The Profiling of a Dance Event was the title of the panel that Vip-Booking.com presented on Friday October 31 as part of the Day Programme of The Amsterdam Dance Event. The event handbook billed this panel as follows:
The art of creating the frame work and set up for a dance-event is a challenge for almost every promoter. It is different to other music festivals; dance events simply take more and other efforts in terms of promotion, billing and production. This panel will elaborate on most of the issues that refers to such events. There are several aspects to be considered in order to make a dance-festival pay off:
The participants will explain their experience in terms of: The impact of the location; The image of the event; The design of the production, is almost as important as the right artists; The artwork for promotion and the pricing of tickets are tools the promoter uses to stimulate the success of a show. The exploitation of an event does not only rely on the marketing budgets of sponsors. And last but not least, what sort of entertainment is the audience looking for. There are no guidelines but there are examples of successful shows and proven concepts. Within this debate experienced promoters will discuss their problems and their ideas to develop their events
I approached the task of moderating this panel with some trepidation, as Dance is a genre that I know very little about. However a get together with the four very experienced professionals with whom I shared the platform in Panel Room 1 of the very beautiful Felix Meritis Building assured me that there was plenty of material to fill our hour, the panel members were:

Alev Calgar: A medical Doctor by training, started Hip Productions in Istanbul in 1997 with her brother and partner Ates Tezer. Amongst many other events they are responsible for the Creamfield Festival in Turkey.

Niels de Geus: Event manager for Dutch Company UDC/Dance Valley for over five years, mainly concerned with artist/creative production.

Carsten Helmich: DJ/promoter of Juicy Beats Festival and Club Trinidat in Germany.

Chris Yuen: Representing Coolworld, one of the major organisers of large dance events in the US, responsible for Ultra, Cyberfest, Hallofest and Planet New Year.

There was good response and input from the floor to the topics discussed. Dance Music does have particular problems in the live area, not to mention the short shelf life and rapid consumption of a sizeable portion of the genre’s recorded output. There are relatively few very big names in the Dance world, they are expensive, and not enough new DJ performers are coming through to broaden the spectrum. ‘The Carl Coxes of this world are needed in order to generate ticket sales, but organisers have to keep their eyes and ears open for new talents as well.’ This was an abiding theme of the Conference as a whole. Unlike the rock world where the promoter provides the staging and the act will usually provide the visual spectacle, Dance promoters are more like theatrical producers and have to provide far more design and decoration, as with the ‘fruit’ themes applied to the stages at the 20,000 audience Juicy Beats Festival. In the Dance world the audience and the event itself are far more central than in other genres where the artist is foremost.

The perceived notion that Dance events are always drug related has given Chris Yuen great problems in the Us, where a new Federal law has been passed which makes it possible for authorities to close down an event if there is even a vague suspicion of drugs being involved. Dance also has to deal with the fact that it is mainly a young persons music, people do not grow older and take this music with them necessarily, as a Bowie or Who fan for instance can hang on to the songs for thirty years, New young audiences are adopting rock, to hold on to the Dance fans as Alev and Carsten pointed out means introducing new elements, such as more live musicians. Sponsorship has to be pursued and the profile of the genre has to be acceptable without a complete compromise of the tribal and cultural nature of Dance. Collaboration with established promoter in other fields was in no way ruled out, and open minds were obvious.

The end result of this panel was that an awareness of the problems would lead to solutions; none of the participants were throwing in the towel, and a show of hands from the floor in response to my question, “Is there room for optimism?’ was resoundingly positive.