Dance Palace

Dance Palace is a multidisciplinary arts and community center that serves residents of the remote region of West Marin. Its programs reach nearly 4,000 people each year through offerings by well-known and local artists in dance, theater, film, and music. Dance Palace also provides performing arts classes for children and adults, and performances and workshops for local students, in and out of school. This grant advances the Performing Arts Program’s Communities strategy by ensuring a home for community-based arts and culture in a rural part of the Bay Area, where few arts resources exist.

The Dance Palace is an active community center that features a performing arts program serving the residents of West Marin, an area that consists of a group of unincorporated semi-rural coastal villages separated from each other and the larger towns of Eastern Marin, with limited access to the arts and significant populations of seniors and those living well below the poverty line. Arts programming includes performances by well-known artists, offering classical, world, and folk music, dance, theater, and film, and reach 3,000 to 4,000 people a year. The Dance Palace also provides performing arts classes for children and adults, the Dance Palace Summer Stock Players for teens, and performances and workshops for local students, in and out of school. Support for strategic planning will assist the organization in developing a road map to guide programming, audience development (in concert with participation in Hewlett’s Audience Research Collaborative), and financial stability. With supplemental funding, and as an outcome of the strategic planning process, Dance Palace will engage a fundraising consultant to complete a cost-benefit analysis of various fundraising efforts by the organization to see how to maximize results.