How Can Dancers’ Knowledge Reshape Arts Administration Practices?
Adapted from Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography, edited by Tonya Lockyer. NCCAkron Series in Dance. Copyright © 2024 by The University of Akron Press. Reprinted by permission.
Creative administration—you might be doing it, but not have a name for it.
Today, many artist-administrators bring ingenuity to the tasks that get art out into the world, get things done. We are problem-solvers, but in ways that prioritize responding to the conditions and desires of the art and the artists. It’s about administrative practices reflecting artistic processes.
Creative administration is not new. Collectively and independently, artists have long created administrative structures to benefit themselves, challenge business-as-usual, and inject creativity into their communities. As artists deal with logistical, financial, and interpersonal challenges in our daily lives, we discover new approaches that work for us. To carve out a life in the arts requires a willingness to ask questions and find new ways; but this labor and expertise has often been undervalued or unacknowledged.
Conversely, inside the offices of institutions, arts workers often have arts backgrounds. Many try, with varying success, to maintain their artistic practices and ways of being within systems that often favor the expectations of donors, funders, and government agencies—rather than those of the artists on whose work they rely. Artists are often administrators; administrators are often artists.
What happens when we challenge these delineations—artist and administrator, creative process and administrative practice? How can we imagine different ways of being and working?
What does dance bring to a conversation about creative administration? Well, to start, dance artists have an embodied understanding of dynamic systems. The human body is a magnificent example of a dynamic system. Dances are dynamic systems, happening in the exchange between people, ideas, and perceptions, each new creative process and context generating new results. Many dance artists bring to creative administration a propensity for investigating underlying ideas and relationships, versus patching up problems without questioning the systems that gave rise to them.
In recent years, in part due to the work of adrienne maree brown, the term emergent strategies has become popular in arts and social nonprofit circles. Dancers understand emergence in our bones—how simple actions can activate complex patterns of interconnection. How a small change in a system creates a chain of events with a larger impact down the line. In dance, creative research is often emergent: discovering the way on the way, navigating by trial and error, assessing and adjusting as you go. Creative research is both the practice and the means to develop the process.
Creative administration can be approached in a way similar to choreographing a dance or developing an improvisational movement score: by looking beyond the individual elements to the flows of relationships between them. For example, if a creative arts worker aims to foster a city’s dance ecology, they might begin by first noting the elements present (artists, presenters, funding sources, rehearsal spaces, training opportunities, commissioning programs, and so on) and then imagining how dance artists, at different stages in their lives, might move through a complex choreography of these elements. Are there ways to optimize nodes of interconnection? What paths will foster artists’ career longevity? A linear path toward a single idea of success? Or a path of intersecting spirals—an iterative system, where artists cycle back, redirect, or reinvigorate, building momentum? As dance artists, we often respond to systems—including communities and cultures—as lived, unfolding experiences, continuously changing, multiple, and malleable.
The field of contemporary dance is a stressed system, rife with inequities and imbalances of power, where even the most “successful artists” struggle to sustain careers of any longevity. Many forward-thinking dance artists want to dismantle systems that create a top-down dynamic between organizations and the artists they were created to serve. Many want to dismantle hierarchies that can make the arts seem inaccessible and elitist. Others are seeking alternatives to the values driving the “American capitalist economic model.”
All of these arts workers labor in ways that prioritize solidarity and disrupt paradigms. Together we can imagine new futures and build things in new ways, creating a public good in which we all have a stake.
