Cultural Cartography: Connecting Kinetic Communities with Dance Map LA
The L.A. dance scene of late has felt a fresh momentum. The decade-long accumulation — of new companies, new venues, new academies and institutions, prestige teachers and choreographers — took a leap in cumulative power this past month, thanks to the debut of an elegant digital source called Dance Map L.A.
Simple census-taking can be a powerful tool on its own, but this video-rich interactive website and mapping tool has been reenergizing a community and serving as a catalyst for important conversations about innovation and invention in L.A. dance.
The project culminates seven years of investigation into digital and multi-media journalism conducted by Dance Map L.A. project director Doug McLennan and executive producer Sasha Anawalt, Director of USC Annenberg Masters School of Arts Journalism. With a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, the duo first created three iterations of pop-up newsrooms covering arts and culture events at a time when city newspapers had cut critics from the payrolls. "The question was: 'How can we ride out this storm," Anawalt explains. "And not only ride it out, but actually defy the storm and shape the future?"
Data collection and visualization became a key way to "make a topic more visible," McLennan says. "Dance Map L.A. is...the first iteration of making a community visible." "Visibility is power" is in fact the tagline of the site. (Full disclosure: McLennan is also the founding editor of the artsjournal website, where my own blog lives.)
To "engage" users with the survey, McLennan conceived of a visual display of responses that he calls 'these interactive donuts.... As soon as you add your answer it shows where you stand in the mix of all of this," he explains. "What's great about it I think is that it kind of spurs you to take a look at the next one and the next one and answer them because you can see where you are in relationship to everybody else," he continues. Other incentives include the opportunity for survey takers to enter into a giveaway for theater tickets and four $250 grants.
During the survey period — launched Feb. 13 and slated to close on April 6 — the site attempts a " three-dimensional view" of the local dance scene, McLennan explains. The question: "What does an L.A. dancer look like" is answered by the survey questions. A physical map answers the question: Where is dance taking place around the county? Thirdly, atwitterbot displays popular conversations about dance as culled from articles cired by local and national Twitter users.
"When you have a way of measuring yourself and looking against a larger frame," McLennan says, "the locating yourself in part of that is just such an empowering feeling. Then it starts to spark creative ideas about where you fit in, what you can do, who you can call on, what you can accomplish." As Anawalt puts it: "Once you've taken the survey, you're in. You're like part of the team."
No one seems more fired up by this coalescing dance community than Anawalt, a prominent L.A. dance journalist before launching her graduate research projects at USC. Meeting at LACMA recently, she says she senses Dance Map L.A. is taking stake of both the current surge in dance activity ("it hasn't felt this way here since the 1980s") but also feels its contribution to an overdue reckoning of L.A. dance history (given that the singular Denishawn school, which spawned pioneering Martha Graham, was started here.) "This really is the birthplace of American modern dance," she says. "Why don't we celebrate that?"
Sitting with Anawalt as she scrolls through the survey, she identifies that most respondents, citing less than 10K annual income, probably hail from the miserably paid concert dance community.
To bring in the broadest possible respondent base, Anawalt is bracketing the survey dates with get-togethers for the city's dance community, a practice initiated by Kristy Edmunds at CAP-UCLA last year when she pulled government, educational and institutional dance mailing lists and sent unexpected invites to the whole community to attend a free performance of the Batsheva Dance Company. In February, Anawalt partnered with Edmunds to host a launch party for DanceMapLA at Royce Hall, where video of local dancers in motion was projected hugely onto the wall (and later turned into a promo film). "Kristy Edmunds and CAP UCLA magnified us, literally," Anawalt says.
Examining the day's survey numbers, nearly 500 respondents, on her laptop, she reads: "How often do you attend dance performances? How much time do you spend time watching dance online?" She shakes her head at the low percentage of YES answers. "I think that's crazy...they are not taking advantage of online. They're not doing video; they are not going to see each other's work; they do not have agents representing them; they do not get together on a regular basis; they're very fractured and there isn't a sense of community."
Yet even when the responses are discouraging, the data collection cannot help but excite her. "It's up to the journalists to take this information and build a story from it," she says. " Interview people. Find out what's really going on. Watch this as it changes." (A few days after we spoke, seeking the younger/professional demographic, Anawalt was queued up alongside those auditioning for "So You Think You Can Dance.")
L.A. lacks a truly robust local hub, only smaller entities like the part-time Dance Resource Center (offering members, mostly indie modern dancers, financial sponsorships via use of their non-profit 501(c)3 status) and Career Transition for Dancers, which provides career counseling and grants to the more professional, union dancers. Neither entity has yet to fully connect with L.A.'s wide range of heritage-based dance companies.
Anawalt dreams of the site spawning increased funding and awareness for the city's need for a physical hub like San Francisco's ODC. In a phone interview this week, Bonnie Oda Homsey, director of the Los Angeles Dance Foundation, concurs. "The issue is making a compelling case to the foundations or public agencies to recalibrate the levels of funding allocated to dance," Homsey says. "Dance Map LA is among the indicators that can help make the case."
In the meantime, things are hopping in cyberspace. Over 500 dancers have taken the survey at this point. McLennan sees greater possibilities of engagement there, too, if an entity might build the site out further. "When you get in some [online] communities that function really well you get a hierarchy — the more you use it, the higher you go up in the hierarchy, people become obsessive about that...It makes it a really good way to motivate people to behave within a community in ways that you would like them to do."
"Not in a coercive kind of way," he adds quickly. "But in a way that helps to build and strengthen the community. If for example L.A.'s dance community is so spread out and it's difficult to get people to rally around particular efforts, maybe there are ways that this kind of thing can help coalesce people around behavior that helps."
Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
Top Image: Dancer, director and teacher d. sabela Grimes spinning it at the DanceMapLA launch | Photo: Christina Campodonico
