Dance Church Should Be DAOdance
Many of our shared experiences in quarantine leave us feeling disconnected, cooped up, or isolated, to put it lightly. Masses flock to various online communities, social video games, binge watch via Watch Party on Amazon Video, and more to satisfy our basic human needs.
I found one community, in particular, helped me connect with my friends while being physical. They call it Dance Church.
Dance Church is a donation-based dance workout party 💃 💪 🥳 where anyone can join to cut loose and boogie down. The video production focuses on a few professional dancers out of NYC, SEA, LA, INDY, SLC, and PDX who lead users through an hour-long dance routine that ranges from silly floor work to tiresome pump squats with ridiculously fun dancing breaks in between. The dancers on camera go nuts. 🙃 You must try it.
The website is populated with positive affirmations like LET’S GO! SAY YES TO YOUR CHOICES! EVERY BODY! ALL HEART! THERE’S NO FRONT! NO TALKING! SING ALONG!
I love doing it with my friends and sometimes without. I blast the music and dress up in my dinosaur onesie so I can tear it up in my own private club. No lines, no cover charge. To feel even more connected, I set my phone up next to the TV, so my friends and I can watch each other.
But, after a few sessions, I started to see why this community hasn’t turned into a phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong, 50k followers across social media platforms and an average 500 to 1,000 viewers for each session is a success story. Still, I feel like it could be so much more. I noticed that I never see my friends on the Dance Church video stream. It is always the same few dancers. There is no option for us to get on camera. We never pick any of the songs. We never pick when the next session will be (they only cover US timezones).
We never have a say in anything.
Dance Church went for production quality and control right off the bat, and it worked great to scale the community to this level. Still, it feels more like a SaaS platform than a community.
Eventually, I found myself feeling left out even though the platform’s intention was to connect people across the digital space through performance arts. Some users do interact on Instagram, but let’s be honest, that is not a good platform to have meaningful discourse, vote, or reward harder working members.
Cue the DAO
Not that DAO.
DAOdance
Imagine everyone in Dance Church could do the following:
- collaborate on scheduling so the K-Pop masses can join
- take turns being on camera
- vote on a playlist
- attract popular DJs and dancers to perform with us
- help design swag
- provide transparency on what funds are used for
- all the while being rewarded for our efforts and rewarding others for their contributions
I believe the Dance Church community can benefit tremendously from a DAO model and a $DANCE token to engage its members and incentivize SO much more.
If anyone is interested in building something like this, I’d love to chat https://linktr.ee/thealexhidalgo
