I’m a terrible dancer. That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised to be approached by John Darvell, director of Nocturn Dance, to collaborate on their latest project.
Fortunately, John was more interested in my storytelling and transmedia skills than my footwork. He wanted to take a low-budget community dance project and turn it into a transmedia experience, opening up the story beyond the walls of the studio and beyond the duration of the performance.
The result was Dare You Watch?, a wonderfully unsettling piece about medical experimentation that used Twitter, Facebook and 18 hours of streamed video to turn a small production into an international gala.
Over 1,200 people from 16 countries watched the dancers on YouTube, the Facebook page gained over 6,000 ‘Likes’ and the characters’ Twitter feeds reached about 13,000 people. Those numbers were a major boost to the conventional auditorium audience of a few hundred, taking Nocturn Dance to new viewers and telling a strange, macabre story in a unique way.
We followed up the project with a second collaboration, The Revelation of Miss White.
David Varela 