Day in and day out at The Dance Complex, we steadfastly do what we do best: offer classes to all who seek the life-changing effects of movement and dance in their lives. And throughout the year we offer performances and workshop opportunities to engage audiences with local, national and international artists. We depend on contributions from the government, foundations and individuals to do so.
Many of the 5000 people who visit The DC monthly use dance as an important thread that is woven through their lives. Some among these – the people who teach, facilitate, administer and dance include our teaching, guest artists and affiliated dance companies – depend on dance to provide for their incomes, their livelihoods. Dance is not just a thread in their lives, it is the whole cloth of their lives.
So, this message is intended to bring awareness to those among our DC circle who may not understand the fragility of weaving a professional life in dance in America today.
Recent data collected by the Mass Cultural Council shows dance professionals in the Commonwealth as making the lowest annual income annually among other artists – approximately $7500. Last week’s actions by our current administration in Washington, DC, to actively dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts (on the heels of its earlier efforts to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities) places us all in insecurity. These actions are an attempt to arrest arts and culture, including the halting of movement and dance.
The actions of the administration are an effort to silence the voices, the stories of self-expression the arts cultivate, and to discredit the value of arts. This ultimately causes harm to the artists you know and engage with here at The DC and everywhere. It causes damage to whole systems of dance genres from the world over.
For the moment, The Dance Complex is not directly affected by the rescinding of grants from the NEA . There are, though, fellow artists and organizations in theatre, dance and visual arts in the region who received notice last week of revoked grants. We stand with you, support you. The ecology of dance and the arts in the Boston region is so interwoven, that we will all be affected by these cuts and the attempts at devaluation.
The Dance Complex will continue to partner with all to sustain the dances we dance together and those we create anew. We are here to instill movement, to deepen value for creative practice.
Fly toward movement any chance you get – it is a freedom that you deserve and it is your right.
We offer the following resources giving more background on these issues, and suggested immediate actions for all concerned to help support the case for artists, including dance, and the arts:
MASSCreative (the Commonwealth’s advocacy organization):
https://www.mass-creative.org/
Dance/USA (national advocacy organization for dance):
https://www.danceusa.org/
Americans for the Arts (national advocacy organization for all the arts):
https://www.
New England Foundation for the Arts, as part of the Collective of Regional Arts Organizations, Statement on the NEA:
https://www.nefa.org/news/