Attracting new audiences to contemporary dance

By turns abstract and emotive, celebratory and confronting, contemporary dance can be a difficult art form to sell to audiences.

Co3’s the cry; photo by Stefan Gosatti

At the recent APACA Conference in Melbourne, in a session about understanding audiences and exploring what people are and are not attending, Arts Centre Melbourne’s CRM & Data Analyst Jade Moore said that based on her analysis of ticket purchases: ‘The assumption that once you attended contemporary dance you were a contemporary dance lover for life, was not actually the case’.

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Richard Watts is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM, and serves as the Chair of La Mama Theatre's volunteer Committee of Management. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, and was awarded the status of Melbourne Fringe Living Legend in 2017. In 2020 he was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize. Most recently, Richard was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Green Room Awards Association in June 2021. Follow him on Twitter: @richardthewatts