Building a professional dance community in Chattanooga
Just over a year ago, our State of the Arts: Dance cover story explored ways Chattanooga dancers are innovating through cross-genre collaboration. This year, we focus on steps we need to take to sustain dance as a professional art in the city.
A few weeks ago I had a chat with Julia Sanford, ex-officio board member of Ballet Tennessee. She started dancing with Ballet Tennessee when her daughter was a little girl, was a member of the company for several years, and has been involved in some fashion ever since.
Sanford was just back from a trip to Seattle where, she says, she could easily find a serious, open adult intermediate ballet class every morning of the week. In fact, she says, she had three different studios to choose from.
“Toronto’s the same way,” she says. “Chattanooga has come a long way in building the diversity and seriousness of our dance community, but we don’t have a professional-level company, which I would love to see.”
As Sanford notes, dancers do return home to Chattanooga, or migrate here, to dance. But except for a handful of combination teaching/dancing posts, all our dancers seem to be hustling—as event coordinators, landlords, writers, fitness coaches, massage therapists, and more. We’re not to the point where more than a few people can focus primarily on dance the way a programmer focuses primarily on coding—because she’s paid to do so.
As Holli Hutson, director/founder of The Mary Holliday Dance Ensemble, observes, “Many don’t think about compensating dancers…I am currently working on a project with a non-profit where we received complimentary tickets for their season in place of payment. It’s a step in the right direction, but I believe part of the struggle is educating the community.”
Typical of many dancers, Hutson is a gypsy teacher, instructing students at Chattanooga Ballet, Siskin Fitness Center and Chattanooga State’s professional actor training program. Her teaching work supports her career as a dancer. Yet there’s a continuous effort across multiple organizations to find funding to allow dance to continue, and to give our dancers what chances we can afford to improve themselves.
“The ‘ask’ is harder for dance,” Sanford says. “People in Chattanooga are very generous, but they give to the arts less than they do to programs for women and children, the ‘heart strings’ causes.”
Sanford identifies two steps to growing professional dance in Chattanooga: cultivating an audience through diverse, approachable projects, and developing civic pride around a big, single dance organization that people identify with the city (much as Chattanoogans identify with the Chattanooga Football Club).
Finding Dance, Attracting Dancers
Let’s start with an analogy. People come listen to music because it’s human to like music—not for all humans, but a lot of them. It’s the same with visual art: not everyone likes the “Mona Lisa”. But throw in Picasso, Norman Rockwell, anime, On Our Backs, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Maus, Ashley Hamilton, Wendy and Richard Pini, and velvet Elvis paintings—sooner or later you’ll find something someone very much enjoys looking at!
As more forms of dance and higher levels of excellence find their way into a location, people will discover something that speaks to them—whether a virtuoso classical performance, a sexy bit of honkytonk swivel, a flash mob, or a thoughtful exploration of a philosophical or political theme.
On the other hand, in a reciprocal fashion, the nearer a location comes to creating a professional dance community, the more likely dancers will move to that community, and the more beauty will be created for the citizens to enjoy.
So creating a professional community begins with a two-step process: creating/attracting an audience, and creating/attracting artists.
Andrew Parker, now in his third season as artistic director of Chattanooga Ballet, feels optimistic about this process, while admitting that we still have a long way to go.
“Chattanooga is a wonderful, vibrant place,” he says. “Part of the reason I moved here is that I saw lots of arts lovers and potential for growth and development in terms of artists and performances and collaborations—across the arts, as well as in dance.”
Noting collaborative work between such groups as Ballet Tennessee and The Pop-Up Project, as well as collaborations Chattanooga Ballet has participated in with civic organizations such as Erlanger Hospital, Parker recognizes both in-town cross pollination and out-of-town influence as means for building dance audiences in Chattanooga.
“There is potential for people to work together and to engage an excited, intellectual and spirited dance audience,” he says. “We had the Patten series [at UTC] but that’s no longer in existence. One of our challenges is to fill that gap of outside companies. Our students and our community need to see companies from other cities so we can be inspired and moved by them; so that people here can continue to learn from those experiences.”
Stepping Out of the Hustle: Building Dance Spaces
Then there’s the money. A professional does excellent work because he or she devotes sustained time to pursuing excellence, and that time can either be paid time or it can represent an opportunity cost to the artist, hours in which she is passively losing money (because she’s not at work) or actively losing money (because she’s renting practice space or incurring other expenses). The greater the opportunity cost, the less time the artist can devote to pursuing excellence. Good dance, even when unpaid, is not a hobby.
Creating the economics to sustain dance has partly to do with finding affordable spaces. Ann Law, founder and executive director at Barking Legs Theater, came to Chattanooga after a career of hustle that included teaching, jazz and disco choreography, waiting tables—much of it “not my chosen work,” she says. Part of the need for hustle was drumming up money to rent space and make her own avant-garde dances. In Chattanooga, she saw a niche for a small theater that could house boundary-pushing dance and music.
“What does Chattanooga not have?” she says, describing her thought process back in 1992. “We have the Tivoli, Memorial Auditorium…but not a venue able to support risky, innovative performance for small audiences. If we can buy the building, we can run a non-profit out of it. If we had to pay rent, we couldn’t afford to take the risks that would make Chattanooga a richer place.”
The result was Contemporary Performing Arts of Chattanooga (CoPAC), which has promoted artistic exploration and education for the past quarter of a century. Barking Legs—which celebrates its silver anniversary this weekend with a virtuoso curated program and party—was first in a series of dedicated homes for performance innovation, allowing dancers and other creators to make and present art on a reasonable budget, with the backing of groups such as CoPAC.
One up-and-coming player in the dance space game is SPOT Venue, directed by proprietress Sarah Yvonne Chappell. In addition to running Ballet Esprit out of SPOT, Chappell makes the location a performance space for collaborative work. Like Law, Chappell had been a gypsy teacher and dancer for a number of years. In founding a space for movement arts, she’s creating a stable base that can sustain a dynamic series of collaborations.
“Through my ten years dancing in Chattanooga, the dance community has [increasingly] worked together in collaboration to foster healthy grounds for creatives to produce,” she says. “Instead of segregating our studios and companies, the community is striving to work synergistically through workshops, choreographic projects and events that support one another…SPOT carries a role in this. We support dancers by offering space for the everyday work of curation and production, for everyday artists and the entirety of the community.”
Lowering Opportunity Costs
Despite owning Barking Legs, Law still has to hustle—to obtain grant money and private donations to keep her work and that of her collaborators in front of an audience. She’s proud to offer her performers honorariums commensurate with their work. Other producers are doing the same. The Pop-Up Project pays their team of collaborators, as do many other organizers in the area.
“It is Pop-Up’s mission to generate fair wage opportunities for dancers,” says Jules Downum, co-artistic director of The Pop-Up Project. “And so, when approached for a commission, or when writing a proposal, we submit itemized budgets that reflect time for choreography as well as the dancers’ time in rehearsal. I will say, we are fighting an uphill battle in Chattanooga. We have not always been able to get an amount that reflects the process, but we are working on it.”
Not everyone can always pay dancers for every opportunity. One artistic director I spoke to discussed raising money for an honorarium for an out-of-town dancer and being unable, after numerous calls, to collect funds for a couple of other, local professionals the same piece.
She spoke openly of her sadness at the limitations that confronted her. Yet, almost always, producers and company directors and choreographers are making the effort to pay dancers at least enough to cover their opportunity costs for performing.
So to summarize: what do we need to do as a city to move the needle a little more toward having a professional dance community? The answer is simple: value and compensate for the process, not just the performance.
Find Some Dance
Want to see some local dancers moving, on the big stage or maybe close enough to see the sweat glisten? The best way you can create a city where you see varied, collaborative, excellent dance whenever you like is…to come see the excellent dancers here right now!
• Let’s Misbehave! Celebrating 25 Years of Barking Legs Theater—November 1–3 at 8:30 p.m. (Hint: Monica Alicia Ellison and Cherokee Aaron-Ellison are back in town!)
• The Nutcracker with Chattanooga Ballet, Tivoli Theatre—December 8 & 9 at 2 p.m., December 8 at 7:30 p.m.
• The Nutcracker with Ballet Tennessee, UTC Fine Arts Center—December 14 @ 8 p.m.; December 15 @ 2:30 p.m.
Jenn Webster is a writer, dancer and choreographer who works in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She obtained her undergraduate degree at Millsaps College and her graduate degrees at UT Knoxville and Penn State University. Jenn specializes in marketing and technical writing. She's excited to learn and share more about Chattanooga and the innovative works we're creating together.