Friday, March 13, 2015
Is American Modern Dance a Pyramid Scheme?
FROM THE GREEN ROOM: Dance/USA's e-Journal: Making a living as an American dancer and choreographer today is a fantasy. By this, I mean it’s a fantasy to think a person can make enough money to afford a place to live, keep the lights on, have enough to eat, and cover transportation costs solely by creating and performing dances.
Or, as Ken Tabachnick, deputy dean of NYU’s Tisch School of he Arts, puts it, “The heart of the matter is that we expect to be able to earn a reasonable living through our art, but the current environment makes this an unrealistic expectation except for a very select few.”
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While this article is about dance, the subject is very relevant to us at Carnegie Mellon. Going into an arts field is signing up for job instability, poor pay, and a constant reminder from your loved ones about the tenuousness of your position. While designers have the benefit of a smaller talent pool and slightly more reliable jobs, the sad fact for all is that there are too many people for too few jobs.
The pyramid scheme analogy is interesting. While the arts fields feel as though they allow for more freedom, artists are controlled by their ability to make a living. The influences may not feel direct, but they make a significant impact on our behavior. While artistic education is of vital importance, it is a shame that the careers of so many artists must be integrated with education in order to make a living. In an ideal world, art educators would be in that profession because it is something they are passionate about, not because they need it to keep the lights on.
I’ve been interested in the business of the arts for a little while now, and this article is particularly interesting. Something that I disagreed with immediately was how it claimed that dance was a pyramid scheme based on the definition. Yes, people are “recruiting” new “members” into a “program”. But these terms are all used loosely. By recruiting and program are they referring to keeping an art form going and by members do they mean students who want to study this for their own reasons? Clearly artists are struggling to find employment, but this does not mean that every artist wants to be a teacher. Something I also disagree with is that they say, “dance programs are taking money from students to train them for jobs that do not exist, except within the small and highly competitive arena of higher education.” There is a certain responsibility of the student to be aware of the field and know what they are signing up. So overall, yes there is a shortage of jobs, however I would not quite go on a limb and say that dance is a pyramid scheme.
Before reading this article, I can confidently say that I never thought of the arts as a pyramid scheme, but as the article progressed, I felt myself getting more and more enraptured by the process. While this process is present in all art forms, it's especially prevalent in dance, where your body is your art form. Even more so than acting, while working as a dance you're expected to keep your body in top condition well past your peak. I can't name you more than a couple of dance companies, much less dance companies that aren't ballet. Here's one profession that is keeping its head alive by teaching new dancers. However, these positions are few and far between, and are perhaps even more unattainable than a steady gig as a dancer. And here is where the pyramid scheme rears its ugly head. There will always be exceptions; booking a backup dancing gig for a headliner like Katy Perry or Beyonce, but those success stories are rare. Is this realization enough to stop having a dance major? It might just be so. Another option to this is having the dance majors take a wide variety of other classes that they can "fall back on," as sad as it might be. Then again, then your Dance Major is less about the dance and more about surviving in a dwindling industry. We will always need people to dance, but will we always need dancers? Time will tell.
There is a lot in this article that can be connected to Carnegie Mellon, and our theater program, but instead, I'm going to focus on the dance. I think the biggest thing about this article is that dance is addicting (I would know, I dance). When people start dancing early, it quickly becomes something that they have to be doing. The same way working backstage at a show is a high, so is dancing in front of an audience. And it may be true that colleges are capitalizing on this addiction people have, but you also have to see that there are more opportunities for dancers that being in a dance company or being a dance teacher. There are some opportunities in theater and other performance industries, but it is true that there aren't many. I love dancing and I understand why some people would want it to be their major, and it is disheartening to think about how there aren't enough jobs for the dances, and I wish that people start taking more of an interest in dancing and support this not-always-as-appreciated art.
I feel like there’s no market for a lot of arts nowadays. Even going into technical theater/entertainment, my constant fear is that I won’t find a job when I graduate and I will have this looming debt with no way to pay it off. Dance seems to be one of those arts which have died off, sadly. I see people dancing on the streets of New York all the time with a hat to collect money. I never see actual shows in which there will be dancers anymore. The one exception is ballet, but even then those aren’t as popular as they once were. Sadly, the only people that I would recognize in ballet performances are the leads. I never know any of the ensembles, and I wouldn’t be able to recognize them individually when they get onstage because of how a lot of ballet studios put their performers in very similar makeup and they all have very similar body types. The lack of variety causes this inability to be recognized and therefore people never go higher up in their companies.
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