Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio, Re: Advisory Council on Arts, Culture, and Tourism

By New York City area Dance Makers and Organizations

May 13, 2020

Honorable Bill de Blasio
Mayor City of New York City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Re: Advisory Council on Arts, Culture, and Tourism

Dear Mayor de Blasio:

We are writing to you as a dance community of organizations and dance workers that make up a significant workforce that is central to New York City’s cultural ecosystem and economy.

We are reaching out because of the glaring absence of a dance representative on the City’s sector Advisory Council on Arts, Culture, and Tourism. While we acknowledge your team’s efforts to develop a strategic COVID-19 reopening and recovery plan and appreciate the inclusion of the arts and cultural organizations in the City, it is critical that the dance community further advocates for itself. Although some of our needs and experiences intersect with that of other performing arts disciplines, the dance sector is unique and demands the attention of the local government.

The dance community in New York City attracts and exports talent around the world, drives local tourism, and is central to some of the City’s most popular and lucrative cultural attractions– including Broadway. Dance/NYC's State of NYC Dance and Workforce Demographics Report has revealed that the dance sector contributes over $300 million to the City's economy, even as dance remains the discipline receiving the lowest amount of funding in arts and culture. This doesn't include the many freelance artists, LLCs, and fiscally-sponsored groups that also help make New York City the dance capital of the world. Despite this, the dance community remains adaptable and vibrant. Our expertise and experiences position us as significant contributors to the health of the arts, culture, and tourism sector of our City as we endeavor to envision a future that will ensure our cultural capital can thrive once again.

Our work and organizations celebrate, employ, and serve a diverse group of New Yorkers: We are people of color, disabled people, transgender and gender-nonconforming people, women-identifying and immigrant people, and people living in poverty. We are the birthplace of hip hop, salsa, and modern dance. We are places of preservation of folkloric and culturally specific dance forms. We are performance venues, presenters, educational institutions and festivals. We are New Yorkers dancing barefoot, on point, taps, sneakers, and Broadway. We are community organizers and administrators, educators and therapists, large organizations, and small community collectives. Together we represent over 5,000 individual dance artists, 1,200+ dance-making entities, and 500+ nonprofit dance companies.

As a dance community, we demand inclusion and formal representation on the City’s Advisory Council on Arts, Culture, and Tourism and its plans for recovery and reopening.

Since the start of the pandemic, Dance/NYC has collected data on the impact our sector has experienced as a result of COVID-19 and the findings are staggering: As of May 8, 2020, individual dance-makers reported a cumulative loss of at least $3.3 million with organizations, projects, and groups indicating losses that exceed $20.5 million. These figures largely account for only early March and April activity. The loss experienced by our community has only deepened and the impact continues to be felt by all. More alarmingly, many respondents are indicating they will not be able to sustain themselves or their institutions much longer without unrestricted funds to cover lost salaries/wages, living expenses, and food/groceries–– we may soon lose a large swath of our cultural sector as closures begin to take course. It is against this backdrop that we as a community have already begun to organize and plan for the future, grounded in data and in the experiences of the very people that make New York City’s arts, culture, and tourism sector thrive.

As the impact of the pandemic grows, our community is evidently suffering the consequences of systems that fail to consider our needs and contributions time and time again. We ask you, Mayor de Blasio, not to further anonymize our stories and expertise by refusing to include us in critical conversations about how we can collectively return to the workplace safely and sustain growth in the near future.

We thank you and your team for all you are doing and look forward to working with you as we move into a new future for New York City.

Signatories,