Every day, dancers, teachers, and young professionals come through my office door. They sit down, often exhausted, sometimes in tears, always searching for answers – How do I keep going? How do I sustain this work I love? Their questions are not about ambition or talent; they are about survival.
The conversations reveal something deeper than personal struggle. They expose a structural fragility in how we fund and value dance. While research across the arts repeatedly demonstrates the economic, social, and educational value of cultural investment, the resources directed toward dance remain disproportionately low compared to both the sector’s contribution and its needs.
Dance operates within what many scholars describe as the “precarious economy” of the arts – a system that relies heavily on short-term project grants, inconsistent sponsorship, and underpaid freelance labour. Studies from cultural economists such as David Throsby, Eleonora Belfiore, and Pier Luigi Sacco have long argued that the arts, and dance in particular, produce both intrinsic and instrumental value: enriching individual wellbeing, social cohesion, and creative innovation. Yet, despite this growing body of evidence, dance continues to exist at the margins of cultural funding priorities.
In practice, this means a widening gap between expectation and support. Institutions are asked to demonstrate social impact, inclusivity, and innovation, often without the structural resources to do so. Freelance dancers are expected to embody professional excellence while navigating an unstable landscape of part-time teaching, short contracts, and self-funded training. As researchers such as Kate Oakley and Mark Banks have noted, this “passion economy” risks normalising inequality, suggesting that dedication and love for one’s art should compensate for systemic underfunding.
Here is where leadership becomes crucial. Leadership in dance today cannot be defined solely by artistic excellence or the capacity to inspire performance. It must also encompass advocacy, strategic vision, and care. To lead in this environment means to navigate uncertainty while protecting the creative and emotional wellbeing of others. It means building sustainability not only in artistic practice but also in the organisational and personal structures that make that practice possible.
When we talk about leadership in dance, we are talking about people, about those who step forward to bridge gaps between creativity and policy, between vision and viability. Leadership, in this sense, is an act of translation: turning the language of movement into arguments for investment, translating artistic value into societal relevance, and ensuring that those sitting on the sofa in my office, overwhelmed, hopeful, and persistent, are not left to bear the weight of systemic neglect alone.
Research in arts management increasingly supports this approach. Sustainable leadership in the cultural sector requires collective intelligence, networks of artists, educators, and producers who share responsibility and influence. This collective model of leadership mirrors the essence of dance itself: collaborative, fluid, responsive.
When dancers come to my office and ask how they can continue, I remind them that their persistence is not just personal courage, it is a political statement. Each act of creation is an act of resistance against a system that too often undervalues what it cannot quantify.
The future of dance is at stake. We can either continue managing decline, or lead with evidence, empathy, and the conviction that art, when properly funded and respected, is not a luxury.
©Javier Torres
