A dance of excellence, accessibility, money and national identity: A discourse analysis of the Royal New Zealand Ballet's website

Abstract

This paper explores how the Royal New Zealand Ballet's (RNZB's) website is used to construct the organisation's identity. Recent changes to the New Zealand government's cultural policy regarding accessibility, accountability, and funding have seen arts organisations need to consider economic sustainability. We posit that the changing demands placed on elite arts organisations to accommodate both artistic and commercial values may create conflicting messages and tensions that impact on their identity. To explore these tensions, we applied Dryzek's discourse analysis to the RNZB's website. The study uncovered the key entities constructed on the website as the audience, sponsors, and dancers, then considered the power relationships between these entities as well as the explicit and implicit reasons the website had been constructed. The results of the study highlight that the RNZB has chosen to emphasise its normative identity as a creative arts organisation, which inevitably had to meet utilitarian needs of financial support in order to have longevity. By making money, access, excellence, and national identity a part of their overall identity, the RNZB have perhaps inadvertently created contradictions and ambiguity in their wider identity scheme. We conclude that the until the RNZB can run sustainably without government support, and the contradictions in their presented identity will most likely remain.