Tanya Crowder, photo by David Hou
Last year I had the pleasure of working with a group of Toronto-based independent dance creators to examine their work/life situation as mid-career artists. The group of eight*, formalized last April as the Alliance of Independent Mid-Career Dance Creators (AIM-CDC), commissioned me to investigate how they, and others like them, were managing their lives and careers. Their intent was to glean some insight into where there are common challenges and potential opportunities for collaboration, and to open conversations in the field about how to improve overall working conditions for indie artists.
Stuck in the Middle: A story about 14 mid-career dance creators in Toronto was released in October 2010, and reveals some challenging (though not surprising) statistics about the lives and careers of dance creators in Toronto.
Allison Cummings, photo by Omer Yuseker
• The average Toronto-based, mid-career independent contemporary dance creator is 39, has worked professionally for 18 years, and earns $18, 130 – 78% of which is earned from dance-related sources. (The low-income cutoff for Canadian cities with populations over 500,000 is $20, 800).
• 80% of artists function on a project-basis with a typical budget of about $27,400 per cycle of activity. Half operate as charities, the other half as sole proprietors.
• In their last cycle of activity, 14 artists engaged a total of 194 individuals and paid out over $357,000 in salaries and wages.
• Artists volunteer time in virtually every aspect of their business. For every paid hour, an additional 36 minutes of volunteer time is required to realize a cycle of activity. This does not include time volunteered by board members.
• Artists spend less than 50% of their time on artistic activity.
• Nearly 60% of business revenues come from government sources.
Heidi Strauss, photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
Dan Wild and Susanna Hood, photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
The report highlights that these artists want and need two key things: more opportunities to promote and disseminate their work, including connecting more with presenters and new markets and an appropriate resourcing strategy and administrative support structure to facilitate a range of activities that support their artistic mandates.
It also points to the fact that artists are replicating an existing business model that isn’t effectively supporting their artistic careers and suggests that a conflict of values between various sources of support may be causing dysfunction in how artists address the advancement of their work.
Meagan O'Shea, photo by Brian Geoff
The Dance Current magazine has recently published an online feature article about the study. Also, CIUT 89.5FM interviewed me just today on their program Evi-dance. The podcast should be available shortly here. To read the full report, visit www.hub14.org and download a copy, available under ‘activity’. This study was generously supported by Canada’s National Ballet School, the Dancer Transition Resource Centre, Dance Ontario, Canadian Children’s Dance Theatre, and hub14.
Sasha Ivanochko, photo by Sam Baardman
Great study. I looked at the full version very quickly but a couple of questions:
- I don’t understand if you are talking about individuals or companies; I think you mean individuals but the incorporation thing is confusing; can an individual be a charity?
- what is a “cycle of work?”
- if a cycle of work is like a dance project, and the average project budget is $27,000, and in calculating this you were looking at 14 artists who engaged a total of 194 individuals, that’s about 14 people involved in each project. No wonder nobody’s making any money
- are there really over 10,000 dancers in Toronto?
- the percentage of government funding (60%) is not surprising when a criteria for inclusion in the survey was having received two grants: where are there dancers working without government support?
Anyway… this finding is really interesting: “that artists are replicating an existing business model that isn’t effectively supporting their artistic careers and suggests that a conflict of values between various sources of support may be causing dysfunction”. Wow, that is a loaded statement. Care to clarify what you’re getting at?
Hi Robert. Thanks for reading the study. The participants are individual creators, some of whom have incorporated organizations to house their work. The number of engaged persons referred to varied quite considerably between each artist and so I felt calculating and stating the average of 14 engaged people on an average $27K budget was misleading. A budget of $27K would likely have fewer than 14 people engaged. My point was to illustrated the overall impact on the economy and labour force by pointing out how significantly the work of 14 individual creators has on the sector.
10,200 is the number of female artists (not dancers) currently in Toronto (according to the most recent stats Canada census).
And to your last point, YES, this is a loaded statement, and I think, the elephant in the room across many parts of the arts sector. Generally speaking, the arts sector is growing at a much faster pace than public funding, and so we have to continue looking at new ways to imagine how to start and grow arts businesses into more sustainable entities given this challenging reality. There is a deep need for new public investment, but it’s not the only front we need to work on in order to find solutions.
Thanks for writing!
[...] practice. Shannon Litzenberger, the current and inaugural Metcalf Arts Policy Fellow in Toronto, reports that the average salary for a mid-career independent contemporary dance creator (with an ave…—almost $3,000 below Toronto’s low-income cut off. These grim figures suggest that the model for [...]