Dance’s communal ethos moving into offices, boardrooms
Recently, several nonprofits within artform have begun to embrace collective leadership
At the end of January, three dancers gathered for a retreat at a rural Northern California compound. In a bare-walled studio, they improvised as a group, taking turns sharing movement prompts and passing ideas from body to body. Sometimes they paused to write questions they hoped to answer through dance; sometimes their explorations spilled into the surrounding woods.
Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr and Karla Quintero had spent many months jointly directing the San Francisco company Bridge Live Arts, hashing out a new collective leadership structure for the organization formerly known as Hope Mohr Dance. They had talked exhaustively about how best to reallocate the responsibilities previously held mostly by Mohr, the group’s founder and choreographer. At their gathering in January, the Dancing Distributed Leadership retreat, they danced about those ideas instead.
“Dancing together taught us more about leading together,” Hill said.
Art-making is often portrayed as a solitary endeavor: the composer at the piano, the painter at the easel. But few choreographers can go into a room alone and emerge with a dance. As an art that lives in the bodies of dancers, who shape and refine its contours, dance reflects a collective creativity. To make dance is to collaborate.
“There is a shared leadership that is really inherent in the artistic practice,” said Sydnie L. Mosley, the founding artistic and executive director of the collective Sydnie L. Mosley Dances.
At professional dance institutions, that collaborative ethos does not usually extend into offices and boardrooms. Most companies and presenting organizations are hierarchies, with one person at the top, or two people: an artistic director and an executive director. Many prominent dance troupes are built around the choreographers who founded them and, in some cases, still lead them — a traditional organizational scaffolding supporting a single creative vision.
But recently, several dance nonprofits have begun embracing collective leadership. Hope Mohr Dance became Bridge Live Arts in August as part of a continuing transformation; it’s currently led by two co-directors, with Mohr moving into an “affiliate artist” role that focuses on choreography.
In January, the advocacy organization Dance/NYC announced its executive director would step aside. An interim team is now at the helm while a committee of stakeholders crafts what a news release called a “more democratic and collectively-driven” model.
Choreographer Gina Gibney expanded the leadership team of her New York City-based organization last year. Now its performance arm, Gibney Company, showcases the work of many choreographers, while its dancers are known as artistic associates and cultivated as leaders.
“We have so many models of single-choreographer companies, and one voice can be clear and loud,” Gibney said. “But when you have a collective of voices, that creates something really beautiful: There’s texture, there’s harmony, there’s counterpoint, there’s tension.”
The trend toward distributed leadership, a term now common in the arts world, aligns with the inclusion and accessibility efforts that have taken on new urgency since the upheavals of the pandemic and the protests around George Floyd’s murder. And it reflects principles that were already shaping artistic programs at many of these organizations — empowering dance artists, championing diverse voices.
Though complicated and sometimes fraught, these transformations can also feel organic: They apply the ideals of creative practice to administrative practice.
“Our public programs are very artist led; they’re very equity driven,” Mohr said. “We really wanted to align our internal structures to better reflect those values.”
Collective models offer these leaders much-needed support.
“I think the biggest thing is that it dismantles this trap that we know a lot of choreographers fall into of doing everything themselves,” Mosley said.