Category: BRDS

Next subject for the Baltimore Regional Dance Survey – what types of classes do Baltimore dancers take? Again, up-front, I have to acknowledge the age-and-teaching bias in the respondent pool – very few new or young dancers participated, and there are a lot more of those around. The survey didn’t even try to approach the elementary-school-age dancers (or their parents). Before even glancing at numbers, this question will lean heavily toward the more advanced classes. How much lean? Let’s find out. Two questions addressed class-levels. Here’s how the first question was phrased:

What type of classes did you primarily take in 2016?

Masterclass – taught for a limited time or on an irregular basis by a visiting or unique instructor.
Advanced – taught on a regular basis by local instructors, generally requiring specific dance competency prerequisites, instructor placement, or audition.
Intermediate – taught on a regular basis by local instructors, and open to students with general dance background.
Beginner – open to all students of any background or experience.

These definitions get a little awkward, because I could find no meaningful and universally-accepted definition of “class levels” that applied across dance forms, so these definitions are made up entirely for the purpose of the survey. The intent was to capture a meaningful difference at each level – if you have thoughts on how these definitions failed or succeeded, please get in touch.

The second question on this subject was a bit challenging to complete, so there is some failure in the data – “Approximately, how many hours did you spend taking any of the listed class levels in 2016?” Since this asked the respondents to think about a whole year of experience, and do some math (3 45-minute classes each week, except summer and a couple weeks in the spring and winter is….), I didn’t expect high precision in the answers. I also had to toss one number that could be a user-error or computer-glitch, but I know nobody managed 100 quadrillion hours of training during 2016.

Now, data. 55 of the validated respondents made it through the first question, but only 49 made it through the multiple-answer question. Of those 55, here’s how it broke down for the primary class level:

Continue reading “Baltimore Dance Classes”

In the last installment, I did a broad overview of what sorts of dance happens in Baltimore, in three dimensions (Learning, Performing, and Teaching). This time, I’ll focus a bit on the level of engagement for the three dimensions (Learning, Performing, and Teaching) within each dance form.

In general, I would expect that people learn a dance form first, then maybe start performing, then maybe start teaching. In some forms (Ballet), progression to the stage and to teaching may be highly dependent on the blessings of one or more teachers, while in others (Belly dance, Liturgical), it’s more likely that the decision to perform is entirely personal. In some forms (Folkloric, Indian), local advanced learning opportunities may be extremely limited – if a dancer is committed to a form, and there isn’t a “next-level” instructor around Baltimore, they will have to go elsewhere to take those next steps. In some forms, where there only a limited number of instructors teach in the region, training may simply stop after a short period of time.

For many reasons, it’s difficult to plot a common trajectory for a dancer from student to performer to teacher, but we do have some data that might illuminate this a bit. It’s important to note that these questions cover an entire career, and so provide no insight into the temporal relation between being a student, being a performer, and being a teacher – it’s impossible to determine if someone started teaching hip hop before they took a hip hop class, only that they’ve been teaching more or less total time than they’ve been studying. Total number of years looks like this:

Continue reading “Baltimore Dance Forms in Three Dimensions”

This is going to be a long one, so make yourself comfortable.

To reveal something about the kinds of dance happening in Baltimore, three separate sections of the BRDS included lists of Dance Forms. Vocabulary for these sections was derived from descriptions on websites of performers and studios in the region and combined into a set of 19 similar “forms” to keep the survey tolerable. Dance forms that had specific functional requirements were separated where practical (e.g., Aerialists need rigging, Acro needs padded surfaces, Flamenco needs hard floors). Even so, these were tough questions to address. Dance forms were presented in descending order of popularity by available classes, and a final “Other” option allowed respondents to include forms they felt were unrecognized in the available descriptions. Having said all that, dance is a fluid discipline, and the boundaries between dance forms are often not well-defined (an exception, of course, is a rigorous ballet syllabus…).

Continue reading “Exploring Baltimore Dance Forms”

The first question in the Baltimore Regional Dance Survey was… complicated. There were several iterations about how to capture three dimensions (Performing, Teaching, and Learning) of a dance career with one question, and I’m still not entirely satisfied with the structure of the question. That said, the BRDS did attempt to measure the relative engagement for these three dimensions. Respondents were asked “On average, how did you divide your time as a dancer in 2016?” in each of Performing, Teaching, and Learning. Available responses for each were “None at all,” “A little,” “A moderate amount,” “A lot,” and “A great deal.”

I’m sure there is a large sampling bias favoring older individuals and teachers represented here (some discussion of the known bias here). So, with biases firmly in mind….

All 80 valid responses (see this for validation criteria) made it through this question (along with another 40 incomplete and invalidated responses – which is why we may come back to those later). Focusing for a moment on only the most-engaged (“A great deal”) responses, only 8 respondents (10%) said they performed “A great deal” in 2016. Twice as many (16) spent a great deal of 2016 learning, and more than 4.5 times that many (37) claimed they spent a great deal of 2016 teaching. Bias confirmed…? At the opposite end of the spectrum (“None at all”), we find 16 respondents did no performance, 11 respondents did no teaching, and 4 respondents did no learning during 2016.

For math, these responses are assigned values from 0 (“None at all”) to 4 (“A great deal”). Aggregating all responses to this question, performing scores 1.6 (between “a little” and “moderate”, teaching scores 2.6 (between “moderate” and “a lot”, and learning scores 2.2 (also between “moderate” and “a lot” but more moderate…).

Continue reading “How Do Baltimore Dancers Spend Their Time?”

Continuing to explore the demographic bits of the Baltimore Regional Dance Survey (we’ll get to dancing eventually, I promise…), we come to gender and age. 51 of 80 valid respondents made it far enough to answer these questions, and everyone that made it this far answered both.

When asked about age, respondents were given 6 ranges (<17, 18-25, 26-33, 34-41, 42-49, and 50+) plus the option not to answer. So we get:

Continue reading “BRDS2017 – Gender and Age”

As the name suggests, I hope to understand the regional dance economy, so one of the first questions – Did the survey reach “the region”? We are still dealing with a relatively small sample size (a total of 53 respondents completed the entire survey and provided valid Zip Codes, 33 of them unique), but the results there are encouraging…

There may be a bit of a coverage gap along the I-95/295 corridor on the south side of the city and around Ellicott City (I’ll have to compare that to studio data before I make any sort of conclusions), but broadly speaking, it looks like a reasonably solid representation of the Baltimore region.

Within the city, there is a north-south corridor within the city (Zip Codes 21201, 21202, 21218, 21211, 21212, 21239) that is represented, and the east-side/west-side are scattered at best. There is a lot of history that plays into maps that look like this….

If anyone has suggestions about reaching into the gaps demonstrated above and finding the dancers that live there, I would very much like to hear from you.

I just received the dataset from the first Baltimore Regional Dance Survey, and I want to thank everyone that participated, and in particular, the Towson students (Naomi Butler, Matthew Losover, and Odunola Oduwole) that conducted the survey as part of their classwork, their instructor (Philippe Duverger), and Cheryl Goodman of Dance Baltimore for helping distribute the survey. It’s going to take some time to fully appreciate the data available, but I did want to tease everyone a bit with the scope of dance in Baltimore.

This survey was sent to 752 potential respondents (plus Dance Baltimore?), 53 completed the entire survey with another 106 partial responses. For now, I’m arbitrarily excluding responses that completed less than 10% of the questions and any responses that spent less than 2 minutes total engaged in the survey (the first few questions from incomplete responses might come back in a future analysis). This leaves 80 responses for analysis, or just a bit more than 10% response rate. Obviously, I’d like to see greater participation, but as a first attempt, I think this is a good start. There are some obvious biases, which I hope to address in time. Of particular concern, there was very little participation from the beginners and casual dancers in the area. Respondents are very biased toward professionals, educators, and those with long careers in dance, but I really (REALLY!) do want to hear from the full array of dancers in the region. For those that did not participate, the survey was structured to analyze four key segments of the Baltimore dance economy – performers, instructors, students, and suppliers of services to dancers.

With that introduction, let’s look at some very superficial numbers (and make up a new unit in the process, the form-year). Self-identified Performers, Instructors, and Students were asked to indicate how many years of experience they had in each of many dance forms (broadly categorized). Based on those responses, this dataset represents at least, 4125 FORM-YEARS of performance experience (the most popular performance dance forms representing 848 years of Modern/Contemporary, 713 years of Ballet, 522 years of Jazz, 317 years of Lyrical, and 287 years of Tap), at least 2827 FORM-YEARS of dance teaching experience (the most popular teaching dance forms representing 551 years of Modern/Contemporary, 447 years of Ballet, 317 years of Jazz, 309 years of Tap, and 234 years of Lyrical), and 4331 FORM-YEARS of dance class experience (the most popular dance forms represent 872 years of Ballet, 822 years of Modern/Contemporary, 555 years of Jazz, 499 years of Tap, and 317 years of Lyrical). These respondents report an average aggregate learning experience of 54.1 form-years, an average aggregate performance experience of 51.5 form-years, and an average aggregate teaching experience of 35.3 form-years.

The last question was open-ended – “Please describe any other issues that affect dancers or dance development in Baltimore Area” Because I can’t respond directly to follow up for more detail or information, I’ll leave some interesting comments here in the hope that they will prompt some discussion or the original respondent will reach out… I’ll start with some questions and hopefully others will jump in with comments.

There is not enough of the art scene in general in Baltimore and sometimes you have to travel in unsafe areas.

I’m sure anyone that’s spent any time with me in a production setting knows that safety (in general) is kind of a thing in my world, but more interesting in this comment is the art scene in Baltimore – is there something more specific missing for you?

Finding affordable choreographic opportunities.

Can you be more specific? Are venues unaffordable? Performers? Equipment? Something else?

I would like to see more open classes for adults/professionals without the commitment to a company.

and

very little classes beyond beginning ballet are available for adult dancers.

and

Finding professional level classes after graduating from college and dance companies in MD

I couldn’t find an sort of industry-standard definitions for things like “open classes” so the survey actually defines four levels of classes –

• Masterclass – taught for a limited time or on an irregular basis by a visiting or unique instructor.
• Advanced – taught on a regular basis by local instructors, generally requiring specific dance competency prerequisites, instructor placement, or audition.
• Intermediate – taught on a regular basis by local instructors, and open to students with general dance background.
• Beginner – open to all students of any background or experience.

Which ones are missing? In what dance forms? At what price?

Veteran Black Non-classical dancers/ dance instructors do not get as many open doors and compensation for sharing and showcasing their creative talents and genius in venues in Baltimore, as their Caucasian counterparts.

This one has deep roots, but is there a specific way to address the problem?

Theaters that can be afforded have poor lighting and sound.

Short-term, is your preferred answer to increase what you can afford, or to provide better lighting and sound in existing theaters?

So with that, I welcome your comments below…

[Update: Posts about the survey will be in the “BRDS” category, click that to see all of them]