Video & book reviews

Managing Dance: Current Issues and Future Strategies
Edited by Linda Jasper & Jeanette Siddall
Northcote House, paperback, 214pp

It’s interesting to have a quite different take on the dance world for a change, looking at it not from the view of the performer or spectator, but from the point of those managing and administering it. This collection of essays from several different authors provides many different perspectives on the dance world in the UK. The contributions are a very mixed bag in every sense. Some are much livelier and better written and than others. The best are based in personal and practical experience, for example Guy Cools’ contribution, which offers some pithy thoughts on the everyday problems and headaches of running a dance venue. Some of the contributors have obviously been subjected to the diagrams of the marketing consultants, with their triangles and arrows, and a few of those have crept in here. Readers who spend their working lives in a Babel of management-speak are probably all too horribly familiar with this: but there is some worthwhile information beyond the jargon.

There are four sections: dance artists, products, education and outreach, and policies. I have to confess that developing dance in schools and education projects isn’t my particular interest, and I found this the least involving. But there is material here on both the general background and history of dance education projects, and a case study of developing dance in two schools. This is very much from the point of view of the administrator and teacher: there’s nothing from the pupils themselves, and this was one point where a consumer’s view would have been interesting. The section on policies is also somewhat dry reading.

I found the sections on managing dance artists and products the most interesting and thought provoking. There is an honest and direct essay from Julia Carruthers about what the job of managing any dance company is like, which contains plenty of advice, all of which might be summarised as "It will all be your fault. You really have to want to do this". The dancers get the applause and the praise: nobody thanks the manager for sorting out the VAT.

The section on dance products includes a contribution from Anne Millman on marketing dance, which contains plenty of food for thought. It provides some statistics on the dance audience in the UK (albeit from 1996). 4% of the adult population claimed to have attended a contemporary dance event (the figure for ballet is 6.6%): but only one in five attendees went to more than one performance a year. There’s an analysis of the characteristics of the core audience, but the basic, and rather bleak message is that supply of dance exceeds demand. This is backed up by another contribution by Linda Jasper on attendance at dance venues in West Sussex, Surrey and Berkshire - venues including Woking’s New Victoria theatre and Horsham Arts Centre. It’s obvious from the detailed figures provided here for attendance at four different venues for the 96/97 season how well Irish and flamenco dance sells, as do touring ballet companies (100% capacity for Vienna Festival Ballet’s Swan Lake, 87% for NBT) compared to some dance companies. Even established names like Rambert (70%) and Richard Alston (54%) don’t do as well, and notable companies like Shobana Jayasingh and Mark Baldwin, who have substantial audiences in London, only sell less than 40%.

Unsurprisingly there’s plenty of material in these pieces on the need to develop the dance audience, and how to go about it. What I always find interesting here is how well understood the characteristics of the dance audience are. It is something subject to a great deal of analysis - I’ve lost count of the number of audience survey forms I’ve filled in at Sadlers and elsewhere. The questioners always want to know your age, sex, income bracket, what newspaper you read, and how many dance companies you see. What I’ve always found odd about these surveys, and which is echoed in this book, is the lack of feedback requested from the audience - the consumer - on the product itself. Those questionnaires never ask ‘What did you like or dislike about the production? Will you come to other performances by this company?’.

Anne Milmann provides an analysis of why people don’t come to dance events - fears that ‘there won’t be a story...the music, if there is any, will be modern, difficult or taped’. She does suggest some general strategies about how to grow audiences, and examples. But it still seems to me that there is a step missing here that the management of any other consumer product would take - find out what your market wants, and offer it. This possibility isn’t really explored: it’s the audience that must adapt to what is available, not the other way round. And perhaps, in the arts, that is how it ought to be. However, in a publication which aims to take a managerial and strategic view, it’s perhaps a shame that what the audience wants out of the dance experience isn’t more fully explored.