August 29, 2007

Can Dancers Make a Living from the Internet?

Amanda Abrams wrote a post yesterday "How to Eat; or, Bringing Home the Bacon" that addresses a fundamental question about whether it's possible for creative people to make a living doing what they love:

We can all agree that actually making a living as a dancer is a ridiculous impossibility, at least in this country...

In the cases of the few dancers who do manage to make a living from their creative interests as opposed to supporting themselves from non-related jobs, it is usually done by "cobbling together a mix of teaching, bodywork and dance production."

Amanda believes that to earn one's livelihood solely from creative pursuits

...requires creativity itself, an openness of mind to brainstorming and combining potentially incongruent concepts. I love the idea of gradually developing a plan that is totally unconventional and unique to one individual, but figuring it out is a hell of a task.

Local dancers Kelly Mayfield and Daniel Burkholder follow-up Amanda's post with their own stories of the challenges that they have to struggle with in order to make it as artists.

The Internet as New Revenue Stream for Dancers

Amanda's post really addresses one of the underlying questions that I've been thinking about as I prepare to expand Great Dance in September:

Is it really possible for dance-makers to use the Internet in innovative ways in order to generate new and more reliable revenue streams, and, as a result, be able to devote more of their time and energy to their creative interests?

My answer is yes although lots of work and experimentation has to be done to make this happen. And as things stand now, the dance community is at the very early stages of developing different approaches to benefiting directly from the Internet.

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