- Details
An Irish response to one of the big questions...
Let’s go way back to January when we all met for first time, and let’s begin with the session on marketing dance that seemed to invoke some very strong reactions. As we remember it, the strongest reaction seemed to be sparked by the question:
how do we market dance work with honesty and integrity?
For the writers and journalists in the group the problem seemed to be breaking through the marketing mode of artists and the blurb and jargon they usually rely upon prior to a show. For the choreographers, the problem was distilling ideas into words (not their normal medium) and feeling that they are under pressure to compromise their ideas to become more accessible to a wider audience.
So we thought,
why not change the format?
Why not challenge the public to experience arts marketing in different ways? Why not challenge artists to break free from tired formulas, and come up with new ways to expose dance work to the public?
Why not set up our own magazine?
A magazine where we could put the artist at the centre, where we could let the artists themselves communicate however they chose? Rather than reviews or interviews, we would publish material that doesn't have a home anywhere else,
the stuff that no marketing manager would ever ask for, or even agree to publish.
From the start, we agreed that we wanted it to be in print, free of charge and distributed widely throughout the city. As dance and theatre are visual mediums, we decided it had to be largely image based, setting ourselves a goal that it would be at least 50% graphic. We wanted it to be visually appealing to attract the casual reader in a café, so that by someone picking it up to browse over their cappucino might generate interest and new audiences.
But what would it look like? Well, we weren’t sure. We decided to test run our idea with an online pilot issue covering the Dublin Fringe Festival to see if the idea worked in practice
And, it did.
We put out an open call and artists sent us lots of different types of material - images, video, script extracts, audio snippets, pages from research notebooks... In arranging this material, we realised that graphically it could also function as an archive for artists and the research that is involved in their work.
Just a couple of weeks later, we travelled to Rotterdam which gave us an opportunity to cover the Festival de Keuze,
road-testing the idea
with a group of international artists who didn’t know us and had to trust us with their material. Again, it was a resounding success with a lot of great feedback, particularly from the artists themselves. From there, we came back to Dublin, and covered the Dublin Theatre Festival. Again, it seemed to be a formula that was getting people talking about the work in new and exciting ways. In total we did three issues in just under three months, covering 22 shows in all.
As we expected, people were interested.
In our first week, we had over 3,000 hits, traffic which was similarly healthy across all three issues resulting in over 18,000 hits on the site to date. This means there's a real appetite for this type of contextual material, particularly alongside a festival. We had feedback from the public saying reading the magazine after seeing a show added to their appreciation and understanding of the show, and from artists saying that they had been able to contextualise their work in more relevant and interesting ways.
So what did we learn from it? It’s a lot of work. Putting a digital issue together means researching artists, contacting them, curating their material, editing text and photos, building web pages and more. Putting together a print issue would mean all of that plus managing budgets and dealing with printers and distribution.
But still, we’re convinced it’s an exciting and potentially ground-breaking idea that should be realised in print. It has been eye-opening and challenging for both artists and the public, and with further development has the potential to make a real impact in engaging new audiences. Plans are in motion to launch our first issue in September 2015, and with luck you'll all be receiving a copy of our first issue in the post imminently…