Choreographer's Carnival, Opportunities for New Media

This past Wednesday, as an intern at a dance talent agency, I was lucky enough to be able to go VIP to Hollywood's monthly Choreographer's Carnival that's held on Sunset Boulevard at the Key Club. This post will describe the amazing experience of Carnival and how technology could be further utilized to promote it.

Going to Carnival is a great learning experience for me, featuring new work by professional dance choreographers, producers, directors, and dancers. As a prospective business person or creative production force of the dance industry, steady exposure to Carnival is invaluable.

Here's a little about Carnival from their website just to introduce you to it if you've never heard of it: "Carnival started eight and a half years ago to give working choreographers and dancers a venue where they can have free artistic expression without the constraints of an artist, a director, or a script. Carnival is an event where it features not only choreographers from the film and video industries, but from all over the world: -Paris, Japan, New York, Las Vegas, Texas, Florida, and many more... Where else can you see a show that highlights not only hip hop but ballet, funk, lyrical, tap, modern, performance art, and spoken word? Only at the Carnival, whre you get more dance for your dollar."

Here are a couple performances from last week's Carnival:

I appreciate many things about Carnival and what it does for the dance industry:

1. Increases exposure of dancers and choreographer's work to a more popular, mainstream audience
   
2. Provides a place for the dance community to meet and thrive
   
3. Allows professionals in the dance industry to see new and promising talent
   
4. Offers a welcoming, free space for artists in the dance world to showcase their work
   
5. Puts on a legit dance show monthly in the heart of Hollywood
   

On the flip side, there are some issues Carnival creates that doesn't support a thriving industry:

1. Dancers and choreographers aren't paid for their work (The Key Club must be making outrageous profits)
   
2. Time and effort spent to present this work unpaid detracts from valued professionalism, open scheduling, and quality of paid, industry jobs
   
3. It seems about 90% of the view of the stage are obstructed, which detracts from viewers' experience
   
4. Past Carnival performances are never revisited for monetization purposes
   

Carnival could:

1. Create a better website with online purchasing options where one could download a high quality video of a particular performance for an affordable rate. This would decrease the amount of piracy and free downloading of Carnival performances on YouTube
   
2. Collect tips for dancers on site and distribute funds accordingly (although the reason The Key Club is avoiding this is probably so that people spend all their money on drinks at the club)
   
3. Build a social networking site where scheduling and communication is mainstream and made available to all the necessary people. This could even extend to a dancer's agency where they could align schedules and check for availability of a particular client based on Carnival.
   
4. Create a yearly DVD of "The Best of Carnival" with different editions for different cities. All could be sold together as a box set. It could even be offered through Netflix or as On Demand on Digital Cable
   
5. Make that DVD release in 3D theaters around the country for wider distribution
   
6. Revolutionize the dance industry by somehow making the show a 3D live event in theaters on a monthly basis. It would become the national event of the tightly knit and ever-growing dance community
   

All in all, Carnival is offering a great service to many dancers and choreographers. It's increasing publicity and legitimacy for an industry that hardly gets the credit it deserves. However, it could do so much more to maximize the influx of cash from producing and performing a monthly show. By taking advantage of the long tail on the internet, as well as new media like 3D live action films, Carnival could propel the dance industry into a full fledged, well paying entertainment industry instead of a group of struggling, undervalued artists.

Too much paper

I work as an intern in the dance department of a talent agency in Hollywood... This experience has been a great one thus far and one I feel lucky to have. Just one question, why must there be SO much paper everywhere!? Between filing commission invoices, sorting check authorization forms and going through over a thousand files looking for updated and outdated contracts I'm constantly getting paper cuts.

I understand that certain legal documents need to be in paper format to be valid, but I don't see why the important details on those papers aren't also recorded in a central database, made readily available to everyone in the office (and other national branches of the company for that matter) with a click of the mouse. Why should I need to spend two days of my life going through files to see who needs to update their contract? Now, I swear the point of this post is not to vent about my inefficient tasks at my internship.

The point of this entry is to reflect on how immensely the dance industry as a whole can stand to gain if it becomes more a part of the digital age. So much time is wasted flipping through papers for the correct document or profile instead of simply pressing Ctrl-F to quickly filter through all the data to find relevant information. The sad thing about this situation is that it is not isolated to the company I work at or the particular task of sorting out which clients need to resign contracts. This is an industry wide problem that makes the dance world less accessible, less efficient, and ultimately less profitable. The problem with becoming ditigized is that its not the industry standard.

Someone (in power) should take it upon themselves to get an IT person, go through a training process, and learn how to use all the present-day technological advancements to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. It's common belief that all LA-based dance agencies all do the same thing. By the way, those top agencies are: Bloc, Clear Talent Group, DDO Artist Agency, and MSA. See for yourself how they indeed do the same thing with no apparent competitive advantages. For starters let's take a quick look at their home pages:

Perhaps this digital revolution should start with a fully functional clients only portion of an agency's website... Hmm.

Time to go to sleep so that I can rest up for proper research all day tomorrow in my paper-filled world. I'll jot down notes detailing my frustrations on inefficient Post-it notes.