Dance/NYC, a nonprofit group that promotes information and appreciation of dance in New York City, is on a mission to depend each dance employee — from choreographers to ballet lecturers to Colombian folkloric dancers — and dance group in New York City and its surrounding areas. The census shall be among the many largest undertakings of its form within the performing arts, the group stated.
The venture, which begins on July 20, seeks to perceive who makes up the dance work drive and the social and monetary hardships that these employees face. The information will assist establish financial gaps and alternatives for truthful wage requirements and different insurance policies throughout the sector.
Alejandra Duque Cifuentes, the group’s govt director, stated that to handle financial inequality and gauge the well being of the business, “we need to look at it from the vantage point of individuals, because helping workers create healthy, thriving businesses creates healthy, thriving industries.”
The aim, she added, is to “create tools that are systemic, and that can address inequities across the sector.”
Duque Cifuentes stated she hoped the survey would land within the palms of each dance employee, pointing to the pervasive Shen Yun ads throughout New York City for instance of the kind of visibility Dance/NYC hopes to obtain.
Like the U.S. census, the strategy to outreach is complicated and multipronged: Organizers plan to disseminate printouts throughout town with QR codes that hyperlink to the survey; set up kiosks at dance occasions and festivals; associate with group organizations and unions; promote on social media; and, just like the federal census, rent staffers to make old school cellphone calls and to knock on doorways to attain as many dance employees as doable. Data shall be collected by way of Oct. 31 and the analysis shall be made public in June 2023.
The group selected the time period “dance worker” to embody all the labor inside the “economy of dance,” Duque Cifuentes stated. That definition consists of lighting, costume and scenic designers together with instructing artists, accompanists and dance directors, fund-raisers and researchers.
The thought for the initiative was born within the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when employers within the arts had been struggling to make payroll and dancers discovered themselves out of labor inside a matter of weeks. Duque Cifuentes stated seeing individuals’s livelihoods collapse as they questioned the way forward for the dance business offered a right away case examine for why labor protections had been “needed more than ever.”
In a 2021 study, which surveyed greater than 1,000 dance employees in regards to the impact of the coronavirus on the business, Dance/NYC discovered 72 p.c stated they wanted cash for housing and 75 p.c had filed for unemployment since March 2020.
“What surfaced during the pandemic was, ‘We need health and we need quality of life,’” she stated, noting that Indigenous individuals and folks of colour suffered the biggest losses of revenue within the sector. “This initiative is the reflection of individual dance workers saying enough is enough.”
In addition to establishing wage requirements and employee protections, Duque Cifuentes stated the info would assist information the group’s grant-making efforts and advocacy work.
“Our desire is to, with our findings, address some of those systemic inequities head on and to really tear the veil,” she stated. “We want to have the data that backs up those stories that we’ve been hearing for decades.”
