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 OAM is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in 2020. In 2021 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association. Most recently, Richard received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Follow him on Twitter: @richardthewatts