How to Act (and React) Like a Professional by Nichelle @ DanceAdvantage

A consummate professional is constructive, positive, is motivated and has the ability to motivate others, displays generosity, and takes the high road. If you want to be seen as a professional in your career and in your life, you must develop strong leadership skills. And leaders are most often defined by their reactions to situations, rather than their actions.

Alvin Ailey’s Uptown by Mikey Pedroza

This past Saturday night, I went to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. They a modern dance group based out of New York and they are in a word INSPIRING! You don’t just “go to see them,” you experience them. This new production featured a new piece called “UPTOWN”. This was a piece choreographed by Matthew Rushing and inspired by the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th-century.

How to Opt Out of the Facebook Mistake at Technology in the Arts

Opt in policies are generally the most effective and considered to be best practice. This is where Facebook made their fatal mistake and where arts organizations need to ensure they are excelling. Organizations only want people to receive information that want to receive it. By allowing people to opt in to programs, the organization is letting the individual take responsibility and targeting individuals who want more contact with the organization.

The Lindy-Loggers by Jerry Almonte

The Lindy blogosphere is surprisingly larger than you think. When I started this post I thought I was just going to describe a handful of sites, but once I was done compiling URL’s I came up with over 50.

If you any suggestions for articles and resources for dancers, send them my way.

There were 9 entries for the contest and I picked six using Random.org and a spreadsheet of the entrants.

I will be contacting them shortly to schedule a virtual private lesson.

Winners are:

• Shortyjoy
• Carla Heiney
• Danielle Jacobowitz
• Olivier L
• Glenn Katzen
• David Lau

As a followup to the Giveaway I’ll be opening up shop for Virtual Dance Lessons shortly, so stay tuned.

That’s not what we need, right?

Right. Dance studios are generally small businesses that don’t have the time, budget or personnel to work like that, nor do we want to engage with our customers that way.

The traditional take on Marketing 101 is that there are 4 (sometimes 5) P’s. These are Product, Price, Place and Promotion, the fifth being Positioning.

Products are what you are selling. For dance studios this may be services like group classes, private lessons, wedding packages, or event performance. They may also include products you sell at your studio, dance shoes and clothing, DVDs, magazines, etc.

Price is how much you sell your products for. For dance studios this can range from inexpensive group lessons to thousand+ dollar products productions.

Place is where your products are selling. This may be a physical location, out of studio lessons, performances in your city. It also includes your demographics, who is buying your product and where you can find your audience.

Promotion is how you get your product in front of your market. We may think of ad pages in newspapers or bulletin boards but there are many ways to promote your products without relying on traditional advertising.

Positioning is where your product fits in your customers minds. This has a lot to do with perception, branding and engagement. Are you the high-end wedding package dance studio? Are you the corporate event performance dancers? Are you the community space for dancers, students and people to gather?

So where do we start out of all of these Ps?

Let’s use an example dance business that we’ll call Urban Jump.

Urban Jump is a small collective of young adult modern, hip hop and break dancers who get together regularly to practice and trade skills. They rent space out for practices. They’ve been asked on occasion to perform at various events and are looking to establish a more solid reputation as performers as well as branch out into teaching group classes in their particular styles of urban dance.

Products

Look at what products (that includes services, goods, etc.) that your business provides.

Urban Jump is looking to provide two different products: event performance and group classes.

Event performances have been usually five to fifteen minute gigs for organizations, community events, and companies that their members have been involved with in the past.

Group classes are new to Urban Jump but will most likely target young adults who are looking to learn basic hip hop, modern and break dance.

Have a core product that your business provides – for Urban Jump they want it to be their event performances.

What is your dance businesses core product?

Have supplementary products that can feed off your core product – Urban Jump is going to teach group classes to supplement their performance income.

Supplementary products are the little bit extra that can make ends meet on tight months or give your dance business a bonus to invest in itself.

What supplementary products can your business sell?

Place

Placing your products means doing some research.

Urban Jump is looking to target large corporate events for performance with their core product.  There are a couple other local dance groups that do similar event performance so the market is existing but not saturated. Urban Jump currently has been getting 1 to 2 gigs a month on average before deciding to pursue it as a business.

Their target market is corporate event producers and the demand is definitely present if an unofficial troupe is getting 1 to 2 gigs a month.

What is your target market?

How much money do they have to spend? Where are they located? What kind of value do they place on your product? What are their values?

What is the demand for your product?

Are there a lot of similar products that saturate the market?

Positioning

Similar to place, positioning will involve some research and some decisions on how you want your products to be perceived.

Urban Jump wants to be a professional performance group. Their work is polished and strong and they’ve always been exceptionally timely working with event producers.

They want to have a professional and smooth relationship with customers and don’t want to haggle over cost.

They should make sure their promotion and pricing reflects this.

Positioning has to do with where you want to be perceived in the mind of your customer. Are you the high end brand that works professionally, looks good and delivers on time? Are you the budget group that gets it done?

These decisions go a long way in establishing your price point and determining how you will market yourself. Good example: Apple Computers vs. HP.

Price

Pricing your products requires a bit of finesse and experimentation but using research of placing and your investigation on positioning will help you determine your sweet spot.

Urban Jump’s principal market is corporate event performance. These events usually involve a good amount of money for production and producers are willing to spend money for a good show.

Urban Jump is new on the scene so it’s unlikely they’ll be able to command top dollar although competition is not fierce and demand is there so prices aren’t driven down by saturation.  Competitive products average around $100 an hour per dance.

They could start by asking for $100 an hour per dancer for their event performances keeping in line with their position.

What are competitive products priced at?

Look at similar dance businesses and see what they are charging for similar products. How would you place your products in comparison to theirs.

Combined with your market research and the demand for your product, you will be able to more easily identify price points that work for your product.

Be aware that competing for the bottom price point is a losing game usually, someone can always undercut you in the long run. Don’t race to the bottom.

Promotion

Now that you have your pricing, your products, your place and position, it’s time to get your products in front of your market.

Urban Jump needs to reach out principally to corporate event producers for their core product.

Their first move is to let events and event producers they’ve worked with in the past that they are officially open for business, then contact other event producers to let them know.  This could be a press package including a demo reel of compiled footage and basic information about services.

Having a professional website with media and contact information along with business cards would be a good place to start.

How does your target market get their information for products like yours?

Are they web savvy, on Facebook and Twitter? Do they rely on classified ads and event listings to find dance classes? Or are they used to traditional press packages from performance groups.

Have the basics.

This means have a website, have basic promotional materials like business cards and flyers, and make it easy for people to pass this information around.

It’s easy to have the basics these days and quite affordably for many small businesses. Don’t neglect them.

Put up your shingle.

Nobody knows you’re open for business until you tell them. Hell, tell everybody. You’ll never know when a simple referral will get you a new client and it doesn’t help to keep quiet about it.

Have any questions about dance marketing 101 for your dance business?

Please contact me with any questions you have or if you want professional help with marketing your dance business.

Creativity & Competitions by Jerry Almonte

Great dancing, or art in general, isn t just about technical skill, or even how creative you can be.  Important factors?  Certainly.  But there’s also the ability to reach out to an audience and get them to react on an emotional level; to see what you see rather than settling by just giving them what they want, whatever you think that is.

Thought Leadership on Social Media Strategy by Adam Singer

How often have you been in a meeting and heard things like “we need to be on Facebook, let’s get on Twitter, or why don’t we start blogging?”  In the social web, it’s analogous to inviting people to a theme party and not telling them what the theme is (or even knowing yourself).  If you approach social media in this way, expect your returns to be as predictable as the costumes your guests at the party will wear.

FREE AGENT by Evita Arce

I used to think I wanted to be “So and So” but that changed as I met new talented role models who I then wanted to emulate.  Now I realize I can not be any of those people.  It is impossible for me to re-create anything or anyone.  I have to discover “me” and be who “I” am suppose to be, so that eventually I am that role model for some one else.

Social Media Strategy: 10 Experts Reveal Their Strategies by Glen Allsop

Together, these people have been involved in social media as long as anyone else and discovered tactics to help you get the most out of the services. Not only that, but they’ve helped shape the way that marketers utilise these services and they teach how to do it in an honest, ethical manner.

As dancers we’re constantly striving to create art with our bodies.

Sometimes we feel like we’re stuck in a rut, like we’re performing the same motions in the same uninspired, rote manner.

Sometimes we feel like we’re on fire, ideas, rhythms and variations pouring out of us raw and unbridled.

Creativity is a “seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.”

~William James

How do we channel that seething cauldron of ideas?

Attempting to force creativity is akin to catch a river with your bare hands. It just doesn’t work that well.

Recent studies in creativity suggest that by recalling a time where we were free to act without worrying about doing the wrong thing, ala childhood, we unstifle the imagination. By casting ourselves as children, we unburden ourselves from the inner critic who tells us we are doing it wrong.

How then we do apply this knowledge to our creative pursuit–dance?

Visualization and Recollection

By visualizing ourselves or describing what we would do if we were seven years old, we incorporate that character into our creative process.

Take 5 to 10 minutes before creating and imagine yourself as a child, write down what you would do with your day if you had the entire day off and you were a child of seven years old.

Then go on to create.

A study at North Dakota State University by Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson used this technique to test creative solutions in a group of undergraduate students. They discovered that those students who were instructed to recall that childhood playfulness scored higher on creativity tests following the exercise than those who did not recall their childhood.

Experimentation

When creating place specific restricting criteria on your movement, or add an element to your movement that is unfamilar to your normal repertoire.

Once you have those restrictions, just go. Don’t take the the time to diagnose everything.

By releasing yourself from the requirements of knowing all of the elements or being fully comfortable with the situation at hand you force yourself to improvise.

A few years ago I danced almost solely in rubber soled shoes, but on the occasion when I was having an off night I kept a pair of leather soled shoes with me. I would change out my shoes and this unfamiliar element (slippery shoes) would release a whole different set of creative impulses that were bound up when wearing sticky shoes.

Play

Take the two exercises above and you’ll see similar elements of play in both of them.  Children play a majority of the time, we don’t have the inhibited impulses of adults questioning ourselves, we don’t know all the answers, and we’re looking to explore.

Before creating take some time to play around. Goof off, mess around, whatever you want to call it. Be humourous, take risks, get on all fours and roll on the ground. Play a game that you played growing up (four square, tag, clapping games, etc.).

Exercise the physical playfulness of the body to release the tensions that inhibit creation.

Then shift modes into dancing.

How do you release your creative dancer?

Each session money comes flowing in as students sign up at the beginning of your series and then you’re left to budget and manage till the next round of signups.

As classes finish up you bite your nails and wonder will the next session fill up so you can pay for the studio space.

You’ve got the Cashflow Blues.

While this rhythm is inevitable to some extent with any studio or dance business that schedules classes as series, it can be mitigated with a little fruitful planning.

Drop-In Classes

As instructors it’s rewarding to have students work through the progression that series classes offer.  They learn faster, receive consistent guidance, and classes develop a social bond.  It’s also confirmed income, which provides more security for the class.  However, not everyone is able to commit to a full length series.

Running drop-in classes gives students unable to commit to longer series a way to participate, new students a way to test your classes, and adds a little something extra in the budget every week.

Scheduling drop-in classes before a dance or open studio time adds some of the social element back in which helps create a stronger community.

Mini-Workshops

It’s great to bring in big name instructors and host full-on weekend extravaganzas every once in a while.  They also bring outside talent to your local scene, keeping it current with what is going on in the wider world of dance.  But they require a great deal of planning and more outlay in terms of money

However, mini-workshops are a great way to boost your bank account and your community.  Mini-workshops are smaller one-day intensives around a specific topic.  It’s a great way to focus on a topic that wouldn’t necessarily be included in a regular series or wouldn’t be able to fill out a whole series of its own.

Mini-workshops are also exceptionally easy to tailor to specific levels.  If you don’t offer high-level instruction and focus primarily on beginner and intermediate technique, they can be a good place to target the more advanced dancers in your community.  Or vice versa, a mini-workshop can be a way to offer an intensive introductory class to get people started.

Open Studio Time

For those dance studio owners who operate out a single space full time, having an open studio time slot where individuals can use the space for a small fee is a good way to capitalize on the all of that unused studio time.

Depending upon your city, good dance studio space can be hard to come by so offering open studio time where individuals can drop in to use the space is a boon to those working on a choreography or wanting to practice.

It may not be a major money maker but it reinforces your studio as a friendly and encouraging space for your dance community.

Private Lessons

Hopefully you already offer private lessons, but if you don’t you should probably start yesterday.

Private lessons are a boon to your teachers, your studio and your students.  Teachers are able to hone their individual feedback and critique skills while earning a good hourly wage. Students receive valuable one-on-one instruction and get to interact on a more personal level with instructors.  Your studio benefits from the improvement of the students, the teachers, and the use of the space.

Whether your studio rents space to teachers for private lessons, takes a cut of the rate, or offers it free to studio teachers, you’re reinforcing the whole community chain when you include private lessons in your curriculum.

Sell A Product

Whether you keep a supply of dance merchandise on hand, DVDs for sale or offer an online service for students, having a product to sell that doesn’t rely on studio time divorces income from time and teachers.

Developing a product may not be the standard for dancers and dance studios, but it creates another revenue stream for your dance business and offers more valuable content to your community.  Spend time researching the kinds of products your students would be interested in, ask them what they’d want that would improve their dance experience.

Budget

Last but definitely not least, having good financial planning and budgeting will keep your books in the black even with the cashflow blues and session shuffle.

Getting It Right

Once you’ve gone through the process of learning a choreography the first time you’re not done. That’s only the beginning.

To be able to better recall choreography and then refine your performance of choreography requires diligence, focus and the right tools for the job.

Have Notes

Having notes, whether in a digital format (video, photo, etc.), personal notation or scary Laban notation, gives you a reference to help guide you through the choreography without having to immediately internalize the whole choreography.

They function as the blueprint upon which you can work through each section individually; they also serve to remind you of particular comments or feedback you received during instruction. Was this section expressive or stoic, intense or reserved and so on.

Learn to Mark

Learning to mark out a choreography is an excellent way to cement audio, visual and spatial cues in your mind.

What is marking?

Marking is also called walking the choreography. The idea is to perform the dance at a fraction of their normal intensity so as to reinforce their placement and relationship of movements and steps to one another.

Marking is a way of alluding to the movement without actually performing it; it’s the physical outlining of the choreography without going into depth.

By marking you can focus on sequencing movements instead of performing the movements.

Use a Video Camera

When practicing the choreography use a video camera to film yourself everytime you run it.

Instead of focusing on a mirror to check your lines while you practice, allow the camera to capture the lines for you and then watch the footage and note places where improvement is needed.

Running specific sections with various emotions or expressiveness allows you to find the appropriate character for your movement in a particular place in the choreography when reviewed on film.

The use of a video camera allows you to take note of where you may be ahead or behind the music, missing a step, creating an unanticipated shape, or moving in an unintended direction.

Filming yourself is a great tool for iterative refinement of a choreography.

Run It In Your Mind

Perhaps one of the best pieces of advice I received when learning a choreography to be performed was to run the whole choreography in my head; three times over back to back.

Visualize yourself going through the routine movement by movement in conjunction with the music (don’t actually listen to the music – it should be part of the visualization).

If you make a mistake or forget something start from the beginning. The goal is to properly perform the choreography non-stop three times through without making a mistake or forgetting a section.

The benefit of this visualization process is that you don’t have to be in the studio to perform it physically. It can be performed sitting on the bus, before you go to sleep, or wherever you have a moment to sit and focus your mind.

You’ll find that visualization combined with actual practice will improve your retention and performance more than with physical practice alone.

Have An Audience

It is exceptionally helpful to have an audience of peers, instructors or mentors to help refine various aspects of a choreography or particular movements.

The outsiders eye is invaluable in approaching the work from a different perspective and notice elements which are out of place or off. Having an open and critical discussion of the performance casts the piece in a new light for the performer, giving the performer a new view on their own movements.

What are your tips for recalling and refining choreography?

So, I’m showcasing a few solid examples of how to make Twitter work for your business without being just another advertising space.

Updates via SMS

One of the best examples of Twitter usage was at the Frankie95 dance event in New York City May, 2009.

They leveraged the Twitter mobile features to feed updates via SMS to hundreds of event participants.  They encouraged attendees to sign up for Twitter, follow them and then set up mobile updates via SMS for their tweets.

By doing so they created a way to quickly and effectively reach their attendees with changes to the schedule, last minute updates, and more with minimal cost.

For large conferences, dance events and workshops with fluid schedules this kind of notification system works wonders to keep your attendees in sync with what’s going on.  Whether your party has moved down the hall or the workshop has been pushed back an hour, your attendees will get an SMS notification delivered to them.

SMS is a direct line to your participants and Twitter’s mobile update feature leverage that connection well.

Connecting

One of the most common uses of Twitter is as a networking tool.  There are many dancers and dance studios on Twitter who you may not be aware of in your area.

Whether you are looking for dancers for your company, looking to hire a new instructor or looking to network with out of town studios and instructors for possible joint projects, Twitter is a great place to find and connect with individuals.

Using services like Twellow, which function as directories of Twitter users grouped into categories, you can find dancers, musicians, DJs or organizers throughout the world to connect with, share information, tips and more.

Customer Service & Brand Management

While we all hope we don’t have too many complaints or issues to address, Twitter is a great tool for tracking issues and connecting with the individuals who have problems and addressing them directly.

Having an ear on the Twitter feeds for your brand name, your dance studio, your dance style, etc. allow you to monitor and deal with issues that may crop up with your business – and especially with your website that may get lost in the shuffle of e-mail.

Searching for mentions of your brand name, dance style, dance studio or instructors can give you a pulse on what people are saying about your business and the world of dance.

Sharing Content

Whether you want to share a photo of the latest dance competition highlights, a music track you just discovered or a video of an inspirational dance video; Twitter is another way to deliver this content to your customers.

With a camera in every phone, you can easily snap a picture of a dancer and immediately send it to Twitter through a service like TwitPic.

If you have a Flickr stream you can feed your photos to your Twitter account, so once you’ve got pictures from your most recent recital, show or even rehearsal you can feed them out to your followers automatically.

Many music streaming services like Last.fm, Blip.fm, and Pandora allow you to share the song or channel you are listening to with your Twitter followers with the click of a button; so if you just caught a song that inspires your dancing – share it.

By sharing content of your dancers, your DJs, your inspiration and your studio you create a stronger community connection with your followers.

Dance Mobs

Who doesn’t love a dance mob?

Whether you are organizing a random club bomb where you descend en masse upon a specific club, a flash mob dance event, or a spontaneous dance party, Twitter helps you setup and share the details needed with dancers.

If a favorite DJ or band is playing at a club it’s a quick way to gather your friends to join you.

With the use of other online media, like YouTube or another video platform, you can share a dance to be learned, and then organize the meetup and performance entirely via Twitter.

These kinds of performances, jams and meetups are a great way to spur interest, engagement and media attention.

A while ago I conducted an experiment in online dance instruction via Skype; and after some testing and feedback I think I’ve got it down.

I’ll be rolling out a virtual private lesson service so that I can work with people one-on-one or with small groups from anywhere in the coming weeks.

So to launch the virtual service, I’m offering 6 virtual dance lessons to Dance Nomad readers.

What do you mean virtual?

I mean we’re going to use the wonders of the internet and video conferencing to work together online.  Tools like Skype allow us to connect dancers from all over the globe to collaborate, learn and develop skills without having to constantly be in the same place.

I’ll contact the winners directly and we’ll schedule a time together.

How it works:

First… Become a fan of The Dance Nomad on the Facebook page.

Then… Leave a comment on why you think you should get the lesson.

I’ll use Random.org to select 3 of  winners and video it so you know it’s legit.

The other 3 winners will be selected based on their comment.

I’ll contact the winners and we’ll get the ball rolling.

What Else?

I expect that you’ll have the technical things worked out on your side; that means: decent internet connection, dance partner (unless you want to work solo), space to dance, and a web cam setup.

These will be 50 minute sessions.

You have to be a Facebook fan at the time of the drawing to win; so make sure you get on over to the Facebook page and leave a comment.

Drawing is closed. Thanks for all the entries.