Visibility is power. The more visible a community, the more power it has. Los Angeles’ dance community is small, fragmented and dispersed, and because it is so spread out, it has difficulty attaining any kind of critical mass.
DanceMapLA is an experimental project with designs to change all that. Created out of the Arts Journalism Specialized Masters program, DanceMapLA will map dance in its many forms in Los Angeles and make the community more visible.
What does dance in LA look like? Where does it happen? Who dances? And what do their lives look like? Who's talking about dance and what are they talking about?
Working on a team led by Professor Sasha Anawalt, the Arts Journalism Master’s students and one alumnus, anticipate officially launching the site and its survey in fall 2014.
We use “map” metaphorically. So from a physical where-does-dance-happen view, we have more than 200 places plotted on an interactive map – dance schools, performance spaces, vendors, etc. Website users can add dance places to the map.
But we also have a “talk” page where visitors can go to see what’s trending in topics in the dance world. We adapted Twitter bot code developed at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University to monitor and aggregate the stories in dance that are getting the most attention on Twitter. You can see stories from the past week or the past month. In this way you can “map” the stories that seem to be of most interest in the dance world.
Lastly, we are mapping dancers themselves. What does a dancer look like in LA? We collected data about commercial dancers in LA from the Screen Actors Guild. And we’ve adapted a dancer survey developed by DanceNYC and vetted with dozens of experts in the dance community in Los Angeles, which we will deploy in the fall of 2014. The survey asks demographic, financial and professional questions in an attempt to create a snapshot of what dancers look like statistically.
The website and its survey will be deployed throughout Los Angeles. USC Annenberg Specialized Journalism students, working with dance organizations throughout the county will publicize and encourage participation in the survey, and tell some of the many stories that this projects will unearth and expose. It's a new kind of journalism.
