Mapping Study" has come to the conclusion the rest of the dance world came to 25 years ago that dancers don't get paid enough.

We should either celebrate that the funding monolith showed up to the party at all or march en-masse to their London offices, pitch forks and burning torches in hand, and chuck the whole lot of them in the Thames to see if **** really does float (snip, Ed!)

The Stage newspaper, bastions of all things understated, wrote;

"ACE fears that the low pay will affect the sustainability of careers, leadership and the ability for "potential dance champions to emerge"

What dancer's fear is that low pay will result in them not being able to buy food, pay for physio or live their lives like most normal people do and could probably care less about being the champion of anything.

Janet Archer, Director of National Dance Strategy (or variation thereof), is quoted;

"[Dance] artists and producers will often elect to work for nothing or very little, in order to get things done. It should not be acceptable for talented people to rely on passion alone to fuel their work."

This statement is suitably ironic considering that Ms Archer, as the AD of Dance City, one of the UK's National Dance Agencies, for more than 10 years, was responsible more than once for asking dancers to work for nothing during her tenure. Well, at least she speaks from experience!

So what does ACE intend to do to rectify this most egregious of problems? More funding? A strongly worded recommendation to the Department For Work and Pensions to enact laws stipulating minimum pay levels for professional dancers?

Not a bit of it. ACE will, as always, sit on its hands, have lots of meetings and, one presumes, spawn more spurious "studies" telling us things we already know. Up next week, ACE says Sadler's Wells really "is dance" or some such bullsh*t.

We'll have more on the Dance Mapping Study very soon.

[ The Stage ]

As a form of communication text messaging has its uses, not very many for sure but it definitely has some practical purpose. Here in TheLab™ we're struggling to think of one but there has to be one, right?

In many ways text messages have become a metaphor for large parts of the internet. Keep it short, keep it simple, keep it unintelligible otherwise nobody will pay any attention. The world is moving fast, everybody is busy, nobody has the time. It's just we're not sure what it is everybody is so busy with that they don't have any time to pay attention.

From video sites, to blogs and social networking to the pervasive scourge that is Twitter the message is becoming ever more truncated and, in a lot of cases, ever more pointless. Content, the actual thing that makes the internet worthwhile, is being compromised for the sake of brevity.

The medium doesn't appear to matter. Video, sound, writing, if it's too long then we're not interested. Or so we are told by the experts. Kids/young people come in for a particularly hard time because, apparently, they all have the attention span of napkins and they all get their kicks watching frogs explode on YouTube.

Yes, there are a lot of kids like that, but what about the ones who aren't?

Internet gurus are constantly telling us about the "conversation" that is taking place on the world wide web. The power of the internet is interactivity, a million voices converging to discuss any given topic, a million voices just dying to give their opinion.

The problem is that there is no conversation. Plenty of voices for sure but very little in the way of an actual back and forth, an exchange of ideas or meaningful debate.

We recall a story on the political website Huffington Post some time ago that generated more than 12,000 comments. The owners of that site would call it a triumph for the public's voice, anybody with a brain would see it as 12,000 bits of writing that nobody will ever read. Imagine standing in a very large room with 5,000 people all talking to themselves and you have some idea of the "conversation" that's going on in commenting sections all over the internet.

What we, here in TheLab™, would propose is the dance sector, and a lot of other sectors, give voice to the dozens, if not hundreds, of thoughtful, intelligent, articulate individuals that work in this sometimes wretched business. Be it through video, audio or good old fashioned writing let them speak.

Let's hear what they have to say free of the fear of the failed group think of the comments section, feedback forms, ratings, thumbs up, thumbs down and meaningless view counters. Smart, attentive people will stay on for the ride. The permanently inattentive will jump ship and look elsewhere but you have to ask yourself, did you really want them in the first place?

If we move toward a more substantive message in all our communications, choosing substance over speed and volume, then surely we're all going to be a lot better off and a lot less stressed out.