To celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, The Place is exploring some big questions crucial to their essence.  Here they focus our attention on what it means to be ‘contemporary’.  Is it a label? Is it definable? Or is it something else altogether? As part of their celebrations The Place‘s Artistic Director Eddie Nixon sat ... Read more

Author, speaker, international advisor on education and the arts and Patron of The Place, Sir Ken Robinson talks to the Chief Executive of The Place, Clare Connor about the innate value of dance, hierarchies in arts and education and how dance may help us expand our narrow views of intelligence.

A ‘pay it forward’ pilot campaign aimed to help families most in need attend dance theatre performances, but it wasn’t all plain sailing. Rhona Matheson, Chief Executive of Starcatchers tells the story.

How Sadler’s Wells made changes to its new membership scheme to increase new Members by over 50%. Director of Marketing & Sales at Sadler’s Wells Sebastian Cheswright Cater explains exactly what has changed.

This article by Andrew Decker, published by The Wallace Foundation, explores the steps Ballet Austin has taken to expand its audiences for unfamiliar works.

Aesop shares the results of its falls prevention dance programme, Dance to Health.

Consider This share their top tips to make your dance or performing arts school stand out.

A benchmarking document created by Heather Maitland on behalf of the Dance Touring Partnership. This research overview focuses primarily on research reports written between 1995 and 2005 into the behaviour and attitudes of attenders of dance styles that the researchers have categorised as ‘contemporary’.

Beth Aplin and Heather Maitland carried out research on dance audiences at Dance Touring Partnership tour venues over two years and three tours. This is the summary of their findings.

In this white paper Ballet Memphis and National Arts Strategies (USA) share the findings of the initial stage of fact finding work that set out to ‘reinvent’ Ballet Memphis by ‘building bridges to new communities and planning a variety of sustainable scenarios for the future business model’.  It gives a fascinating insight into the questions ... Read more

Two case studies describe projects to attract new attenders. The first involving Northern Ballet Theatre and Leeds Grand Theatre highlights the importance of producing good quality data. The second project involving MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling and Sunderland Empire describes their aim to attract young new attenders and concludes that monitoring and evaluation must be build ... Read more

This article describes the ways that different dance companies are using social media to engage with their audiences.

Big Dance took place throughout the country between 5th and 13th July 2008. It was designed as a biennial celebration of dance, celebrating the diversity, accessibility and fun of the artform. The emphasis was on inviting people to get involved: by creating unusual events in extraordinary places it encouraged sustained engagement and participation by those audiences not typically associated with ... Read more

This research snapshot report provides a brief profile of audiences for contemporary dance. It draws on Audiences London and Dance Touring Partnership’s analysis of audience data in 2006 and 2007. The key summarised findings conclude that audiences for dance are not as frequent attenders of the artform as we’d like to think, and that the ... Read more