Dance, first started as a part of a religious ritual, has developed to be an individual genre of performing arts combined with a concept of a stage. Dancers, dancing groups, and performances have naturally increased as people started to teach dance i...
Dance, first started as a part of a religious ritual, has developed to be an individual genre of performing arts combined with a concept of a stage. Dancers, dancing groups, and performances have naturally increased as people started to teach dance in universities. This implies that artists become to need to consider the economic profitability of a performance whereas in the past, they were just satisfied with the fact itself that they create and present arts.
Performers expect more people to come and pay for their performances and spectators want more satisfaction in performances for their expenses. Thus, people came to recognize a dancing performance as a cultural product and this notion produced a market formed with an audience as a consumer, stage as an intermediary place and an agency as a part that takes charge of marketing and promotion.
Thus, dancing performance market currently includes 89 Korean dance performing groups, 51 modern dance performing groups, and 32 ballet groups. According to the statistics of the year 1999, those groups staged total of 324 traditional Korean dance performances, 441 creative Korean dance performances, 361 modern dance performances, and 264 ballet performances. Also, the figures show that performances were frequent in Seoul by regional groups and in October by monthly statistics.
However, considering that there are only five agencies that are specialized in dance performances and those five companies have to deal with 1400 performances of more than 170 dancing groups, it is not difficult to imagine the poor surroundings of dancing performances. This circumstance makes dancing groups plan and coordinate performances by themselves.
It seems that 184 theatres capable of dancing performances are enough. And yet, since all of them are not places specialized for dance performances, it is not that those stages are always available for dancing performances throughout a year. Also, they are capable of providing place but not of providing perfect or adequate facilities for the dancing performances.
In addition, there exists a surplus in production and a shortage in demand, distribution and intermediation. The number of times that an ordinary person visits a theatre is 0.1 time a year.
With respect to the work itself, it will be desirable to select easier subjects rather than abstract and unrealistic ones so as the general public can well understand and get more satisfaction. As to an admission fee, a price that is reasonable and differentiated for the economic status of spectators should be set while considering the production costs. Concerning stages, a scale and system need to be considered with the comfortableness of seats according to the length of a performance. It is also important to choose a place conveniently situated for the main audience. With that, the starting time of performance should be carefully reviewed to avoid adolescents getting home too late (when they are the main audience) and to enable salaried men to enjoy performances after work (when they are the main audience).
In publicity, although media promotion, direct promotion, advertisement are all available methods, it is required that media promotion and direct promotion be the focal methods when we consider the poorness of dancing performance. The first page of a press release for effective media promotion should be simple and clear while not missing any important points. Here, it is important to provide more contents such as highlighting new facts, introducing the choreographer and performance group, and providing knowledge about the concerned work piece so that it can occupy more pages when reported.
The printed material used in direct promotion should attract attention even among many other articles. Nevertheless, material with pretty outlooks and poor contents only results in failing to attract the potential audience.
However, all these proposals are meaningful only when they are combined. Also, in the sense that the basis of marketing is a market research, only a marketing strategy based on a thorough market survey and plan with targeting group is to produce a successful dancing perform