Last Rites

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lauren Zaleta limps out of the main dance studio of the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City in faded jeans and a bulky, olive-green jacket while the other girls—her fellow students—stay behind, in black leotards and white tights. Today, Zaleta’s brown hair, normally piled high in a tight bun that shows off her doll-like face and light blue eyes, is pulled back in a messy ponytail. On doctor’s orders, she’s wearing five-inch high-heeled brown wedge shoes; her right ankle, where she has sprained a tendon, must be relieved of any weight when she walks. Until it heals, she needs to balance her weight on her toes.

Zaleta’s injury has come at the worst possible time: the beginning of the audition season for placements in dance companies, which typically lasts around three months at the start of every year. This is the spring term of her second and final year as a trainee at the prestigious school, which means that unless she lands a job with a dance company within the next sixty days, the dance career of the twenty-one-year-old ballerina will have ended before it ever began.

For the last two years, Zaleta has been a student in the Joffrey School’s pre-professional track, an intensive, highly regarded program for students planning to become professional dancers. Founded more than a half-century ago as an offshoot of the legendary Chicago-based Joffrey Ballet Company, the school enjoys a reputation among dance companies as a prime producer of fresh dance talent. That helps explains why enrollment at the Joffrey has remained steady, with seventy-six current students between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two now hoping for spots with modern-dance or ballet companies when they graduate. But for all its prestige, the upper school has become the Joffrey’s most worrisome wing, and for one simple reason: The dance world is crumbling, and young dancers such as Lauren Zaleta are training for a profession that grows smaller and less significant by the year. What once might have seemed a momentary setback—a sprained ankle, a torn tendon, even just a bad cold—now could cost an aspiring dancer an opportunity that may never come back again.

“A couple more months, that’s all I’ve got,” Zaleta says. The prognosis for her profession isn’t much better.

It is not startling news to report that every branch of the performing arts, from symphony orchestras to operas to theater companies, has suffered deeply at the hands of the worst economic downturn in decades. Government funding for the arts has dropped along with endowments, contributions, and ticket sales. Cutbacks are commonplace, and risk taking has diminished as cultural institutions do whatever they can to survive. Symphony orchestras travel less than ever before and more regularly fill their programs with the works of crowd pleasers such as Beethoven and Brahms to ensure attendance. Theater producers routinely cast serious dramas with television and movie stars to draw audiences. Major American opera companies—New York’s Metropolitan Opera included—have been forced to cut back significantly on major productions as endowments shrink.

But American dance culture isn’t just struggling. To some observers, its diagnosis seems to be especially grim, perhaps even terminal: Dance is a victim of inherent weaknesses made yet more dire by the profession’s financial woes. Mounting deficits, shrinking audiences, and less critical support have combined to cause an entire art form to fear its fate in ways that other performing arts do not.

Already less popular than other cultural offerings, even on a good day, dance relies far more heavily on audience support than does its competition. A dance aficionado can’t download a performance on an iPod and enjoy it in the car during a long drive. Dance demands a different kind of interaction with an audience; it takes more effort and concentration—and money—for a dance devotee to end up in a theater or concert hall with a group of dancers and watch them sweat, listen to their breathing, and marvel at the command they have over their bodies. Dance is an all-or-nothing proposition for its audience, and this may end up being a principal reason for its demise.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the worst possible time in dance history for audiences. It is, simply put, the bleakest it has been for the dance industry itself in nearly a century.

This represents a dramatic shift from just thirty years ago, when dancers still were the sorts of celebrities who landed on the covers of magazines such as Time , Life , and Newsweek . Names such as Astaire, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, and Ailey were familiar even to those who didn’t know the difference between modern dance and ballet: “a kind of semi-stoned generation that loved looking at things and dancers themselves,” as former Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt describes 1970 audiences. Hard as it may be to imagine today, thousands of people rioted in Paris in 1914 because they felt Igor Stravinsky’s score for Le Sacre du Printemps— a ballet choreographed by the celebrated Russian dancer Nijinsky—was too violent. The twentieth century saw an explosion of creativity that lasted for decades: Choreographers such as George Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Isadora Duncan transformed the profession and made way for innovators such as Merce Cunningham, Bob Fosse, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and others whose eponymous companies and styles turned dance into a cultural sensation.

In 2011 the prestigious Paul Taylor Dance Company, which debuted in 1954 and became one of the first major touring modern-dance companies in America, will appear in half the number of shows it booked in 2008. The main company used to go to about thirty-five different American cities in a year; last year its dancers visited fewer than twenty. The company used to charge presenters between $60,000 and $90,000 per show. Today the majority of gigs earn $20,000 a week and include mostly weekend performances.

“Think of it from the theater’s perspective,” says Sarah Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic of the Washington Post , who fears that the profession she critiques, at least in its current form, may one day morph into something far smaller and less significant. “Are they going to book something with a relatively small audience like a dance show or something that will guarantee a bigger audience?” The answer to her question is depressingly clear.

Fewer shows translate into fewer “dancer weeks” for performers. Paul Taylor’s dancers are paid by the number of weeks they perform, which once averaged forty-four weeks a year. In 2009 the average was down to thirty-five dancer weeks, which meant that dancers ended up freelancing for other companies to make more money on the side.

Companies lately have been forced to put most of their funds into heavy marketing in a desperate hope to drum up audiences. As for young dancers, the competition for the few jobs now available to them is so great that, by the time auditions are over, the dancers already are exhausted—before they’ve even arrived on a stage. “Dancers have to fight harder than they have ever had before [because of this], which is very daunting for a young dancer coming out,” says Joan Jeffri, director of the arts administration program and the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Teachers College at Columbia University. “And it’s not like dancers have agents like actors do to find auditions; nothing is centralized.”

To outward appearances, dance aficionados might be mollified by the fact that dance is such a young industry; more than two-thirds of all dance companies were founded in the past sixteen years, according to Dance / USA, the leading research group on dance. But, in a way, that has made matters worse. With only about sixteen companies over thirty-five years of age, it is not surprising that dance lacks much of the infrastructure, cultural memory, and broad acceptance that other performing arts enjoy.

“There’s more people fighting now for existence,” agrees Deborah Jowitt, whose own career serves as a painful metaphor for dance’s troubles. She joined the Voice in 1967, at the beginning of the nation’s dance boom, and was laid off forty years later, in 2008, as the dance downturn deepened. “Lots of companies and not a lot of money. Not a lot of paid work.”

Funding sources are drying up, too. The New York City Ballet let go eleven of its 101 dancers in July 2009 to lighten the company’s $7 million budget deficit by a factor of $1.2 million, on a budget of $62 million. The dismissals were accompanied by reduced staff salaries, a hiring freeze, and cuts to administrative spending. The company expected to reduce the deficit to $5 million this year—better, but not enough to keep the company alive indefinitely.

While the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the first African-American dance troupe that has grown into one of the nation’s most prominent modern dance companies, has not dismissed dancers, the company has reduced administrative staff and salaries. Rather than touring for six weeks, the main company toured for only three in the fall 2009 season. The troupe had to cut overseas touring completely.

That is the current, sorry state of the profession Lauren Zaleta wants to join. It is no wonder she worries that, if her ankle doesn’t heal soon, there’ll be no jobs left.

As Zaleta limps along the hallway at the Joffrey, she spies her friend Claire Sargenti doing pirouettes in an empty studio. Sargenti is a petite, twenty-one-year-old brunette with short, fine hair that falls over her brown eyes when she twirls. When she finally tires of doing pirouettes, Zaleta claps for her; and Sargenti bounces toward her to give her a bear hug before flopping down next to her. Both girls sit on the floor as Sargenti stretches her legs, tucks away stray strands of hair, and wipes the sweat off her face.

Zaleta remembers sitting on the floor when she was three years old, watching enviously as dancers practiced basic floor work and the class instructor said she was too young to start taking classes. Although she liked ballet, it was jazz that drew her in at age four. She danced throughout her traditional schooling, sometimes taking up to four classes during the school week and all day on weekends. She began taking ballet seriously in high school; that’s considered late to begin a professional career in dance, but her previous training in other forms of dance and her innate talent made her an easy choice for judges at the Joffrey auditions.

Today Zaleta explains that cutbacks at large companies mean talented dancers who have been let go from the major companies—or who would have had a real shot at places in such companies—are now filling spots in smaller companies. This trickle-down effect is making it much more difficult for new dancers to emerge on the professional scene.

For Zaleta, thinking about dance means thinking about money. To manage the meager lifestyle of a starving artist in New York City, she completes close to forty hours of work-study at the Joffrey, which means that, for every class she teaches, she can take a class for free. This significantly reduces the $11,500 annual tuition. She also serves as a resident assistant in the school’s dormitory, working late hours so she will have to pay only $200 in rent rather than the $1000 per month charged to the other girls.

Zaleta scrimps on the tools of her trade as well. In her backpack she carries a ziplock bag that holds a small, blue vial of superglue, which she uses to keep her pointe shoes stiff. Holding the pointe shoes so that they face downward, she puts a few drops in the front and leaves the shoes to dry. This will keep the shoes sturdy and wearable for perhaps another day. Pointe shoes, which run between $60 and $100, depending on the brand, can die within one week, unlike flat shoes, which can last for months. Rather than splurge repeatedly on new, delicate shoes, ballerinas will spend $3 for glue to keep old ones in manageable condition.

“I’m used to going without dinner for weeks, used to wearing holey shoes, used to dead pointe shoes that most people would get hurt wearing,” Zaleta says. Her big toe shows through a hole in her flat shoes, which are browned and worn at the soles.

Money was an issue from the start, as Zaleta’s father supports a family of seven on a police officer’s modest income in Philadelphia. Her mother stays at home to take care of a sister with a medical condition, and two siblings are in college. When Zaleta moved to Manhattan at nineteen, her mother told her that, if she didn’t make it into a company or a prominent training school within six months, she had to return to college in Philadelphia and complete her degree in animal bioscience.

Today Zaleta’s mother is incredibly supportive of her daughter’s dancing career. In February she made the two-hour trip from Philadelphia to New York to see Zaleta perform in a free show at the World Financial Center. The show, in celebration of the Chinese New Year, was a collaboration between New York-based artists, including Joffrey dancers, and Beijing Opera performers. Zaleta, in a fuchsia leotard, was on stage for about fifteen minutes.

The key to hiring the next generation of dancers is finding the next generation of people who will pay to see them. Even without funding cutbacks, dance is in trouble because younger people have grown less interested in traditional art forms than in, say, video games. Financial issues are actually making even worse what already had evolved into a crisis. In a survey on arts attendance in 2008, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that less than 3 percent of the population attends a ballet performance in a given year, a figure down by 30 percent from 2002. This figure showed an even more dramatic decline from 1982, when new dance companies kept springing up and funding was available—too much funding, as it turns out.

Between 1987 and 1997, the number of nonprofit dance companies nearly doubled, far outpacing population growth. In 1992 the NEA’s dance appropriations reached nearly $176 million. That same year, the agency awarded $5.6 million to nonprofit dance companies, more than 3 percent of its budget. But by 1996, the agency cut its appropriations to $99 million, a 43 percent reduction, and grants to dance companies dropped by $2.7 million, or nearly 3 percent of the agency’s budget. NEA grants to dance companies have decreased steadily ever since.

Meanwhile, the NEA reports that ballet attendance dropped by one-third between 1982 and 2008 and was down by nearly half for college-educated Americans. The percentage of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 who attended a ballet performance fell by nearly 50 percent from 1982 to 2008. The median age of audiences is going steadily up, and it is clear that demand hasn’t kept up with growth.

All of this doesn’t sit well with donors, who tend to prefer supporting institutions such as museums and schools where they can see their names engraved on a wall. Such acknowledgments of support serve as exposure, which means advertising, which eventually could even mean a return on a donor’s investment. But with dance, nothing is permanent. Ticket prices barely cover the costs of a production on the best of days. Think of the dancers, their costumes, makeup, stage crew, live musicians, rehearsal time, stage time, choreography, rights to music. It’s expensive, and it’s fleeting.

“Dance is ephemeral and small, which adds to its charm, but this doesn’t translate into a stable art form,” says the Washington Post ’s Kaufman. “When asking people to donate large sums of money to help create new work, they [the donors] are really kind of jumping into a void, which for some is a hurdle. Not everything worthy can pay for itself. Especially in a sour financial climate.”

Yes, all the fine arts in America are in desperate trouble; attendance at opera, theater, jazz, symphony, and ballet performances has dropped dramatically in recent decades, and the median age of attendees has increased dramatically. If the fine arts are to survive as a living, creative, and significant force in American life, arts institutions need to radically recreate themselves.

But dance may not be able to do so before it loses its audience completely.

“They can’t just create programs that serve their typical subscribers and then try and market them in a way that seems relevant to twenty-five-year-olds,” says Diane Ragsdale, whose research paper, “Recreating Fine Arts Institutions,” was published in the Stanford Social Review last year. “They have to program authentically for a younger audience and if that means losing some of the wealthy, older, white patrons that were shackling the organizations, that’s okay too.” Ragsdale now serves as the assistant program officer for performing arts at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has given generous grants to dance entities—including the Paul Taylor Dance Company—in the past.

Not unlike print publications and record labels, many fine-arts organizations have failed to adjust to the radical social, cultural, and technological changes that have taken place in the United States during the past few decades. The way people express their appreciation for art, and the way they view art, has changed. “For a growing number of Americans, particularly young ones, showing up at a prescribed time, paying a hefty admission fee of up to $180, and spending an entire evening passively watching a performance in a dark and sacred venue where even the crinkling of a cough drop wrapper is enough to elicit glares from the patron next to you, feels more akin to penance than an enjoyable way to spend an evening,” says Ragsdale.

Instead, popular forms of dance performance have become more about competition and moves and less about narrative or story—like sports set to music. Television programs such as “So You Think You Can Dance” demonstrate that “successful” dancers are those who can display physical talent; these shows do not showcase dance works based on profound observations or that express something beyond the merely physical.

“That’s kind of out, having a piece be ‘about something,’” says Kaufman. “The ones who want to do something more substantial have to work in the same system of no time or money. It is a system that’s not designed right now to produce a lot of quality.”

The Paul Taylor Dance Company, still known for its original, evocative, and vibrant choreography at a time when Paul Taylor himself is over eighty years old, is now struggling to find its image as audiences seem more interested in commercial pieces. This premier modern dance company is one of the earliest touring companies in America and a brand name in the dance world. Although, after fifty years of building a strong reputation, most of the company’s success is based on its brand, this is also what, ultimately, is hurting it.

“People have loved Paul Taylor for years, but that’s exactly the weakness,” says Edson Womble, the company’s financial director for more than twenty years. “When you’re thirty years old, do you listen to the same things your parents did? The name to young people is Frank Sinatra. And as great as Sinatra is, he didn’t do as many concerts the last fifteen years of his life.”

The key is to attract a loyal following of younger audience members.

“The sad thing is that, if we don’t find an audience, then there is simply no audience for Paul Taylor anymore, and it wouldn’t be the first [company] to go that way,” says Womble. “There is a shelf life. And we’ve still got one more really challenging year ahead of us.”

To gird against failure, dance organizations are spending millions on better infrastructure when they should be redirecting their efforts to appeal to younger patrons.

“Giant buildings are not the answer,” says Gregory Mosher, a director and producer of more than two hundred stage productions who has worked with such playwrights as David Mamet, Samuel Beckett, and Tennessee Williams. He is also the recipient of every major theater award, including two Tony Awards, for his works. He served as the head of theater at New York’s Lincoln Center, where he revolutionized marketing strategies by changing traditional subscription methods to encourage younger, less well-off patrons to come to the theater. “I don’t know anyone under the age of thirty-five who cares about what the Lincoln Center just built. What would matter is if the Lincoln Center took some of the millions of dollars to subsidize seats.”

While Facebook plus podcasts plus $10 tickets isn’t necessarily the simple solution everyone is looking for, new buildings are an issue because they could be impeding the creation of exactly the type of art to which younger audiences are drawn.

“Money is still going toward buildings with the typical marble lobbies and proscenium arches on stage, but this in itself cements the artist to these physical boundaries,” says Ragsdale. “The buildings themselves become a force that is constraining the content of new work.”

Because the arts are a nearly $22-billion-a-year industry in America,
it seems worthwhile to spend a few billion more in an effort to retool
arts organizations.

“It’s about getting a young person off an Xbox,” says Mosher.

One answer could involve giving younger employees at arts institutions a say in programming. “Not actively engaging younger staff in serious questions and not giving them authority is just frustrating at this point,” says Ragsdale. “In some cases, it is time for new, fresh leadership altogether, and the transition won’t be easy.”

With arts organizations trying to focus their energies on redefining market strategies to attract younger audiences and make use of minimal funding, dancers themselves are directly affected. Tired of waiting for good news, Claire Sargenti and Lauren Zaleta took matters into their own hands. With two other Joffrey dancers, they started a ballet collaborative called New Bridges Ballet designed to put on low-budget shows in places where one wouldn’t expect to see ballet: in bars, in Washington Square Park, in a music video for a heavy-metal band.

In a journal entry in September 2008, Sargenti wrote eloquently about the night New Bridges Ballet was conceived:

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Last Rites