The pandemic was the final blow for some dance companies. How do the survivors stay nimble?

Sloan Pearson was expecting good news from the Zoom call with her director and fellow members of Taylor 2, the dance troupe she’d performed with for four years. With only six dancers, the group was an intimate, highly mobile offshoot of the celebrated Paul Taylor Dance Company, designed to bring Taylor’s beautifully made works to colleges and small towns.

“Maybe they’ll take us into the main company,” Pearson, 27, remembers thinking before that call, in the spring of 2020.

Instead, as she and her colleagues stared in shocked disbelief at their computer screens, they were notified that Taylor 2 was closing. Permanently.

Suddenly, these elite dancers were out of work, at a time when no one was hiring.

“It was brutal,” Pearson says. “Everyone was instantly in mourning. This dream job, which was an amazing experience, an amazing company - that was it.”

They weren’t alone. Last year, as the pandemic forced the world to cancel in-person activities, the premise of dance was essentially outlawed. Income that depended on performances, teaching and touring vanished overnight.

Now, as the dance companies that managed to survive are returning to the stage, the ghosts of those that no longer exist haunt the field. Their dancers, directors and choreographers are scarred. Observers worry the closures portend more difficulties ahead.

“It’s been difficult to witness,” says Alejandra Duque Cifuentes, executive director of the service organization Dance/NYC. “Covid put into question the fiscal and business model of dance companies. Part of what drove these closures is that with all their creativity in diversifying revenue, the pandemic was literally testing every single of one of them.”

As a result, Duque Cifuentes says, Dance/NYC surveys show a migration of the dance workforce out of New York City, as well as a migration out of the industry. As of late 2020, 5 percent of the dance workforce had relocated permanently and 17 percent were considering permanent relocation. In addition, 43 percent were considering long-term career options outside of dance.

At this point, no one knows exactly how many dance companies have collapsed across the country due to pandemic-related stresses. Among the most notable shutdowns, in addition to Taylor 2, are Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, a 25-yearold company with a dual-city base; the internationally traveled Rioult Dance NY, founded in 1994 by former Martha Graham dancer Pascal Rioult; and the all-male companies 10 Hairy Legs, of Highland Park, N.J., and Madboots Dance, based in New York.

At first glance, the number of lost dance jobs may not seem particularly large. Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, one of the biggest to close, employed 11 dancers. Rioult had 10. But salaried jobs like these, with consistent weeks of work and some measure of benefits, are difficult to come by. And in an industry that literally depends on close personal contact, many dance artists deeply value company life, being part of a tightknit group of like-minded people who spend their careers training, traveling and creating art together.

“That model of a stable company that allows you to develop a language with people you’ve trained - I feel very strong about this,” says Rioult, who has been freelance choreographing since losing his company. “A sense of community. Which you don’t get when you’re going right and left, like I’m doing now.”

These subtler qualities of the dancer’s life are what seem to be in decline, according to experts. Dance advocates see the vanished organizations as troubling signs that the art form, routinely under financial stress, may be shrinking and its structures drastically changing.

“The traditional model of the dance company is completely in question right now,” says Duque Cifuentes. “Now the question is, ‘How do we stay nimble so the overhead doesn’t destroy us in a crisis, and doesn’t require such effort to maintain?’ “

The traditional model in contemporary dance is the single-choreographer company, a more-or-less stable ensemble led by a director-choreographer who creates the repertoire and keeps dancers on salary year to year. Mark Morris Dance Group and the Paul Taylor Dance Company are the most prominent examples, though since Taylor’s death in 2018 the entity he founded has commissioned works by others. These groups tour widely, perform annually in New York and operate their own headquarters, with schools attached, so they have rehearsal space as well as income from classes and studio rentals. In other words, they had diversified revenue, long seen as a strategic benefit.