A meeting with Greens Arts spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson Young
What do the Covid-affected dance studio sector and the tertiary dance training sectors have in common? Where do they fit into the Australian dance ecology? Why are they not included in arts policy and funding strategies? And why are they not recognised as integral to the wider dance industry by politicians and policy makers?
These are some of the questions discussed recently a meeting between the Greens Arts spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson Young and Ausdance National VP Julie Dyson at Parliament House in Canberra.
Sarah had recently expressed interest in (and sympathy for) dance studio businesses in the COVID-19 environment, and so the publication of Ausdance Victoria’s Covid-19 Business Impact Survey, (focusing on dance studios), and the Federal Government’s proposal to increase tertiary fees in the Creative Arts provided a perfect opportunity for us to ‘join the dots’ and advocate for dance education and training and their centrality to the Australian dance ecology.
Dance studio businesses number in their thousands in Australia, and the Ausdance Victoria impact survey found that millions of dollars had been lost in Victoria alone with forced closures, and yet most were not eligible for government assistance. As the report notes:
Most commonly, studios have only been able to access JobKeeper for the owner, part-time and full-time staff, leaving 80% of workers in the sector unsupported.
And –
92% of respondents expressed concern about their business surviving until the end of March 2021. … If these businesses collapse, thousands of independent dance artists and associated workers will lose their primary sources of income, and the cumulative effect on local economies, such as performance venues, dance suppliers, and related retailers, will be exponentially catastrophic.
As well as the financial impact, we discussed the role of dance studios in communities, the value of their work with young people (including artistic, physical, social and educational), and the impact of Zoom teaching as an unsatisfactory substitute for face-to-face teaching. We also noted that adequate correction and feedback is not really possible in an extended Zoom teaching environment.
Our suggestion that Sarah make a public statement in support of the studio sector was well received, but she also undertook to look into better financial support for these small businesses.
We also discussed the impact of proposed Creative Arts fee increases on courses such as those training dancers at WAAPA, and provided a list of dance course alumni back to 1983 with graduate jobs listed, contradicting the federal Education Minister’s statement that Arts graduates are not ‘job ready’.
Ausdance’s submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Government’s Higher Education Support Amendment Bill 2020 notes that –
Ausdance is well aware of the exceptional career pathways these courses offer their graduates, both in Australia and overseas. Australian dance companies and independent artists’ projects are almost entirely made up of graduates, and international companies look to Australian-trained dancers for technically and artistically mature artists.
Our submission to the Senate inquiry goes on:
Australia's arts industry is already in a precarious situation as a result of severely reduced government investment in artistic practice (as opposed to the ‘billions’ it invests in galleries, libraries and museums). There is also a complete lack of industry-based public policy.
Increasing fees for Creative Arts courses will severely exacerbate this situation, and we risk an imminent perfect storm for the $111b arts industry. The new fees proposal means that creative arts students will be squeezed from both ends – their opportunities within the course will be further reduced (due to university budget cuts) while the overall cost of their courses will increase.
Sarah noted that in the past she had left matters of arts education and training to the Greens’ education spokesperson, but that in fact she now appreciated the need to ‘join the dots’, and include dance studio teachers and tertiary dance educators in arts policies, rather than siloing them into education portfolios.
We agreed that these sectors must indeed be treated as an important part of the arts ecology, and that arts ministers, advisors, bureaucrats and other arts spokespersons must start to recognise the studio and tertiary dance education sectors as central to the wider dance ecology.