There was a painful moment for Chicago Dance and Music Alliance head Matthew Brockmeier at last week’s unveiling of a year’s worth of dance-audience research. Results from the $100,000 study, funded by the Chicago Community Trust as part of its multiyear Excellence in Dance Initiative, were used in developing a plan to boost visibility and ticket sales for local dance companies. Now came word that the trust will also fund part of that $360,000 marketing effort. It was music to the ears of the 150 people who’d gathered at the Chicago Cultural Center, including Brockmeier. But the centerpiece of the plan, a new dance-performance Web site set to debut next September, caught him off guard. The Dance and Music Alliance spent the last two years developing a similar site, with listings and background on performances by 56 member dance companies. Also funded by the Chicago Community Trust, it was just launched at the beginning of this year. “From what I’ve heard,” Brockmeier says, “the new site would be redundant.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Chicago Dance and Music Alliance was formed in 2001, when the Chicago Dance Coalition merged with another professional association, the Chicago Music Alliance. Both groups had been around since the early 1980s, and they had similar functions. When the dance coalition “hit a wall” in funding in ’99, says Brockmeier, who’d been with the music alliance for a decade by then, “we were able to step in.” He ran the two groups as separate organizations from a single office until the coalition’s board “decided to make common cause.” Now the combined alliance’s membership includes 165 nonprofit organizations and 150 individuals. On a yearly budget of just over $300,000, it provides training, advocacy, promotion, and the advantage of group rates for advertising. Its Web site, www.chicagoperformances.org, offers detailed information on where to get music or dance lessons as well as performance listings. But Brockmeier admits the site had a low profile until last winter, when–with money from the Chicago Community Trust and Boeing–it was completed and the alliance began a modest public promotion with radio spots and flyers. Since then, he says, traffic has been rising, most recently averaging 500 visits a day, the majority of them to the listings.
Brockmeier says his site is a victim of bad timing: the survey began in 2003, before the alliance started its promotion efforts. But the report itself suggests dissatisfaction that goes deeper. While the alliance site lists events, it is “geared toward its membership and is of a more academic” rather than commercial nature, the report says. (The proposed new site, in contrast, would be “dynamic,” “visually stimulating,” and “geared toward dance consumers.”) And in a list of liabilities dance companies face (including limited budgets and short runs), the report lobs a more devastating blow: “The dance community has needs much broader than the current service organization/trade association is providing.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Yvette Marie Dostatni.
