365 days, 365 new ways to communicate dance with diagonal

After one year, diagonal dance is still here, well and alive. The journey has been made of ups and downs, but the mission is what matters at the end of the day.

One year, one global pandemic, one beautiful community, and hundreds of Zoom meetings with meaningful conversations. In March 2020, we had no idea where this journey was taking us. Twelve months later, we are certain that diagonal dance is far more than a communications agency providing services for artists and organisations: it’s a space for open discussions, sharing knowledge, and championing a community of global dance artists that are reinventing themselves during these challenging times. Everyone has the power within themselves to communicate a message more clearly.

The idea of combining dance and communications started to emerge in 2019, when we realized the lack of expertise in this area and how small organisations and independent artists were struggling to build a solid communications strategy that effectively reached the audience. Dance marketing seemed a vast concept by then until one premise came into our minds: how to make dance more accessible to everyone by translating the powerful experience of movement into new languages? And that’s when diagonal started to emerge, amid ripped papers from notebooks and calendars. 

Dance is the primordial way of human communication, yet is sometimes so far from people. Why? Well, even though we don’t have the magical solution, we managed to develop our own: communications can connect dance with new audiences by translating the unique experience of dancing and watching dance. How? By using the digital tools that can reach and engage with more people. In a world where digital noise is too loud in our daily lives, it’s more crucial than ever to use them wisely: it was never so important to use the digital platform to add value to your community. Crossing the areas of content marketing, public relations, storytelling, branding, and copywriting, we were able to use our knowledge to bring a new source of value to support the sector. And it’s all about giving and receiving – giving the best services we can give, and receiving the amazing voices of so many professionals that crossed our paths during this year. 

After 365 days of discovering new ways to promote dance, we look back also proud of what we can share with the community. Initiatives such as the Coffee Break, Diagonal Lab and our Blogs & Interviews opened the doors to discover more about inspiring professionals that nurture the need to learn, explore, discuss and think outside the box. We’re still amazed by how the dance community wants to be more collaborative and join forces – and we’re glad to be part of it! Here’s to more years of making dance more accessible to everyone. 

Diagonal was not possible without its amazing team: Ines, Bernardo, Barbara, and Filipe, who believed in this project from the very beginning. And, of course, we need to thank you all who jumped in to highlight how amazing the dance sector is: our partners at Dance Art Journal; the organizations that have been sharing their manifestos with us; our fantastic interviewers and guest bloggers; all the Diagonal Coffee Break guests; The Diagonal Lab Workshops facilitators and participants; the friends who embraced this exciting journey with us; the organisations and individuals we are pleased to be working with. To all the diagonal community: we can’t thank you enough!