An exciting new initiative is currently underway to help grow the audiences for dance in our region. Discover Dance, is a research project led by Arts About Manchester with DiGM, dance venues and promoters, to study audiences at performances. A strategy will be drawn out to develop these audiences as well as to engage paople who have never tried out dance performance before.

The Urban Moves Festival in July 2005 was an early project for the research. Valuable information was collected from those watching the performances, and this showed that Manchester’s first outdoor dance festival attracted a remarkable 44% of people who had never tried out such performance before! 87% of these people also said that they would attend a dance event again.

This new audience will be further involved and encouraged through Discover Dance. (20% of people came from outside the Manchester area to Urban Moves, another very successful statistic!) Click www.urbanmovesfestival.co.uk to link to the festival pages.

See www.aam.org.uk for further information on the research