Europe’s dance sector prides itself on resilience. But resilience has a cost, and that cost is rarely distributed fairly. As disinvestment and increasingly conditional funding reshape artistic practice, dance artists, choreographers, researchers, and cultural practitioners are being asked to absorb the consequences—reshaping their proposals, their timelines and even their artistic ambitions to fit what limited resources will allow.
Working conditions vary enormously from one country to the next, and shared European standards remain an all-too-distant objective. Meanwhile, funding logics are shifting beneath artists’ feet: support for finished, touring work is giving way to support for “practice” in the abstract, eroding the ensembles, companies, and shared structures that once allowed dance to be made collectively—and replacing them with individualized practices that are easier to fund in small increments, but harder to sustain, harder to pass on, and harder to build a career around.
These pressures land hardest on those who are already structurally disadvantaged. Dance schools continue to graduate large numbers of young practitioners each year, most of whom are expected to become choreographers and entrepreneurs almost overnight, while many funders concentrate support on early careers and leave comparatively little for artists further down the line.
Join dance artists, researchers, and cultural professionals from across Europe for a critical dialogue that aims to turn diagnosis into recommendations.
Read more about this iCoDaCo online conference hosted by FACE (Fresh Arts Coalition Europe).
