With year-round pay, in the mood to dance
ODC performers celebrate contracts that are a rarity in their profession
Audiences at ODC/Dance performances this year are seeing a rarity in the contemporary dance world: an 11-person company of full-time, yearround employees.
Before Jan. 1, ODC dancers, just like many other professional American dancers, were paid full-time for the weeks they rehearsed and performed; in their case, 40 weeks per year. San Francisco Ballet dancers have a 42week contract, Alonzo King Lines Ballet dancers get 40 weeks, and Smuin Contemporary Ballet dancers get 36 to 40 weeks of work each year.
On their off weeks, ODC dancers would seek unemployment benefits or wrangle guest-artist gigs elsewhere. Such are the standard difficulties in the lives of most professional dancers — and that’s if they’re lucky.
Even if they’ve been doggedly training for a lifetime, becoming soughtafter and elite, with nowhere higher in the Bay Area they can go, the dance industry as a whole still hasn’t found a way to invest in them year-round.
For dancer Brandon “Private” Freeman, who joined ODC in 1996, it’s a situation he’s used to. “You’re constantly trying to plan ahead for the next layoff,” he recalled.
Usually his first week back after a layoff, when he’s started dancing but hasn’t gotten his first ODC paycheck again, grocery money gets tight. “But then we got up after this season and didn’t have to file for unemployment, and we got paid still. It just felt a little surreal, honestly,” he said, and “kind
of glorious. Employment like this really lifted a weight off of my shoulders.”
The year-round contracts came about because of the many uncertainties that arose in the pandemic’s early days, according to ODC Executive Director Carma Zisman.
As tours were repeatedly postponed, company leadership experimented with various “made-up, semiarbitrary” possible return dates, Zisman said, only to realize: “Great, so then we’re going to have 11 people who commit to us, clear their calendars, pin their financial plans and their hopes on these dates, and then what happens if a presenter says no? Or another restriction happens and we can’t touch each other?”
Paying the dancers year-round staves off those uncertainties, allowing the organization flexibility in scheduling. To afford the additional weeks of pay for dancers, ODC put off hiring in multiple administrative roles.
Dancer Christian Squires said he initially pushed back on how much weekly pay the new year-round contract was offering — it was more than his pre-pandemic weekly wage, but less than his late 2021 wage. But then he learned that built into the dancers’ new contracts are rest and recovery weeks in which they still get paid.
“I am really excited to be like, ‘Hey, I’m getting paid to be off,’ and really look at it through an artist lens,” he
said.
Squires envisioned spending more time going to exhibits such as “Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy,” as he’d done recently at the Legion of Honor, partly to inspire his other work in costume design. “I was feeding my artistic drive, which then feeds into my job here,” he said. In other lines of work, research and development are part of one’s paid hours, he pointed out. Not so in dance, until now.
During the next weeks he’s not actively dancing or rehearsing, Squires said, he might take a class in African dance.
The year-round contract “sets a super-important precedent for dance companies around the country,” said ODC dancer Cora Cliburn. “At the same time, so many of my friends who are not in the arts just expect that kind of contract right off the bat. So I think it was both exciting and also a little telling about our expectations as artists for how we’re valued.”
Still, Squires and his fellow dancers said that though year-round pay represents big progress for ODC, it’s just a step. The dancers now make $62,400 per year, the city’s minimum for full-time exempt employees. But the Economic Policy Institute, using 2020 dollar values, calculates the salary needed for a single adult to attain a “modest yet adequate standard of living” in the city to be $70,016.
“What is so different about being a dancer and an artist is so much of who you are is wrapped up in your artistry and your job,” Squires said, emphasizing that the nuts-and-bolts tasks he performs that pay his rent are also who he is.
It’s still early in the yearround contract, but already the dancers feel glimmers of change, which audiences attending “Island City Waterways: Uprooted” (SaturdaySunday, May 21-22) or the company’s Summer Sampler ( July 28-30) might detect.
“There is something about knowing that we’re going to be fully in this for the full year that does lend itself to more intimacy,” Cliburn said.
Company members remember all too clearly when, early in the pandemic, ODC not coming back at all felt like a real possibility. Now, if health officials ever require another full shutdown, the dancers will continue to get paid.
“The bones of the buildings are a part of me,” Freeman said of his long tenure with the company. Now, with the 52-week contract, “I’ll get to come in here more often and create more art and collaborate more and solve problems. That’s what we do.”