ExploreDance.com offers multiple viewpoints on dance from our diverse team of writers. We try to provide honest and supportive coverage. Generally the reviews are in prose form, and once in a while in poetic form. However, if a dance company really wants honest feedback, it should ask the audience. And while dance is a kind of ephemeral beauty, sometimes it needs to be quantified to find a path to the next level.

The attached report contains the results from an audience research survey conducted by Robert Abrams Consulting LLC for La Danserie: both quantitative and qualitative feedback from the audience to La Danserie's performance. La Danserie gave ExploreDance.com permission to share the report. (Robert Abrams Consulting LLC, technically, is ExploreDance.com's parent company.)

The idea is not to choreograph by focus group. Rather, it is to make sure that dance companies create dance with their eyes open, rather than half blind. You may decide to choreograph to your audience's preferences, or against their preferences, but the better you know your audience, the more likely your company will be successful in the long run. You could also discover that you are missing a demographic group, such as parents with young children, in which case you might be able to sell more tickets without changing your choreography, but simply by offering a show at a different time or a different price point.

I should also mention that, since this was an initial audience research project, I pushed the analysis a little farther than I ordinarily might to show what would be possible with a larger sample size.

The PDF contains both the audience research report, as well as the original review, which can also be found here: www.exploredance.com/3071.

Sharing this report also introduces a new feature on ExploreDance.com. We can now post PDFs directly. While a small step forward perhaps, it will allow for new efficiencies in key areas, and sets the stage for the next phase of development.