Dancing with Dollars in the Millennium.

A TEN-YEAR SUMMARY OF TRENDS

It sometimes feels as if dance has just had a ten-year adventure as daunting as a new student's first time down the studio diagonal with a fast and tricky combination. We got through the '90s, but we look and feel different now than we did before the experience. There has been some exhilarating success, but nothing came easy and prices have been paid. A few have fallen along the way.

Professional not-for-profit dance in America, or "concert dance" as we shall call it in the rest of this publication, has weathered some serious challenges since 1989. Artists, performers, administrators, board members, students, teachers, critics and dance-lovers have all felt the stress. Many have been frustrated by obstacles over which they had little influence. Many have had to change their beliefs and assumptions about their place in an evolving and diverse community. Many have sought and found audacious solutions where conventional thinking no longer applied. The '90s were not an easy decade.

Consider the following. There was the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts, its consequences, and the larger "cultural wars" from which it sprang. There was the rise of a ferocious winner-take-all outlook in every aspect of our society from Little League coaching to presidential elections, from CEO compensation to the de-legitimization of the individual artist. We have begun coming to grips with AIDS and the aging of the baby boomers in a context of deeply flawed health-care and elder-care systems. The Internet has emerged as an astonishing juggernaut of social and economic change utterly unrelated to live performance in almost any conceivable way. We are seeing a diversification of the American conscience to embrace those with disabilities, those in racial or cultural minorities and others with perceived or discernible disadvantages. There is also brute resistance to that diversification. We are alarmed by the growing use of lawsuits and courtrooms as weapons. And, of course, we are blessed with emerging new generations of dancers and choreographers.

In an environment with so many challenges, change becomes inevitable. This article addresses some of the changes that have happened in the '90s and some that may still be happening. Where appropriate, we will also mention areas in which change notably has not taken place.

THE WAY WE WERE: A QUICK LOOK AT THE END OF THE '80S

We can look back now and think of the last two or three years of the '80s as a time of suspended calm heralding a gathering storm. We were seeing perhaps the final gently lapping ripples of what once had been called the "dance explosion." Thanks in part to the NEA's Dance on Tour Program in the '70s and in part to the rise of the grant-seeking and grant-awarding culture, America had seen a fifteen-year wave of growth and maturation in the world of concert dance. Clive Barnes noted this in his January, 2001, column for Dance Magazine, "The Greening of U.S. Classic Ballet." In it, he celebrated what he sees as progress from a past offering only a mere handful of "major professional troupes" to a present in which "classical ballet now flourishes from sea to shining sea."

Sheer numbers alone tell the story. Professional dance companies, as counted by the NEA, numbered 37 in 1965 and 157 in 1975. By 1990 this figure had exceeded 400, based on applications to the NEA Dance Program. In 1993 Dance/USA undertook a census of professional dance companies that identified over 650 serious companies and raised questions about broadening the definition of professionalism. Other factors also contributed in the late 1980s to a sense of energy in the dance field. For example, Gregory Hines brought visibility to tap on screen and Mikhail Baryshnikov, the charismatic star of Twyla Tharp's Push Comes to Shove and the film industry's The Turning Point, was an icon whose name could reach beyond concert dance's established audience. They gave a focus and a face to dance that helped to lend credibility to concert dance among the general population.

The Nutcracker was another energizer. The ballet had grown from an exciting novelty of the '60s, a coming thing, to an established tradition. Everyone now knew that the Nutcracker was a box-office success. Everyone knew that every ballet company that could mount one did so. Everyone who had children had to go see it.

Modern dance choreographers kept the artistic pot boiling by undertaking daring experiments in movement and content, though not always to everyone's taste. Lines between theater and dance had begun to blur. Modernism was succeeded by postmodernism. The influence of foreign cultures began to increase, especially including butoh from Japan, hard-edged theatricality from a variety of European troupes, and a growingly articulate self-awareness among people of West African and African American cultures.

At the same time, ballet companies were engaging modern choreographers with increasing regularity and there was some concern about a relative lack of new creators in the ballet field. There were efforts to nurture ballet choreographers through initiatives like the Carlisle Project and special commissioning opportunities by major companies. Meanwhile, there was a feeling among the moderns that new faces were gaining footholds alongside icons from earlier generations.

In short, there was a sense of energy, but not of certainty, about where it was all going. There was also a sense of having gained ground in the cultural landscape, but an uneasy suspicion that the growth and the victories were both fragile.

THE CHANGING FACE

Several powerful trends began to make themselves felt at the beginning of the '90s. One was a rise in the number and visibility of "culturally specific" companies producing dance of, by and for people of color and people of origins and aesthetics other than those covered by the generally Anglo-European terms "ballet" and "modern dance." A second was the beginning of a shift in the fashions and aesthetics of small companies working in modern dance and related genres. A third was a subtle but steady movement to recognize that serious dance was occurring across the nation, and that the term "regional" was no longer applicable as a way of distinguishing big-time "coast" companies from lesser entities. And a fourth was the arrival of new generations of dancers and choreographers challenging old assumptions and structures. Several concrete results proceeded from these trends.

As the '80s moved into the '90s, it became not only politically correct but also aesthetically fashionable to present and see work by artists of color. There was a great deal of energy behind this trend. The old classifications of "ballet, modern, jazz, tap and ethnic" no longer sufficed. Indeed, the word "ethnic" became politically incorrect. Dancemakers and companies were clear and specific about labeling their own work. It was Cambodian classical, or butoh, or Afro-Caribbean, or Philippine traditional, or bharata natyam, or any of a hundred culturally or nationally precise categories.

In a study conducted in 1993, Dance/USA compiled lists of companies engaged by eighty-five presenters of varying sizes and types from all fifty states. The study examined three years, from 1989 through 1991, and documented over 1,700 individual engagements involving over 1,000 dance companies. Nearly a quarter of all the engagements featured only twenty-five companies that were booked repeatedly at varying sites. Of those "top twenty-five" companies, six were directly associated--by aesthetic mission, company membership or artistic direction--with persons of colon In addition, "culturally specific" bookings increased from 22 percent to 26 percent of all bookings over the three-year period.

At the same time, the '80s fashion in modern dance to experiment with crossovers to other genres such as theater and performance art began to lose momentum. For a while the cultural attacks by the right found an easy target in experimental modern work, labeling it "self-indulgent," "inaccessible" and "elitist." By 1999 these challenges had joined with the broadening of cultural options to produce new flavors of popular work. These especially favored percussive and highly rhythmic work and work with roots in what were perceived to be established traditions.

For example, Irish step dance, Appalachian clogging and a new generation of inventive and streetwise tap artists began to find appreciative audiences. Some of these forms appeared in highly visible commercial productions as well as in cutting-edge new companies. Genres such as East Indian kathak and bharata natyam, Spanish flamenco, and West African traditional dance also found a market. First break dance, then hip-hop played roles as indigenous American sources of inspiration for new and inventive choreographers.

These forms had two things in common. One was that they were all decisively rhythmic, in sharp contrast to the spoken-word concepts and sound-collage experiments of '80s "modern." The other was that they could all claim roots in a culture or tradition larger or older than just one choreographer's creative vision. It was as if audiences either mirrored, or responded to, or perhaps even helped to further the right-wing de-legitimization of individual artists. The institutional reflection of this change in the face of American dance clearly appears in the restructured NEA. By law, the NEA no longer offers fellowships to individual choreographers. And its restructuring into four major areas includes one entitled "Heritage and Preservation."

Lastly, a new generation of dancers and choreographers began to pioneer increased efforts to take dance out of proscenium theaters and into both communities in general and schools in particular. As dance companies of substance and accomplishment took root in cities throughout the nation, they found it increasingly necessary to build new audiences and cultivate new markets. By the end of the decade "outreach" had become for many a given rather than an extra.

THE DOUBLE WHAMMY 

The new decade began with a double whammy. First, the recession of 1990-91 had a powerful impact on funding priorities. Various estimates have been given of how far corporate giving to the arts has declined since 1989, but they are all double-digit percentages. Social issues took center stage in the nation's consciousness and dollars for the arts were sometimes redirected, regretfully or not, to social services of various kinds.

Simultaneously, a long-simmering right-wing attack on the NEA finally found its last-straw excuse in controversial works by visual artist Andres Serrano and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Led by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), and Representatives Richard Armey (R-TX) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a vigorous attempt was mounted in 1989 and 1990 to eliminate the NEA. Failing that, related bills attempted to reduce funding for the Endowment, to hamstring it with regulations, to prohibit funding of individual artists, and specifically to punish galleries and arts agencies that had exhibited works by Serrano and Mapplethorpe.

In other words, the arts themselves were attacked at the highest levels of the nation just when economic and social forces began motivating donors of all kinds to consider giving less to the arts. Make no mistake that this attack was simply another gesture of political opportunism. Donald Wildmon, the powerful leader of the conservative American Family Association who gave political and practical support to Helms, Armey and Rohrabacher from the very beginning, articulated the real agenda very clearly. He is quoted in the September 2, 1990, New York Times as follows: "What we are up against is not dirty words and dirty pictures. It is a philosophy of life which ... springs from a moral cancer in our society, and it will lead us to destruction if we are unable to stop it." The echoes of these thoughts from ten years ago have reverberated all the way into 2000's presidential primaries and campaign.

Against this backdrop, our discussion of the financial health and structures of concert dance companies begins.

PROFITABILITY 101

The simplest question is "Did they make or lose money?" In 1990, 65 percent of the companies reporting financial data to Dance/USA ended the year with a profit. Just one year later, with the recession and the right-wing attack in full gear, that level dropped abruptly to 45 percent. In other words, if thirteen out of twenty companies cleared a profit in 1990, only nine out of twenty--less than half--were likely to clear a profit in 1991.

Before going further, it is important to clarify something. Most concert dance companies are "not-for-profit" organizations. They enjoy exemption from corporate income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the United States tax code. Many people believe that this means they should not make a profit, or that it really doesn't matter if they don't make a profit. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The phrase "not-for-profit" really means just that no single person or persons can own the company, not even the founding artistic director. There can't be any stockholders. And if the company decides to go out of business, it's not allowed to split up whatever is left among the dancers and employees. Once the company becomes a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation it really belongs to the community, and that's why members of the community sit on the board of directors, albeit as volunteers.

Profits and losses matter for dance companies just like they do for anybody. If a dance company loses money year after year it will pile up a debt. What's more, the debt won't go away until it's actually paid with real money. It can't be "written off." Thanks to unfortunate experiences with credit cards, most people now understand how this kind of debt can linger, seemingly with a life of its own.

This is important for dancers and other employees of dance companies to understand. The point is that if there is a debt, it "lives somewhere." It is owed to the studio landlord, or to the pointe shoe supplier, or to the IRS, or to somebody. Sometimes, in fact often, people learn when a company goes into crisis that it is owed to the payroll. The results can be very painful for everyone concerned.

When the double whammy hit in 1991, a lot of concert dance companies suddenly started piling up debt. They had to do two things as quickly as possible. They had to change what they were doing so that the same shortfall did not repeat in 1992, which would have put them twice as far into the hole, and they had to find some money to pay the debts they had just taken on. The rest of the decade is a story of how different kinds of companies straggled in their various ways to accomplish those tasks.

Large and Medium Ballet companies as well as Large Modern companies (for an explanation of group titles such as these see the box "Companies of a Feather") have actually ended the decade better off then when they started it. More of these companies now report ending the year with a profit more often than they did in 1990. Graph 1, "Ballet Profitability," shows what percentage of Large Ballet and Medium Ballet companies reporting to Dance/USA ended each year in the black. Graph 2 shows the same for Modern companies.

[Graphs 1&2 OMITTED]

These graphs demonstrate that all companies except Medium Moderns show a general upward slope following the slump in 1992. In 1990, everybody was clustered together between 63 percent and 70 percent. By 1998 the groups were scattered. At least 75 percent or more of Ballet and Large Modern companies reported ending 1998 and 1999 with a profit. But Medium Moderns culminated a five-year downward slide with only 33 percent reporting profits in 1998.

Bear in mind that these figures and graphs are drawn from fairly small groups of companies. There are only about thirteen Large Ballet companies in the nation, and this data draws on eight to ten of them. This means that just one or two companies can change the averages a fair amount, even though we are reporting from a majority of the group being analyzed. For example, the sharp drop in Large Ballet in 1997 is caused by just such a situation. This is also why the graphs do not show 1999 figures for Medium Modern.

But the general trend is clear. We can fairly say with some certainty that the data shows three groups of companies becoming more profitable and one group becoming less profitable during the '90s. For further discussion of the statistical credibility of these analyses, see the box "What We Can and Can't Do With Statistics."

This leads us to a second measure of financial health. If you make a profit, year after year, it piles up just like a debt would. There are technical terms for this kind of accumulated profit, but it will be easier here to just call it a "surplus." Just as all companies except Medium Modern increased their profitability since 1992, so also they increased their surpluses.

Surpluses are important because they provide a cushion against bad years. For example, if you lose $10,000 one year, but you started the year with a $35,000 surplus, then you're still not hurting too badly. You can use $10,000 of your surplus to pay off the shortfall, and you will still have $25,000 of surplus profit left over as a cushion for future years.

If, on the other hand, you have only a $3,000 surplus, then the $10,000 shortfall will leave you with a $7,000 accumulated debt. And if you make a small profit the following year--say, $2,500--you'll still be in the hole. The $2,500 can only reduce your accumulated debt from $7,000 to $4,500. This can get quite complicated. A company can look wonderful by posting profits for five years in a row, while suffering great stress because it's really trying to dig out of an enormous accumulated debt.

The simplest textbook example occurs when this year's profit adds simply to an existing surplus. The result often appears one year later. Graph 3, "Medium Modern Surpluses," shows how the rise and fall of companies reporting profits is paralleled, a year or so later, by the rise and fall in how many companies report surpluses.

[Graph 3 OMITTED]

Usually, however, the process is messier. Graph 4, "Medium Ballet Surpluses," shows three stages. From 1990 to 1992, we see both profits and surpluses declining as they did for everyone. From 1992 through 1995, we see the two lines sometimes in parallel, sometimes in parallel delayed by one year, and sometimes in opposition. This was a period when many companies were moving in and out of surplus or debt situations while also moving in and out of making profits. Then from 1996 through 1999 there is a clear parallel upward sweep as the Medium Ballet companies achieved their goal of climbing back from the hard years of 1991 and 1992. If you know how to read the graph it tells a gripping story.

[Graph 4 OMITTED]

A third measure of financial health used to be what was called the "earned income ratio," or EIR. This technical term means what percent of all the money your company brings in was earned by doing what you do (e.g. selling tickets to performances, teaching classes; subletting studio space, and so forth). This money is "earned income." Grants, gifts, and the value of volunteer work are called "contributed income" or "support." If your small modern company does two seasons in a year, sells $6,000 worth of tickets to the performances, and receives $4,000 in grant money from the State Arts Council, then your total income is $10,000 and your EIR is 60 percent. You earned 60 percent of your total income through $6,000 in ticket sales.

At one time a high EIR was considered a sign of financial health. Indeed, many private foundations would consider grant applications only from companies whose EIR was above a certain level. To this day, Dance/USA frequently receives calls from funders and from board members of dance companies asking about trends or industry standards in EIRs.

One major change occurring in the '90s is that EIRs no longer serve as rigorously reliable indicators of financial health. For a number of financially complicated reasons, many companies with very low EIRs have posted profits in the decade just ended. What's more, the number doing so is tending to increase. Further, one might expect companies with very high EIRs not to have unprofitable years. Again, the '90s have surprised us by yielding a crop of examples where high-EIR companies have ended in the red

Still, people should not yet give up on EIRs. Administrators and dancers checking out a company before signing on, funders looking at overall conditions, new board members eager to assess strategies for the company, should all continue to measure EIRs. They may not be good indicators of looming trouble, but high EIRs do seem to go hand in hand with financial success.

For example, Large Moderns have rebounded very well from the trough of 1991-92, in part because of aggressive touring. Dance/USA has seventy seven reports from Large Moderns in the '90s. Of the twenty-one that boast EIRs higher than 60 percent, not one reported a loss in the same year.

Also, consider the fact that the companies with the consistently lowest EIRs--Medium Moderns--have the lowest profitability rate. Finally, note that during the hard years of 1990-92, 50 percent of companies reporting high EIRs had losses, while at the end of the decade, from 1997-99, only 21 percent of high-EIR companies reported losses.

In other words, having a high EIR doesn't necessarily mean a likelihood of being profitable. But profitability and a high EIR make good bedfellows. Where you see one, look for the other. Just don't assume that there is cause and effect between them. Average EIRs in 1999 were as follows: Large Ballet, 57 percent; Medium Ballet, 52 percent; Large Modern, 55 percent; and Medium Modern, 44 percent.

In summary, dance companies in the '90s began to parallel the national economy as a whole in that the rich, visible and powerful became richer quicker while the poor languished. Companies with budgets over $1 million addressed the challenges of 1991-92 and actually came out of the situation better than they went in. But smaller companies ended up worse off. Further, companies who posted successive years of profits began to accumulate healthy surpluses or to increase existing ones.

PAYDAY

Dance is people-intensive. It is created by people, administered by people, delivered by people, and cannot be stocked on shelves like manufactured objects because it lives in the skills, hearts and minds of people. Dance uses people, space and time much more than it uses tools and materials. Dance companies consistently spent more than 50 percent of their operating budgets on gross wages throughout the decade. Sadly, personnel costs are not only the largest share of expenses for dance companies, they are also the most flexible. The field is full of underpaid and overworked people.

Large Ballet companies, for example, spent about 59 percent to 61 percent of their budgets on personnel for most of the decade. For reasons not yet clear, this percentage slipped after 1997 to about 56 percent or 57 percent. Medium Moderns also reported an average of about 57 percent for personnel costs, but it isn't because they paid people a lot. It's because their resources were so limited that just getting the bare minimum number of people was their biggest concern. They skimped on costumes, props and other nonpersonnel expenses. Their budgets were quite volatile, and unlike the other three groups their average of 57 percent embraced a wide range, from as much as 65 percent to as little as 50 percent.

Large Modern and Medium Ballet companies differ in that they consistently reported lower personnel percentages, around 53 percent. This is because they held costs down during the decade in order to recover from the plunge of 1991-92.

The good news is that for the most part, wages have kept pace with inflation, or done better, over the span of the decade. Inflation from 1992 to 1999 totaled about 18 percent while most dancers and administrative positions increased compensation levels by between 27 percent and 31 percent. Only corps dancers in companies with budgets between $1 million and $2.5 million fell short of matching inflation.

In addition, there was no significant decrease in work weeks, especially for dancers. This matters a great deal because dance companies do not generally offer fifty-two weeks with paid vacation. Large companies, both Ballet and Modern, employ dancers for an average of forty weeks per year. Medium Modern companies varied erratically between twenty-nine and thirty-four weeks per year, and Medium Ballet inched up from an average of thirty-two weeks per year to between thirty-three and thirty-four.

So what do dancers earn? If we compute averages for all dancers in companies we can find a useful, though artificial number. Dancers in companies with budgets between $1 million and $2.5 million, for example, averaged $427 per week in 1999. This figure conveniently condenses a more complicated picture. Principal dancers made more, averaging $624 per week, apprentices made only $176 per week and several companies reported generic dancers simply at an average level of $553 per week. For purposes of comparison, it is easier to reference the overall average of $427 per week.

Dancers in companies with budgets over $5 million averaged $816 per week, with corps earning $708 and principals nearly twice that much. Companies with budgets between $2.5 million and $5 million averaged $541 per week. Dancers in companies with budgets under $1 million and down to about $250,000 made $409 per week.

Now do some arithmetic. A cots dancer in a Medium Ballet company, for example, might make $450 per week, about the same as a principal dancer in a Medium Modern company. For the ballet dancer, with a thirty-four-week contract, that's only $15,300 per year. The principal dancer with the smaller company gets even less from a contract of twenty-nine or thirty weeks. Principal dancers with Large Ballets, averaging $1,361 per week in 1999, end up with $54,000 on a forty-week contract. But that higher scale applies only to a handful of dancers in the entire nation. So while the good news is that budgets may not have been balanced by taking "cuts" out of the pockets of the personnel, and that raises have exceeded inflation, the bad news is that most dancers in most companies have been making pitifully little all along.

THE NUTCRACKER COMES OF MIDDLE AGE

Someone in an advice column once reported a teenage daughter saying to her mother, "Don't even bother trying to get a life. You can't have a life. You're a mom!" This uncomfortable vignette reminds us that growing up involves many things, not least of which is learning to give up some of the resilience and omni-potentiality of youth.

Apparently something like this has happened to The Nutcracker during the '90s. It seems like only yesterday that the annual Nut was a guaranteed source of earned income, a vehicle for building audiences and a sure sell-out. From the mid-'60s to the end of the '80s, more and more Nutcrackers were mounted, more and more tickets were sold and more and more inventive variations on the classic tale were explored.

The cold truth of the '90s is that Nutcracker audiences for Large Ballet and Medium Ballet alike dropped off sharply near the end of the decade and have shown only tentative signs of recovering. The numbers bring no explanations with them for why this has happened, but they are unmistakable. They also raise an intriguing mystery.

Let's consider the audiences first. Total Nutcracker audiences for Large Ballet companies peaked at an average of 111,300 per company in 1993. The fiscal year 1993 Nutcrackers were actually performed in December of 1992, exactly 100 years after the ballet first premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia. Diligent marketing departments at ballet companies made the most of this centennial event and audiences peaked.

For the next three years there was a sort of honeymoon, with total audiences in the 90,000-plus range, which was better than the figures for 1991 and 1992. But then the bottom dropped out. Average total Nutcracker audiences for the 1997 year reached only 71,500 per company. Several companies made headlines in their communities because of the financial disappointments that came with this shortfall.

And it was no fluke, statistical or otherwise. Audiences in 1998 and 1999 averaged only 75,000 and 76,000. This might suggest a small and hopeful upward trend, but nowhere near a recovery to the levels reported earlier in the decade. Graph 6, "Large Ballet Nutcracker Audiences," shows the decade ending with a drop-off.

[Graph 6 OMITTED]

Might this decline be illusory, a product of changes in number of performances or the quantity of available seating at theaters? One could argue that competition with other holiday shows such as Disney on Ice and A Christmas Carol might have led some companies to shorter runs in rental theaters and fewer performances. Fewer performances arguably could mean smaller total audiences.

Unhappily, this is not the case. When we test for average attendance per performance, the exact same pattern occurs as with total audiences. Also, when we test for attendance as a percent of the number of available seats, the pattern repeats again. There is a peak in 1993, a "honeymoon" following, and a drop-off in 1997 followed by slow improvement. Compare Graph 7, "Nut Audiences as Percent of Available Seats," with Graph 6. The similarity of these three patterns of audience measurement tells us that audiences really declined in the '90s.

[Graph 7 OMITTED]

Medium Ballet has a slightly different but no less grim tale to tell. The pattern of peaking in 1993 but dropping off in 1997 with hints of some recovery at the end of the decade is identical. The chief difference is that audiences as a percentage of available seating were smaller for Medium Ballet than they were for Large Ballet. In other words, Medium Ballet was less likely to sell out the house. Where Large Ballets could peak in 1993 at 91 percent of the house, Medium Ballets peaked the same year with 79 percent of the house.

And now, the mystery. In spite of suffering the same sort of decline in Nutcracker audiences that Large Ballet companies experienced, Medium Ballets actually made more and more money off their Nutcrackers as the decade wore on. Graph 8, "Medium Ballet Nutcracker Revenue" shows total average earnings per company for Nutcrackers, adjusted for inflation and expressed as 1999 dollars. The line is jagged, but the trend is certainly upward.

[Graph 8 OMITTED]

How did they do it? Again, the numbers do not explain themselves. But two other pieces of information suggest a possible answer. First, Nutcracker audiences remained a notably high percentage of total audience for all home performances for the whole year. In the three "lowest" years of the decade, 1997-1999, Nutcracker audiences represented 58 percent to 60 percent of total home audiences for the year. Compare this with Large Ballet, whose Nutcracker audiences represented only about 42 percent of total home attendance. This means that Nutcrackers mattered more for Medium Ballet companies than for Large Ballet companies.

Put this together with a second piece of information. From 1991 to 1999, Medium Ballet companies raised their highest single ticket price from $39 to $47, a 20.5 percent increase. They raised their lowest single ticket price from $10.80 to $17, a 57 percent increase! These figures have been adjusted for inflation and expressed in 1999 dollars. We can speculate that increased ticket revenue came from a strategic decision to raise prices, probably with special emphasis on Nutcrackers.

So now it is clear that The Nutcracker no longer grows headlong with the vivacity and novelty of youth. It remains to be seen whether it will settle into a steady role as an annual and profitable tradition or whether these audience figures are the first signs of a long and strong favorite running out of momentum.

It is a financially important question. At the beginning of the decade, Nutcracker revenue accounted for about 20 percent to 21 percent of total income for ballet companies in general. By the end of the decade this figure had dropped to about 16 percent for Large Ballet and 19 percent for Medium Ballet. Even with the audience decline, those are still big numbers. No company can afford to step away casually from its annual pilgrimage to the Sugar Plum Fairy's court.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT FOR THE ARTS

As noted earlier in this article, one of the major stories of the '90s has been the attack by right-wing political, religious and cultural forces against the arts. This attack focused on the National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA, a federal agency in Washington, D.C. The NEA was founded in 1965 and made its first grants the following year. Over time it became a symbol and leader for awarding government dollars to artists and arts organizations in all disciplines, including dance.

Attempts to dismantle the NEA entirely have failed so far. But the agency has changed dramatically since 1990. The budget plummeted from its all-time high of $176 million in 1992 to $98 million in 1999. The sharpest drop occurred in 1996, coinciding with the Republican takeover of Congress. This means the NEA now has less money for grants to the arts and less money to do the work of the agency in its role as a leader and national symbol for the arts.

There have been numerous other changes as well, some driven by the choking-off of money and some driven by political compromises made in the effort to preserve the very life of the agency. Two of these changes have had special impact on the field of concert dance.

One such change is that the NEA can no longer award grants to individual artists, though there are some exceptions in fields such as literature. This means that individual choreographers can no longer receive National Endowment Fellowships for creating new dance works. The impact on Medium Modern companies, usually founded and directed by individual choreographers, has been severe. Large Ballet companies have felt less pain from this policy because they usually produce work by a variety of choreographers and they can apply to the NEA for federal support as companies, not just as individuals. Sometimes this means that NEA support finally reaches a choreographer indirectly through a commission from a large company. But the small companies who produce only the work of their founding directors are less able to compete for funding.

Another change has affected dance companies of all sizes. The NEA no longer organizes its programs and grant awards by artistic disciplines such as "dance," or "theater" or "visual arts." It now awards in categories cutting across disciplines, such as "Creation and Presentation" or "Heritage and Preservation." This means that companies from different disciplines compete for funding within the same categories. Much difficulty and confusion has resulted from this situation.

The impact on professional concert dance of these changes at the NEA is clear. Dance companies, both individually and as a field, get less money from the NEA now than they did in the late '80s and early '90s and fewer companies get grants. Large Ballet companies reporting to Dance/USA averaged $312,000 of NEA support per company in 1992, the peak year of the decade for that group of companies. The same group of companies averaged only $128,000 in 1999. Large Modern companies dropped similarly. Medium Moderns plunged from an average of $45,000 in 1991 to $9,000 in 1999, only one-fifth of their one-time level of support.

The graph entitled "Average Federal Support Per Company" shows this general downward trend clearly. It is interesting that Medium Ballet spent the decade slowly improving after a plunge in 1992. This group of companies averaged $97,000 in federal support in 1991 and managed to regain this level with $96,000 in 1999.

Another measure of how changes at the NEA have impacted dance is the headcount of how many companies receive support, regardless of the amount of money awarded. Common sense suggests that dance companies of national importance and high artistic merit that have a history of receiving federal support would probably continue to receive support even if budget cuts regrettably reduced the dollar amounts they received.

The graph entitled "Federal Support: Number of Companies" makes it clear that fewer dance companies in the groups we have been discussing are even receiving federal NEA grants at all. Most interesting is Large Ballet. One hundred percent of the companies reporting received NEA funding through 1996, when the sharpest drop in the NEA budget occurred. In 1997, Large Ballet also dropped. Medium Ballet and Medium Modern companies show a clear downward trend in number of companies funded. (The graph does not show Large Modern companies because the companies reporting to Dance/USA have continued to receive support, but the number of companies reporting in 1998 and 1999 is too small to be a reliable sample.)

But federal funding isn't the only form of government support available to the arts. States provide support as well, usually through state agencies commonly called "State Arts Councils" or "State Arts Boards." In fact, every dance company providing data to Dance/USA has reported some amount of state funding in every year since 1991. Some cities have agencies that support the arts at a local level as well.

One hope in the struggle over the NEA has been that budget cuts at the federal level might be made up at the state and local levels. This has not proven to be the case. State support, like federal support, has declined for most companies except Medium Ballet. For example, Large Modern companies were averaging $95,000 to $100,000 in state support at the beginning of the decade. They averaged $73,000 and $88,000 in 1998 and 1999 respectively, after dropping as low as $38,000 in 1996.

Local support has actually increased for most companies except Large Ballet. But the dollar amounts are far smaller than they tend to be with state and federal grants. Cities simply do not have enough money to offset cutbacks at the higher levels.

In the end, we can combine federal, state and local government support into one figure. Has government support in general increased, declined, or held even? The graphs entitled "Average Government Support per Company" show in 1999 dollars how this support has declined for all types of companies. Some of your tax dollars that used to be working for the arts are now working for something else.

How much does this matter to the companies affected? Do companies depend heavily on government support? The answer is complicated, and varies among the different groups of companies. For example, Large Ballet, Large Modern and Medium Ballet companies got about 5 percent of their total income from government support in 1998. That indicates how strongly they did or did not rely upon government funding. Medium Modern, in contrast, averaged 12 percent. That means that Medium Modern companies were more than twice as vulnerable as other companies to changes, especially declines, in government funding.

On the other hand, while Large Ballet may have averaged 5 percent in 1998, they averaged only 3 percent in 1997. And Large modern averaged 10 percent in 1995. Further, when we consider individual companies the 1998 levels among Medium Ballet companies ranged from 11 percent to less than 1 percent. So these figures jumped around a great deal. Two things were at work here. First, now that fewer companies were getting grants at the federal level it meant that getting a grant one year and not getting one the next became a real possibility. This made the numbers change from year to year and it made budget planning more of a headache than it already was. Second, all companies have seen the role of government dollars decrease in their budgets over the course of the decade. The process has been bumpy at times.

Consider Medium Modern again. Certainly these companies are vulnerable with 10 percent of their budgets depending on government support. This group of companies also took a severe hit in the universal decline of the decade; they used to get over 20 percent of their revenue from government sources. But can we perhaps argue that other companies are well protected because only 5 percent of their average income was from government sources and 5 percent isn't all that much?

The arithmetic argues otherwise. Just for example, Large Ballet includes a number of companies with budgets around $10 million. Five percent of $10 million is $500,000. That's a lot of money. In fact, two of the nine Large Ballets who reported in 1999 had final profits of less than that figure. They would have gone into debt were it not for their government support. The impact on Medium Moderns is even clearer. Not one of the companies reporting to Dance/USA in 1999 would have had a profit if government funding had been withdrawn.

In short, government support for the arts has declined in the '90s. Fewer companies get support, and the support they get is smaller. Medium Ballet companies have managed to weather this costly change in attitude and policy fairly well. Medium modern companies have taken a beating.

DIGGING DEEP AT HOME

Not all grants and donations come from government sources. There is a whole category of support from the private sector. This category is also sometimes called "charitable giving," or "tax-deductible contributions." Examples of private support are donations from individuals such as checks written in response to "fund drives" and premium price tickets purchased for "benefit events" or performances. Other kinds of support in this category include grants from businesses, corporations and private foundations.

For most dance companies, private support has always been a larger source of money than government support. Medium Ballet companies, for example, have gotten between 4 percent and 9 percent of their income from government support during the '90s while raising from 32 percent to 43 percent from private support. So it should come as no surprise that dance companies have looked to private support as a way of replacing the dollars lost to diminished government support.

The large companies, both ballet and modern, have had success and more than success with this effort, as have Medium Ballet companies to a lesser degree. On the other hand, Medium Modern and other smaller companies have not fared as well in seeking increased private support, and have been genuinely hurt by government cutbacks.

For example, Medium Modern and other small companies averaged a loss of $64,400 per company in government support and replaced it with an average of $73,600 worth of increased private support spread among many sources. Realistically, that means that some companies did not succeed in replacing the lost government money. Worse, these figures do not even reflect the companies who used to receive support and now do not.

Large Modern, in contrast, has lost an average of $103,200 per company in government funding since 1991, but has seen an increase of $1,310,600 in private support. Their biggest increase was in revenue from special events, such as benefit performances and fund-raisers. These events are really a roundabout way of raising support from individuals. Large Ballet had an even bigger increase in private support, averaging over $2,800,000 per company more than in 1991. Most of this, nearly three-quarters, came from individual donations in one form or another.

Medium Ballet, incidentally, posted its successful growth in private support mostly through private foundations.

The most interesting thing about the great increase in individual donations for Large Ballet and Large Modern companies is that the increase actually comes from a limited number of sources. Large Ballet, for example, more than doubled their individual donations per company from $985,000 in 1991 to over $2 million in 1999. But the number of donors only increased by 20 percent. That means that only a few more people gave donations, but the donations were much, much larger.

There are some ironies here. The right-wing attack on the arts accused artists of "elitism." This argument was offered as one reason for getting government out of supporting the arts. What we see as a result is that, yes, individual people began stepping forward to make up--and more than make up--the lost revenue. But the biggest, most visible, most institutionalized companies benefited the most and the money came increasingly from committed dance enthusiasts who could afford big donations, rather than from a broadening grass-roots constituency. One can infer a number of conclusions from this trend.

MEDIUM BALLET SHOWS HOW IT'S DONE

As noted earlier, much of the '90s was a tale of how various groups of companies addressed the task of getting out of the 1991-92 double whammy. Medium Ballet was notably successful in this endeavor. They were hit hardest by the 1991 slump, dropping from a group profitability rate of 64 percent in 1990 to 43 percent in 1991, the lowest of any group. Not only did they convert this to 92 percent profitability by the end of the decade; they did it while growing their budgets an average of 70 percent.

They did it four ways. First, they built up private donations from individuals, corporations and foundations in their communities. Private support stood at 32.8 percent of total revenue in 1991, averaging $939,650 per company. By 1999, the dollar average had grown by 34 percent to $1.26 million and its share of total revenue had become 40.3 percent.

Second, they put a lid on personnel costs. Despite 70 percent growth in overall budgets for the decade, total administrative salaries grew only 59 percent and dancers' salaries grew only 49 percent. Average numbers of administrative staff were seven full-time and three part-time in 1991, compared to eight full-time and four part-time in 1999. In effect, people got raises which exceeded the inflation level of 26 percent, but they worked harder to run larger companies with the same numbers of people.

Third, they turned their schools around. In 1991, the average net for school operations in Medium Ballet companies was a loss of $15,560 on a budget of about $278,000. By 1999 the average school budget had grown by 49 percent to about $415,000 and the average net was a profit of $39,300. This also had the effect of improving their EIRs.

And fourth, as audiences diminished, Medium Ballet companies raised ticket prices to achieve an actual 17 percent increase in average home performance revenue, from $870,800 in 1991 to $1,016,100 in 1999. (All figures are adjusted for inflation to 1999 dollars.) Over the same nine-year period low single ticket prices rose from $10.80 to $17 and high ticket prices gained 20.5 percent by increasing from $32 to $47. This strategy is also discussed in the earlier section of this article on Nutcrackers.

SUMMING IT UP

Any dancer who has ever done a lecture-demonstration, or any outreach event, on a concrete floor, will say that such surfaces are serious trouble. Dancing on slippery, sticky or unresilient surfaces can cause many kinds of injuries. They can be literally frightening to dance upon. Dancers pray for something--anything--other than concrete. But sometimes getting your wish can also be trouble. Any dancer who has performed on slippery portable platforms, sometimes not even connected to each other, can attest to the fact that even concrete has the merit of being stable.

Concert dance in America has not enjoyed much stability in the '90s. As this article has discussed, many important changes have occurred in the environment concert dance inhabits. Ballet audiences, including Nutcracker audiences, have "gone soft." Individual creativity has become suspect. A hundred new ethnicities and genres of dance have entered the marketplace. Education and outreach have begun to take a place alongside proscenium performances as a major activity for dance companies. The "dance explosion" has been replaced by widespread demands for the arts, including dance, to pay their own way and to undergo a Darwinian triage in the marketplace.

A few key trends emerge. They embrace and include many of the smaller changes explored in this article.

The economy of dance in America has begun to resemble the general economy of the for-profit world in that the extremes of "top" and "bottom" have become increasingly polarized. Size, stability and name recognition matter more than they may have at other times. These three terms are all relative, but the principle seems applicable in marketplaces of whatever size. The largest, most stable, most recognized dance companies in the nation, in a region, or in a city possess advantages greater than ever before in the nation, in that region or in that city. New companies, small companies and under-capitalized companies that possess considerable managerial and artistic virtue may find it more challenging to establish themselves.

Government support for the arts has declined. This is both a symptom and a cause of pervasive skepticism about dance, especially dance as a valued national asset worthy of tax-dollar support and especially dance as a form of individual expression.

And finally, new genres have emerged, often drawing heavily on traditions from other cultures hitherto untapped in the field of American dance. Medium Modern companies have had to struggle under oppressive disadvantages and Medium Ballet companies have found ways to survive with ferocious tenacity and to cast themselves as big fish in their own ponds. Meanwhile, small companies of all imaginable kinds have appeared and flourished and sometimes disappeared with astonishing energy and variety.

It remains to be seen whether the growing stability of the bigger dance institutions will set the pace and dominate the agenda for the future, or whether the energy of the new generations and genres will create a different set of relationships in the dance ecology.

RELATED ARTICLE: COMPANIES OF A FEATHER

People involved with concert dance know that it can be dangerous to generalize too broadly about dance as a whole. They know that dance in America is diverse and varied, embracing many aesthetics, many cultures, many kinds of structures and many levels of accomplishment.

But this is not common knowledge. A large part of the American public has not been educated to understand the real and numerous differences between the varied kinds of dance flourishing in America. Many think concert dance is only what they last saw, or only "things like The Nutcracker." Many believe that smaller companies are just like larger companies, only "less successful." Many think dance is just something harmless for their daughters to dabble with until they grow up, but certainly nothing of real value to our culture.

A basic way to get past these myths and misconceptions is to understand and clarify the variety that dance offers. To put it more technically, this means avoiding statistical generalizations about dance that might contribute to stereotypes and misunderstandings.

What if someone asked how many dancers there are in "a typical dance company?" Would it make sense to add up averages for ballet companies, West African cultural ensembles, single-choreographer modern troupes and everything else, then compute an overall average? Not at all. This would be like averaging basketball, football and soccer scores to arrive at the score of a "typical ballgame." The arithmetic and the data might be rigorously correct, but the result would not illuminate anything that was actually happening to anybody. There are historic, aesthetic, structural and environmental reasons why different kinds of companies come in different sizes.

Again, while this may seem obvious, there are many for whom it is not. Dance/USA receives dozens of phone calls and emails each year asking what a "typical dancer's salary" might be. Of course, there is not one answer. The answer varies widely according to what kind of company is involved, how big it is, where it is located, and how many weeks of contract it offers.

Seventeen years of reviewing data submitted by member companies has led Dance/USA to develop a means of categorizing concert dance companies realistically. The system is based on two criteria: genre and budget size. Examples include Large Ballet, Small Modern, Medium Culturally Specific, and so forth. These groups and this system were developed, not by establishing arbitrary boundaries and dropping companies into them, but by analyzing how groups of companies structurally resemble or differ from each other. The fault lines, where clear differences occur, establish the boundaries. These groups and their boundaries, especially as regards budget size, are reviewed and updated annually.

Large Ballet companies have budgets in excess of $5 million. Most reside in the twenty-five metropolitan areas in the country. Most have thirty or more dancers, most have over twenty-five administrative staff as well as production staff, most have endowments and most do not tour extensively. There are thirteen such companies in the United States.

Medium Ballet companies have budgets between $1 million and $5 million. They may be located in large, second-tier or medium-sized communities. Indeed, some co-exist in large communities with Large Ballet companies. They generally have fewer than twenty-five dancers and often make only partial use of the classical corps/soloist/principal hierarchy. Often they remain closely linked with ballet schools from which they evolved over the past thirty-five years. Their administrative staffs average only eight or nine people and may be as few as three to five. There are about sixty Medium Ballet companies in America.

Small Ballets have budgets under $1 million and generally take two forms. Some are still evolving from their original schools. They may self-classify themselves as "semi-professional" or they may vehemently claim professional status, albeit of a fledgling nature. Others are unquestionably professional but classify themselves as "chamber ballets." These have small casts of six to ten dancers and only two or three administrators. They tour a great deal and behave very much like Medium Moderns.

Notably, some Small Ballets eventually become Medium Ballets. But no Medium Ballet in the last ten years has succeeded in leap-frogging to Large Ballet. A key limitation is community size. Large Ballet companies draw an average of $2.2 million from individual donations each year, with as many as 3,500 donors. Medium Ballet only averages $181,000 from around 600 donors. You really need to occupy one of the truly large metropolitan communities in the nation to be able to command the kind of fund-raising scale that Large Ballet requires.

Large Modern companies have budgets in excess of $860,000. This figure is considerably lower than the figure dividing Large from Medium Ballet because modern companies are inherently smaller than ballet companies. The majority of Large Moderns are based in or near New York City. Their aesthetics are self-defined and unique, sometimes springing from or rooted in the inventive genius of one founder/choreographer. There are about fifteen of these companies and the number varies from year to year because several are right on the borderline between Large and Medium.

Medium Modern companies have budgets between $250,000 and $860,000. They are incredibly diverse, aesthetically speaking, and range from long-standing companies to fast-rising newcomers. They have minimal staffs, four to ten dancers, they tour as much as they can, and for the most part they lack financial security and institutional grounding. There are perhaps sixty to eighty in America. They differ from Small Moderns primarily in that most of them pay dancers by salary while smaller companies have a wide range of compensation systems, if any.

Dance/USA does not have sufficiently comprehensive data at this time to address most small companies, most companies rooted in culturally specific aesthetics other than Euro-American ballet and modern, and most companies in less usual or non-company-oriented forms such as ice dance, historic dance, soloists and tap. The thrust of this article therefore addresses Large and Medium Ballet and Modern companies, four groups for which credible and extensive data is on hand.

RELATED ARTICLE: WHAT WE CAN AND CAN'T DO WITH STATISTICS

Much of the information in this article is drawn from surveys conducted annually by Dance/USA. Participation in these surveys is voluntary and open only to Dance/USA member companies. Companies who choose to participate receive detailed results of the surveys on a confidential basis. Non-participants, including the general public, may request general and aggregate information by contacting Dance/USA.

As a result, the dance companies whose data appears here are not a scientifically representative sample of the dance field as a whole. They are self-selected, both as members of Dance/USA and as voluntary participants in these annual surveys. Large and medium companies in the genres of ballet and modern dance are disproportionately well represented by this data. Small companies of all genres, jazz or tap ensembles and ethnic or culturally specific companies are less well represented because few have chosen to participate in the surveys.

Typically, between thirty-five and fifty companies participate each year. These include a control group of twenty companies that have participated for seven or more of the past ten years. Dance/USA frequently compares results from the control group with results from participants as a whole to reduce the risk of occasional participants skewing data.

Despite these caveats, this data has proven over time to be an informative indicator of general trends among larger and more visible companies in the concert dance field. Because the samples are small the conclusions drawn are indicative rather than definitive. We can use these statistics to track general trends in certain groups of companies. But we cannot analyze detailed relationships between variables and we cannot generalize about the entire field of dance in America. Dance/USA's annual survey forms are difficult and time-consuming to complete. The field owes a debt of gratitude to the companies that have volunteered their time and effort to provide useful hard information about the financial and statistical realities of concert dance in America.

Additional information for this article has also been drawn from Dance/USA's census of professional dance companies conducted in 1993-94 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and from two studies of dance touring and presenting conducted by Dance/USA in conjunction with the William Keens Company in 1992-93, with funding from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.