There's More Than Waitressing - dancers, choreographers and their day jobs - Column

Dance Magazine, April, 2001 by Jody Sperling

DANCERS INTERPRET FOR DEAF, HAWK REAL ESTATE TO MAKE ENDS MEET

So, you're a dancer--what do you do for a living? This is a familiar question to me and many fellow dancers of all styles. The truth is that most dancers who are not in major companies don't make a living at their art. Last fall, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report, "More Than Once in a Blue Moon: Multiple Job Holdings by American Artists," that backs up this observation with a few numbers--one study has 84 percent of surveyed dancers working outside the field. So when we're not onstage, in class or in the studio, what do we do to pay the rent? A lot of different things--we're not all waitresses, yoga instructors, massage therapists or office temps.

A 30-year-old dancer-choreographer (and sometime writer) from New York City, I've been working for the past year and a half as a real estate agent at Fox Residential Group. I get a lot of double takes when people find this out. In a way, it's a perfect fit with my dance life. As an agent, I make my own hours and can take time off for rehearsals and out-of-town gigs. Real estate is also a moving-around job; no risk of desk-butt here. Scheduling appointments feels like choreography to me. My job is to organize people in time and place; that is, I have to make sure that they show up at the correct addresses at the appointed hours.

Another similar aspect of real estate and dance is that both rely on personal marketing. It's taken me a while to get comfortable with promoting two separate, coexisting identities of myself, as performer and broker. Many people know me in either one capacity or the other. Previously, I worked as a photo editor and videotaped dance performances. But real estate offers me a more viable and flexible way to make a living and to help support my dance habit. (A warning to real estate wannabes: The deal making can be an emotional roller-coaster ride. Don't try this unless you can stomach it through the dry spells.)

"I would go absolutely bonkers if I had a desk job," says Audrey Cooper, a 34-year-old dancer from Oakland, California, who works as a sign language interpreter. Her performance experience helps her assume the interpreter's first-person mode of communication; her challenge is to tune her senses to the speaker and to physically express spoken nuances in American Sign Language. Cooper works as a freelancer twenty to twenty-five hours a week. She gets paid, on average, $40 per hour plus travel expenses, but receives no benefits. Because California emphasizes support services for people with hearing disabilities, interpreters are in high demand. Cooper translates regularly at university classes, corporate meetings, conferences and hospitals. Although she has master's degrees in both dance therapy and social work, Cooper finds that interpreting provides a lifestyle more amenable to dancing than full-time employment in either profession. She has time to perform with local choreographers (including Maxine Moerman), practice Authentic Movement (an experiential, improvisational dance form) and develop her own dance works.

Signing is a physical labor. On the downside are the repetitive motion stress injuries--the strained index finger and the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrists. As yet, she has no disability insurance. Cooper can't even stop signing when she gets home: Her husband, a doctoral student in linguistics, is deaf and a fourth-generation signer. A couple of years ago, Cooper cast him in one of her pieces; he performed a short dialogue while others danced on stage. Cooper's own dancing has been informed by her experience with ASL. She now uses her hands and face in more detailed and subtly expressive ways.

Choreographer Sally Silvers, 48, has been making dances for more than twenty years and has been working almost that long at the Labor Institute, a nonprofit organization that produces training curricula and conducts research for unions, community groups and government agencies on labor topics. As the institute's finance manager--a glorified bookkeeper, she says--Silvers works twenty hours a week in the Manhattan office. A huge advantage of her position is that she can choose her hours, working around her busy rehearsal and performance schedule. An unusual feature of the job is that, because of the institute's salary equalization policy, she makes as much money per hour as the director. The institute, not surprisingly, also offers generous employee benefits. A member of the Labor Party, Silvers is passionate about both art and politics. She wouldn't have stayed with the institute for so long if she didn't firmly believe in its purpose.

Over the years, Silvers has developed an international reputation as a quirky, inventive, madcap choreographer. She's performed at the major dance venues in the city, toured in the United States and abroad, and received many grants, including six fellowships from the NEA. So why does she need a day job? The fact is that to make a decent living as a choreographer, she and her company would have to tour constantly. She feels that her job has freed her from both the grind of the touring lifestyle and pressures she would face to tailor her work to the tastes of out-of-town presenters. She feels emboldened to make truly original work, knowing she doesn't have to rely on its success for her survival. In this way, she's the Charles Ives of the dance world. (A renowned twentieth-century American composer, Ives worked all his life as an insurance salesman, preferring not to depend on his music for his income.)