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Anatomy of the Dance Company Boom, 1958–1980

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Leila Sussmann
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Extract

Alvin Toffler made an eloquent plea in 1967 for the construction of cultural statistics that would give artists, policy-makers and social scientists a reliable map of where the arts enterprises had been and where they seemed to be going. Only slow progress has been made since then.

To take the example that will concern us in this research note, how much solid information do we have concerning the “dance boom” that reportedly took place during the Sixties and Seventies? A “dance boom” can refer to many things. It can mean rapid growth in the size of the dance audience; in the number of dance companies; in the amount of amateur participation in the art; in the number of dance performances; and so on. These aspects of the art might not all show the same trends. For instance, the number of dance performances might have increased faster during the “boom” than the number of companies—or vice versa—suggesting two very different developments. Actually, the only firm documentation we possess concerning the boom in the amount of dance activity has to do with the size of the audience, and we have that only for the Seventies, not the Sixties. Surveys done by the Louis Harris polling organization put the percentage of Americans aged 18 years and older who attended at least one live dance performance in the years 1973, 1975 and 1980 at 9%, 16% and 25%.

Type
Research Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Fall 1984 , pp. 23 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1984

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References

NOTES

1. Toffler, Alvin, “The Art of Measuring the Arts”, in Albrecht, Barnett and Griff, , eds., The Sociology of Art and Literature (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 535–548Google Scholar.

2. American Council for the Arts, Americans and the Arts (New York: 1980), p. 8Google ScholarPubMed. The National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report, Washington, D.C., 1976, p. 21Google ScholarPubMed, estimated that “a little over a decade ago (1965) people who attended live performances numbered about one million. … By 1971 the audience had grown to 6.4 million, 16% of the adult population.” The NEA gives no source for these estimates. Their estimate of the audience in 1971 is nearly double the Harris figure for 1973 and equal to Harris' estimate for 1975. The discrepancies may be due to differences in the age groups included or to the way membership in the dance audience is defined. Since the Harris report used explicit definitions and methodology while the NEA gave no account in its annual report either of its definition or its method of arriving at estimates, the Harris figures are best relied on as indices of the size of the dance audience. Attendance of at least one live dance perfomance a year is a reasonable operational definition of “a member of the dance audience.” An alternative approach would be to measure audiences and add up the total number of attendances rather than total people attending. That would give a higher figure than the Harris one and may have been the actual procedure used by the NEA. A count of audiences could not have been complete, however; there would have to be some estimating procedure to supplement the actual counts.

3. American Council for the Arts, Chapters 2 and 4.

4. The trend in number of dancers as given in the U.S. 1970 census makes no distinction among types of dancers and is therefore not useful for our purpose.

5. National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: 1980),p. 13Google ScholarPubMed.

6. The sole exception is that data for 1966 and 1967 were combined. Dance Magazine Annual (New York City: Dance Publishing Co., Inc.)Google Scholar.

7. It would be illegal not to participate in a census. De facto, however, many people escape the census altogether and many more omit the answers to specific questions on the census questionnaire.

8. Personal communication from Sidney Marcus, Bureau of the Census.

9. “In 1957 the Ford Foundation undertook a five-year study that investigated the state of the country's (ballet) performing institutions, organizations and training institutions. … Starting in 1959 gifted students throughout the country began to receive scholarships for advanced schooling. … In December, 1963, the Foundation announced awards totaling $7,756,750 to assist the classical dance in America.… this massive program of grants, which at that point represented the largest sum ever allotted by a foundation to a single art form, methodically set about to stabilize the field by supporting a series of resident professional companies and schools throughout the country. …” Gelles, George, “The Ballet”, in Lowry, W. McNeil, ed., The Performing Arts and American Society (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1978), p. vGoogle Scholar.

10. Lowry, pp. 22-23.

11. American Council for the Arts.

12. However, the Harris Poll shows that men are today as much a part of the arts audience as women. Even in the dance audience women are only very slightly overrepresented as compared to men. American Council on the Arts, p. 24.

13. The median earnings of women in dance in 1969 were 61% of the median earnings of men in dance, Minorities and Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, January 1978), p. 15Google Scholar.