Dancing is poor in Quebec: this phrase is an ostinato that we hear again over the decades. Recently, it is embodied by an average annual income of $22,859 to $27,334 for its artisans, a decreasing number of productions worked each year and an audience undermined by 58% by the pandemic. Today, dance estimates that, to avoid the dismantling of its professional environment, it is missing at least seven million dollars. Seven million which were not from the last budget, and which are conspicuous by their absence and its consequences: forcing the dance to go backwards, to regress.
” We turn arround. We really risk going back to square one in 2004,” says Parise Mongrain, new director of the Regroupement québécois de la danse (RQD), with a sigh. “It’s as if dance was unable to have the basic financial assets that would allow it to experience real advancement,” laments the ex-dancer who was very familiar with the working conditions of the early 2000s.
“Companies and organizations have made incredible efforts in recent years to raise salaries and artists’ fees, to improve conditions,” underlines the director. “We’re not even talking about an upgrade; it was still at the bottom of that. There, there is a real risk of losing these little gains. If the budget of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) is not indexed, the companies anticipate a direct impact on the workforce. » Indeed, the majority of dance funding goes through the CALQ.
According to the director, less labor in dance means a guaranteed return to small forms – these choreographies of few performers, without sets, with few musicians, or even without musicians at all -, which cost less expensive, “at a time when broadcasters are hungry for great forms, especially internationally, where we are trying to regain our place post-pandemic”.
And also fewer activities, less time allocated to creation, fewer service offerings from service organizations. And a “return to this dynamic, this vicious circle which causes the exhaustion of artists and cultural workers”.
Pay and get paid like in 2017
The majority of artistic associations, with the exception of those in the audiovisual sector, have expressed great fears since the unveiling of the last Girard budget and the credits granted to culture – and particularly those granted to the CALQ.
Especially since it is this year that the renewal of the Mission Support program is taking place: the funding resulting from it allows the companies which obtain it to have a recurring base for four years, to see medium term rather than always operating “by project”.
Due to a pandemic pause, the program has not been renewed since 2017. The community believes that there are many new applicants, and many are asking for an increase in funding. And there are, in the state of the budget, those who fear facing a refusal, of seeing their possibility of a small artistic longevity disappear.
The RQD wanted to know precisely what was happening in dance. At the end of March, the group conducted a flash survey of its members; The duty first read the results of the survey on the CALQ Mission Support program.
“The clear majority of respondents did not experience an increase [de leur subvention de Soutien à la mission] for 7 years now, or even up to 30 years in the case of a respondent, while inflation for this period was 22.4%,” underlines the RQD. On average, respondents requested a 72% increase over the base grant awarded in 2017.
Based on the financial needs of the respondents, the RQD extrapolated those of the entire community. Result: $7,374,886 more would be needed to avoid the dismantling of professional dance in Quebec. This sum would allow dance alone and its workers to benefit from $18.6 million in Mission Support.
“Innovation comes from taking risks”
The RQD also surveyed its member organizations on the effects that a maximum 5% increase in their Mission Support would have for them, as is emerging.
The vast majority believe that they will have to “make layoffs, leave positions vacant, reduce hours; freeze or reduce salaries, withdraw social benefits, make lower quality job offers.” The deterioration of the conditions offered to artists is also at the top of the feared consequences.
“Labor in the performing arts sector is often the only expense that can be reduced,” recalls the RQD. “It is easy to deduce from the responses that the efforts of recent years to improve working conditions are at risk of being wiped out,” we read again.
Parise Mongrain continues orally: “We seem to forget that in art, as in all sectors, growth is costly. That growth and innovation come from taking risks. That the arts are among the sectors that must innovate the most, risk the most, renew themselves the most, and that a minimum of stability is needed to do so. »
Some 41 respondents provided data to the survey in question, a representative sample, according to the RQD, both in terms of its quantity and the ratios of the different types of organizations (service, distribution, creation) which responded.