Almost a year after the closing of the Dancer's Group space in San Francisco, not much has changed for the better.<P>I have a theory that we do infact have enough venues to present dance in the wider Bay Area, but most of them are sooooo bad managed that no one can produce decent work there. <P>This is just a theory : completely unproven or researched. Do any of you from the Bay Area have insight? Do any of you in other cities see the same sort of thing?

In San Diego there has been much the same problem. Housing and rental prices are absurdly high. There was one section of the downtown area that was blooming with loft space for all kinds of artists including dance. However, a very ordinary house -1200 square feet, in a very ordinary neighborhood is about $300,000.00. You can imagine what this does to rental prices.<P>However, it is just in that area downtown - I think I mentioned this before - that it was decided to put in a new baseball park, and that just about killed the loft space in that part of town. Of course now the ball park is in court and stopped dead for lack of funding. But the artists are gone - or going.

LMCtech, good question. We've talked about this issue in various forms in several threads. Some action is being taken but the community is so fractured that I wonder if it has the collective will to help itself.

Here are some of the previous threads:

- <a href=http://forum.criticaldance.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000047 target=_blank>Rent vs Arts</a>

- <a href=http://forum.criticaldance.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000102 target=_blank>Artists vs Dot-Coms</a>

- <a href=http://forum.criticaldance.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000130 target=_blank>Dance Crisis in SF</a> (in which Dancers' Group's roundtable sessions are talked about)

- <a href=http://forum.criticaldance.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=000048 target=_blank>Money - Is it not really there?</a>

There are also a smattering of others...

<small>[ 08-11-2002, 18:10: Message edited by: Azlan ]</small>

But is anyone doing anything about bad management?<P>We get money and space from anywhere we can, but who is managing the money or answering questions at the spaces?

I have the same questions...