Eight Strategies for Engaging Audience Participation in Community Dance

ABSTRACT

Planning and facilitating a community dance with the goal of getting participants to dance together can be a challenge. This article identifies eight strategies that helped engage the audience in a community dance event that took place in a girls-only secondary school in Hong Kong, and offers practical steps to execute those strategies in other similar community dance settings. In each strategy section, the practical steps are followed by a reflection of how the strategy worked to engage audience participation in that dance event, which aimed to bring together the students and alumni to bid farewell to their school on the day before the campus would be completely torn down for redevelopment. Although these strategies are most relevant to audience participation dance events that aim to strengthen the bonds within a community with shared history, they could also offer insights to the creative process of other audience participation dance events.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would not feel right to publish this article without acknowledging the expertise and experience brought to the project by Catherine Yau, the artistic director and choreographer of the event. Thank you, Catherine!

Event photos are used with the kind permission of Ying Wa Girls' School.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

A documentary video of the “Last Class: Move Groove” event is available on the publisher's website at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23734833.2017.1310538.