‘Dear Dancer,’

Today, many dancers are trained to dedicate their careers to perfecting the craft of dancing techniques. While it is vitally important to preserve this skill, as it carries cultural and historical significance, we must strive to find a balance between innovation and preservation. Dance education’s main focus on craft may hinder the evolution of the art. By not fostering innovation we are inhibiting students from seeing beyond what currently exists and potentially stifling the evolution of the art form. We must cultivate a student’s love of movement and expression of self, not just praising technical achievements.

Imagine if we could break free from this mold. Better preparing dancers to be not just creators and performers but also entrepreneurs could encourage a renaissance of invention, purpose and relevance in dance. We must inspire students to find greater satisfaction, meaning and agency in their careers.

In addition to this shift in dance education, the structure and governance of dance companies also needs to change. In today’s companies, it is assumed that dancers have no ownership of the work that they help create. Dancers, various collaborators, and even patrons should all be rewarded for growing the company’s exposure across different revenue channels, from ticket sales to ad views, endorsements, and broader cultural partnerships. Dancers and choreographers should be able to create works and accrue royalties in the years following the performances. Giving dancers more opportunities to monetize their work is essential to encouraging entrepreneurship and creativity in the field itself. Additionally, the artists who are working with a dance company should be given an active role in shaping the company’s future—creatively, but also in how they run as a business. Much innovation is needed operationally beyond the confines of the stage. The assumption that company directors have the dancers’ best interest in mind, or that they are more in touch with the latest cultural developments and possibilities, has been proven wrong time and time again. Dancers do not need to be starving artists! They have the skills and often the vision to take their destiny into their own hands!

Which brings us to the way that dance is consumed. Let’s start imagining a world where dancers and choreographers create pieces that in turn help support the foundations, schools, organizations, and patrons that have supported them. From emerging companies to established, historic companies as well as solo artists, dance needs to reach new audiences through new channels, and find new models to fund itself. 

In the past, donations and direct ticket sales have represented the main revenue streams for dance companies. Today, technology has finally caught up to the needs of the dance world, providing many platforms and forums for broadcasting work and interfacing with collaborators and sponsors. Fully leveraging these technologies and incorporating them into the artform will help promote and launch dance into the future. We are all growing and evolving over time, as should our craft. As the world changes around us in rapid and sometimes unpredictable ways, dancers are essential to keeping humanity in flow with the digital world. We have a responsibility to expose new audiences to the incredible artists that have come before us while not forgetting to lift the artists of the future.

From financial markets to the art world, emerging technologies such a web3, spatial computing and artificial intelligence are decentralizing old structures while providing new frontiers, new economies, and new ways of moving together. I am a lifelong dancer. A lover of movement and storytelling. I believe that these technologies can herald immense progress in dance and choreography. At the core, they will challenge the outdated structures of dance companies to create dynamic, flexible, and collaborative models for distributed ownership. This will provide dancers as well as other participants, from sponsors to technicians, with appropriate compensation for their work and support. Blockchain implementation could create new formats for works to be distributed and consumed, reaching new audiences while growing interest in the discipline in the process. We can finally take a piece of work outside of the live stage and sell it as the masterpiece that it is!

Breaking the fourth wall through these tools also affords co-creation of movement with audience members, who can be involved through participatory features. We can teach them about how much the human body can shape a story, communicate an idea. From virtual classes to unique performances generated with the viewer, content can be pushed to different channels or made exclusive to certain communities.

As dancers, we have always enjoyed expressing ourselves in conjunction with many artists outside of our field. In this new paradigm, we have more agency over our careers and can collaborate with multiple companies or perform as solo talents. We can choose the projects we want to work on and retain ownership over our output. Furthermore, we must expand our horizons to engage creatively beyond the dance world. Performers or companies will be able to partner with other artists such as musicians, visual artists, and poets to use their work, or create new work together, while sharing rights. By encouraging blockchain-enabled collaborations with other artists from other fields, dance content will also be re-contextualized and exposed to new audiences, stimulating cross pollination between disciplines.

We all need to wonder why concert dance’s aging audience is struggling to renew itself. Embracing these technological possibilities will get us into current conversations with the present culture. While offering vast new possibilities, this new future for dance is also a bridge to the past, providing established, historic companies with a way of preserving, broadcasting, and building on top of heritage works. In this way, this revolution in how we teach, structure and broadcast our dance work inscribes itself as both a departure, but also a continuation of the existing dance world.

Making motion capture, advanced animation and editing capabilities accessible to all dancers will help them create more collaborative, immersive works, and connect more intimately with their audiences. These new performances can vary in length (from a few seconds to days), format (participatory, interactive, abstracted), and distribution (ads, collaborations, partnerships, new virtual audiences). No longer having to rely exclusively on live performances to express themselves will also elongate dancer’s notoriously short careers.