i just wrote a little something on the rising cost of dance workshops on the west coast, mainly focussing on San Francisco, but including elsewhere.

a link to it is www.bodyresearch.org/costs.html , if you are interested in forwarding it or seeing an updated version of it at some future date. the current version rests below...

peace
karl

It is an ongoing dialogue that I have had with many friends of mine in the arts about the high cost of workshops in dance these days. This increase is well beyond inflation or increases in the cost of living. I remember that when I took a workshop with Joe Goode in the summer of 91, it was a 3 week full time workshop with one of the most respected contemporary companies in the bay area that people were coming to from all over the country, and we paid $500 for it. Even counting for inflation, that would be the equivalent of paying $700 now for a workshop. Joe Goode’s workshops via Dancer’s Group’s summer festival now goes for $420 for one week, and that is one of their cheaper workshops on a per hour basis… this represents an 80 percent increase in the real cost of workshops (increase beyond inflation – not counting inflation, it is a 150% increase).

I feel outraged and thoroughly perplexed that the fees should have risen so much. I do not believe that teachers are making more money, as i hear that attendance is down for many workshops, and where teachers are paid a flat fee, it is s ridiculously low amount of the money coming in. I have been told that Moving on Center, for example, only pays $50 an hour for teachers … the fees of 2 to 3 students. I also know that Keith Hennessey had to argue with Dancer’s Group to at least allow him to teach more – WITHOUT PAYING HIM MORE! -- so that he felt that participants were getting more for their money. It feel outrageous that an organization that is supposed to be supporting dancers would want to turn down such an offer of volunteering teaching time. What would be their vested interest in keeping the per hour fees for workshops so high?

What is it about? Is it about focusing on teaching to people who work full time? It feels like there is a change in spirit from organizing events for a community of artists who prioritize making time for exploration, living cheaply to organizing workshops for dancers who basically work full time at other things and have to pull themselves away for shorter experiences that cost more. Somehow there has been a trend in marketing workshops --which I and others like Keith Hennessey or Ben Yalom (of Foolsfury Theater) have been fighting – of raising the per hour cost.

There is a strange piece of marketing wisdom that if you charge more, people will value it more and want it more. There is a truth to that which I really try not to give into, having faith that it is not the whole picture. If I was faced with a choice, I would rather fill a workshop and have people come and study more with me and make a little less than perhaps make more by charging more and having more limited financial accessibility for workshops. However, I have actually had a fair amount of success charging less for workshops and filling them so that I make more in the end – at least compared to many of those who charge more for their workshops.

Keith Hennessey has written a number of times how he feels that the cost of training new artists should not fall entirely on the them, but that funding to support teachers should come from their performing work, from grants and fundraisers. There is something to this view, I think, although it does not necessarily apply to arts that are more focused on personal process and investigation as opposed to purely performance oriented arts. However, without even going there, there is also something of economics to look at and also the kind of society of arts makers that we are trying to create… when workshops cost more, then they must be aimed at 1)the rich or 2)those who work full time and can only take off small pieces of time for workshops, or 3) in the sense of a pyramid scheme, those who aspire to teach and charge that much (by mathematics and casual observation, most who try this fail and are led on by false hopes). I would argue that we can create a viable alternate economy of dance when we offer more frequent or longer workshops charging less, trying to create a world where people are working less (don’t need to pay so much for workshops) and take more workshops and where we collaborate on making a richer world of exploration in creative process.

At the end of this little missive, I have tabulated a few selective workshops and training programs and how much they cost on a per hour basis, plus mitigating notes.

Before I get to the comparison, though, I want to share an interesting story about a novel way to collectively organize a dance/performance education…the Jaffa school in Israel. A few years ago, there was a large cluster of people who had been rejected by the only real contemporary training program in Israel… they were mostly in their early 30s and were looking to get into performance work and dance relatively late. Many of them knew each other from the workshop circuit. Rather than surrender to just keeping up with sporadic workshops, they decided to organize a training program themselves… they decided the subjects that they wanted to study – yoga, modern dance, composition/improvisation, tai chi, voice work, contact improvisation – and they hired the teachers themselves and organized studio space to make a 20 hour a week training program in Jaffa. In the end it was a small fraction of the cost that they would have paid in workshops, and they got to create a truly contemporary training program, reflecting their interests rather than the interests of the establishment. The teachers were all delighted, as it gave them a guaranteed attendance and pay check as well as a motivated and interesting body of students. I put this model out to inspire any of you who want to study…

Peace
Karl

Table of per hour fees for training… no comments made on relative quality of training, a factor not correlated with price necessarily.
per hour fees (based on early enrollment)/Name of Training/Location/Duration/Notes
$3 / Rumblepeg Winter Dance and Performance Intensive (Jan-Feb 2007)/Eureka, CA /2 months/this is like the Jaffa program, in spirit… includes some hours done in group laboratory
$3.75 / EDAM Summer Intensive w/Peter Bingham, Andrew Harwood, Mark Bovain/ Vancouver, BC/3 weeks/ this is supported by the Canadian government
$5.50 / Strictly Seattle /Seattle, WA/2 weeks
$7.10/Roots & Wings Summer workshop w/Karl Frost/Berkeley, CA/2 weeks
$7.20/foolsFury physical theater intensive/ SF, CA/2 weeks
$8.30/Nancy Stark Smith’s winter intensive/Earthdance, MA/2.5 weeks/ This does not include $33/day room and board fee
$8.75/Lower Left Contact Workshop/2 days/ SF, CA
$10.60/Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation/ Seattle, WA/ 6 days ( a little complicated to estimate because of evening activities … assumes doing the whole thing rather than drop-in rates, which are much higher)
$12.75/ West Coast Contact Festival/Berkeley, CA/5 days/ ( a little complicated to estimate because of evening activities … assumes doing the whole thing rather than drop-in rates, which are much higher)
$13.30/Moving on Center (MOC) summer somatics & performance intensive (Konanov, Savage, Cheng)/Oakland, CA/ 2 weeks
$13.70/University of California, Santa Cruz, Dance Dept/Santa Cruz, CA/ 1 semester to 4 years/ (does not include things like studio access, rehearsals, etc, nor the fact that you have a BA at the end)
$14/ Dancer’s Group Summer Festival training w/ Joe Goode/SF, CA/1 week
$14.50/Dancer’s Group Summer Festival training w/Nina Martin and Shelly Center/SF, CA/1 week (full time)
$16.10/MOC Laban training/ Oakland, CA/ 1 week
$16.40/Dancer’s Group Summer Festival training w/Nina Martin/SF,CA/1 week (half time)
$23/MOC Authentic Movement training/ Oakland, CA/1 week
$25.70/ Experimental Performance Institute at New College/SF, CA/ 1 semester to 4 years/ (does not include things like studio access, rehearsals, etc, nor the fact that you have a BA at the end)
$43.70/Cornish College of the Arts/Seattle, WA/ 1 semester to 4 years/ (does not include things like studio access, rehearsals, etc, nor the fact that you have a BA at the end)