Side hustle essential: how Covid brought dancers to their knees
When lockdown hit in March, it didn’t stop dancers dancing. The flood of online classes, short films and Instagram clips are testimony to that. But it did stop many of them earning. Outside the big ballet companies, most dancers and choreographers are freelance (81% according to One Dance UK). Some were eligible for financial support, others fell through the cracks. Ever creative, some have found new ways to make money, like Sam Coren, formerly of the Hofesh Shechter Company, who started fixing and building bikes. Or Daisy West, a dancer with Mark Bruce Company, who designs greetings cards on the side. But it turns out having a second job is nothing new to most dancers, in a competitive industry where contracts are often short and pay is poor. A 2015 survey by Dancers Pro found that more than 50% of dancers earned less than £5,000 a year from performing. The current Equity minimum fee for an independent production is £471 a week. “There’s always been a need for a side hustle,” says West.
The precariousness of the dancer’s life has come into sharp focus during lockdown, and many artists now want to see a change when we come out the other side. “The systemic injustices of the industry have been unveiled more than ever,” says dancer and Rolfing practitioner Hayley Matthews. “For too long there’s been a prescribed necessity for dancers to live precarious financial lives.” Lockdown has “exposed a lot that was really fragile and difficult about this industry”, says Rachel Elderkin, a dancer, writer and podcaster who also works front of house in the West End and has a sideline dressing as a Disney princess for kids’ parties. “Even though [as a dance artist] you’re the people who create work, the money goes to organisations and as a freelancer you have to apply for opportunities.” The funds don’t always trickle down.
Dancer, choreographer, writer and model Valerie Ebuwa was due to have her first solo project, Body Data, screened at the V&A in April, but coronavirus put paid to that. She released the film and accompanying talk online. Dancers are “always at the bottom of the pile”, she says in her talk on Instagram. “Why don’t dancers get paid as much as musicians, or any other [artists]?”
Others agree. Coren (who ordinarily teaches alongside performing and choreographing) gives an example. “The music video is largely built on the exploitation of dancers,” he says, remembering a shoot where dancers were paid £100 a day, “but riggers, sparks, were probably on £300-400 a day, a runner might be on £180-200. For me that shows a disdain for what we do.”
Choreographer Sally Marie reports anecdotally that in opera, dancers are paid half as much as the singers, and a fraction of the stars’ wages – she remembers a friend being paid £325 a week to dance in an opera when the lead singers were getting £60,000 a show.
“Musicians have a very strong union,” says Elderkin. “With dancers, they just get someone else in. You’re dispensable.” Or at least that’s how it feels, despite the fact dancers are expert at what they do, and often start their careers with 10 or 15 years’ training under their belts (and continue to train every day, at their own expense). “Freelance artists hold up the industry, largely,” says Coren. “We’re undervalued and I think it starts with us – we don’t value ourselves in what we do.”
“The problem is that the industry’s so saturated and I feel there’s not enough sense of community,” says Ebuwa. “Once I say no to a fee, within two minutes it’s posted online and someone who has less experience than me – or more, but hasn’t had a job in weeks and the rent is due – will take the fee.” Sally Marie tried to get more money for her dancers on one project, and had her funding application turned down as a result. “I’ve always wanted to be generous because I feel we have to support dancers’ daily training,” she says.
As well as training, there’s the unpaid admin, the time spent looking for work, the pitching, applications, auditions, paperwork. “The main part of what I do is looking for the opportunities,” says Elderkin. “It’s such a huge part of your time.” Marie estimates she spent eight months working for free last year. It’s not only financially precarious, says Matthews, but physically and emotionally exhausting, to the detriment of the art. “The system is shooting itself in the foot,” she says.
Marie has felt the purse strings tighten significantly over the last decade since austerity took effect. The result won’t be that there aren’t any dancers, she says, but that you lose the richness and diversity. For example, when she crunched the numbers on the hundreds of dancers she auditions, Marie found that less than 1% had a child. “When people start having children and realise they can’t live on £15,000 a year they start to leave,” she says, and it depletes the quality of the art. “In theatre, if everyone had to be under 30 it wouldn’t be so interesting.”
There’s concern for what lies ahead. “One of my real worries coming out of this is that the workforce is going to be so heavily depleted [it will] undo lots of the work we’ve done to try to make arts more inclusive,” says Coren. Kuchipudi dancer Arunima Kumar worries about her field of South Asian dance. “It’s more difficult as we are low in the pecking order,” she says. “The pie is now smaller and there isn’t enough for everyone.”
But there’s optimism, too, and hunger for change. “I really hope that this is a chance to go, ‘Hang on, we’ve all been in this boat with holes in it the whole time, pretending that we’re fine, but are we fine?’” says Daisy West. Grassroots initiatives have sprung up, including Dance Futures for All, founded by Marie and Joumana Mourad, intending to talk not only about money, but “how we can still be creative within the framework that we’ve got”, thinking about making use of empty office buildings to rehearse in, for example.
Some dancers advocate for a French-style system, paying artists unemployment benefits between jobs. Many support universal basic income, including dance artist and academic Gillie Kleiman, who is part of a new UBI Lab dedicated to the arts. But Kleiman has other ideas too, about radically redistributing wealth within the arts, from higher paid administrators to the artists themselves.
“We think it’s normal for a chief executive of an arts organisation to be on a six-figure salary while the people who are actually on stage doing the work that people come to see might be earning 15k a year,” she says. “And I think it’s unacceptable, it’s unjust. We’re very used to expecting artists or other people whose labour doesn’t fit well into neoliberalism to just suffer. I don’t want anyone to suffer.” If commissioners and companies aren’t willing to pay more, she says, then “you’re consistently only programming work where the artists are willing to sleep on their friends’ floors”.
Redistribution, says Kleiman, isn’t just about splitting resources more equitably. “What I really want is for more artists to be making more decisions about more resources,” she says. “The arts has become another sector – along with care, education, health – where the people who are actually doing the work don’t get to make any decisions.”
Ebuwa says something similar. “There’s enough money, but it’s not being distributed fairly or evenly and people need to be accountable to that,” she says. “It’s not fair that dancers give their bodies, their minds, their time, to be underpaid.”
As a working-class black woman, Ebuwa says she’s had to push harder than many to make it in her industry, and now she wants to push the industry itself. “Really it’s not my talent that’s given me a career in dance,” she says. “It’s the fact that I’m so unwilling to give up. So unwilling to not have a career in this thing I fought for, and now it’s my duty and responsibility to change it.”
