Great Southern Dance
A new performing arts company has a credibility problem that most businesses don’t. The work is live, ephemeral, and experienced in a room. Once the performance is over, what’s left is documentation, reputation, and a website. For Great Southern Dance, launching in 2019 with no web presence at all, that last part needed to be right from the start.
The client
Great Southern Dance is a Hobart-based professional contemporary dance company founded in 2019. Artistic Director Felicity Bott leads a company that works across dance, architecture, light, sound, and narrative, creating site-specific and in-theatre performances that draw deeply on Tasmanian landscape, history, and place. Their work has been staged at heritage sites including the Female Factory and Port Arthur Historic Site, and premiered at Hobart’s Studio Theatre. Alongside their performance work, they run community dance classes and maintain an active presence in Tasmania’s arts sector.
The challenge
GSD incorporated in 2019 and hit the ground with a clear artistic vision and no website. For a performing arts organisation, that gap matters beyond just looking professional. Funding bodies, presenting partners, schools, potential collaborators, and audience members all need somewhere to understand who the company is, what they make, and what they stand for. Social media fills some of that role, but it doesn’t hold the depth of context a serious arts organisation needs to establish itself.
The site also needed to carry a lot of different content without losing the company’s identity. Works documentation, media coverage, community class information, company profile, and a growing archive of collaborators and projects all needed a home that felt coherent rather than cluttered.
What we built
A custom WordPress theme built around the work
We built the site on WordPress with a fully custom theme, which gave us the freedom to shape the design around GSD’s aesthetic rather than fitting the company into a template. Contemporary dance organisations sit in a distinct visual territory, serious and artistic without being inaccessible, and the design needed to hold that balance.
The works section is the centre of gravity. Each production gets its own page where video, photography, critical writing, and production credits can be brought together in one place. That depth of documentation matters for an arts company building a body of work over time. It also serves a practical purpose: grant applications, partnership proposals, and media enquiries all benefit from a well-organised archive that shows the company’s history clearly.
Structured to serve multiple audiences without diluting the core
GSD’s audiences are genuinely different from each other. A dance reviewer, a funding assessor, a parent looking to enrol their child in community classes, and a choreographer considering a collaboration are all plausible visitors to the same site. The navigation separates these clearly: practice, works, media, commons, and class bookings each have their own space, so different visitors can find what they need without the site feeling like it’s trying to be all things at once.
The community classes link out to Humanitix for bookings, keeping the transaction on a dedicated ticketing platform rather than adding that complexity to the site itself. It’s a practical decision that keeps the site focused on what it does best: presenting the company and its work.
The result
Great Southern Dance now has a web presence that matches the ambition and integrity of the company’s artistic practice. From launch, the site has served as the primary reference point for the company’s growing profile in the Tasmanian and national arts sectors, supporting funding applications, media coverage, and audience development as the company builds its body of work.
Working on something similar?
If you’re launching a new arts organisation or creative practice and need a site that does justice to the work, get in touch and we can talk through what that might look like.
