Last month we took part in English National Ballet’s Dance is the Word initiative, talking to fellow bloggers and dance writers about how they can set up a blog, how to boost their social media presence, as well as what to expect from the ballet blogosphere in these days of broken-down geographical barriers.
It was lovely to meet other UK ballet bloggers and to hold a lively discussion mediated by course leader Donald Hutera (The Times, Dance Europe), who recently came to embrace social media and is still quite intrigued by this thing we call the Twitterverse.
Here are some of the slides we prepared for our chat. We thought they might come in handy for those of you who are thinking of starting a dance zine, or any kind of art/culture blog:
ENB’s Dance is the Word course culminated with participants being granted backstage access to ENB’s Emerging Dancer competition, which this year saw a shared first place: Junor Souza and Alison McWhinney, who won after dancing together in the Esmeralda pas de deux. Brazilian danseur Junor also won the People’s Choice Award. Fifteen “Dance is the Word” writers were there to document the occasion, with snapshots of their reviews published onto ENB’s own blog. It is great to see ENB supporting dance writing and fostering a much needed debate about the art form.
Finalists and the judges at ENB’s Emerging Dancer 2014 – Photo: © ASH
