Like with many artistic professions that come with a high degree of uncertainty and difficulty, dancing, especially if you’re living and working in New York City, is a very challenging career to commit yourself to.
Because the dance world is so competitive and so dependent on physical capability, the smallest ankle sprain or blown audition for a pop star’s music video could set you back months, and many dancers in the Big Apple rely on side gigs to make ends meet.
Knowing this, dance service organization Dance/NYC is about to launch the Dance Industry Census, a comprehensive attempt to account for every dancer and dance organization in New York state, and certain parts of New Jersey. By doing this, Dance/NYC hopes to illuminate systemic inequities, discover more about working conditions for dancers, and get a better sense of average wages.
“The initiative was born out of a lot of the experiences of the staff and myself throughout the years in the dance community realizing that it was incredibly difficult to figure out getting paid, or how often we should be getting breaks, or why was it so hard to find health insurance?” Alejandra Duque Cifuentes, the Executive Director of Dance/NYC, told The Daily Beast. The urgency behind creating the census ramped up during the pandemic.
Dance/NYC’s 2021 Coronavirus Dance Impact Study found that 47% of individual dance workers in New York City were unemployed in late fall 2020; at the beginning of the pandemic, 7% were unemployed. 30% of those who were unemployed in late fall 2020 are women of color.
“Essentially, what folks were experiencing was that they went from being booked and blessed to ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be able to buy groceries this week, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to pay my rent this week,'” Cifuentes told The Daily Beast.
Within the Dance Census study, which will accumulate data between July and October of 2022, individuals who fall under the designation of “dance worker” include choreographers, dance teachers, dance producers and academics who study dance, among many others connected to the industry; all these folks can submit information to the study.
While standout, prestigious companies like New York City Ballet are widely known, the vast majority of dance companies are small, independent and difficult to fund, Cifuentes told The Daily Beast. Plus, there are a variety of unions across the country that incorporate dancers, but there’s no central union exclusive to dancers in the entire United States, often leaving performers unsure about how exactly to advocate for themselves.
In addition to driving new funding for companies and studios and providing dancers with self-advocacy tools, Cifuentes hopes the census “gives us transparent information about the state of the industry. It’s really hard to make changes, create new policies and enforce new things if we don’t actually understand what the state of our industry is.”
“Dance artists and workers are vital and necessary creators of New York City’s vibrant culture,” Yanira Castro, an artist and a member of the Dance. Workforce. Resilience. Initiative task force, said in a statement. “We—like all workers—deserve equitable pay, full disability access, and joyful and just working conditions to thrive.”
