Irish dance companies are an international success. But dance artists in Ireland struggle to earn a living

Irish contemporary dance continues to find success on national and international stages. Some Irish dance companies are reviewed by the New York Times as often as they are by Irish newspapers. International producers are increasingly drawn to Irish companies. Oona Doherty’s Navy Blue had 12 European and US co-producers, for example.

But this masks the everyday occupational poverty that dance artists suffer in Ireland. A new report, Dance Counts, solidifies into hard data what was known anecdotally about dancers’ working conditions. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents reported a total personal income of less than €20,000 a year, and 60 per cent reported a total household income of less than €40,000 a year; 18 per cent reported that most of their work is unpaid. This is even though half of respondents have been educated to postgraduate level.

“As the national representative organisation for professional dance in Ireland, it’s part of who we are to ensure that we’re across the demographics, the data, the information, the experiences and the needs of professional dancers working in the industry,” says Sheila Creevey, the chief executive of Dance Ireland, which commissioned the report by Peter Campbell, Victoria Durrer and Aoife McGrath. “It has really been a data-gathering exercise – essential in getting some really strong evidence and data that we can present as advocates – but it hasn’t revealed anything different from what we’ve been hearing from dancers.”

Agreement on standard rates of pay across the industry is important, but dancers need more than just money

Creevey says the findings point to a clear pathway to improving dancers’ working conditions. “Dance resource organisations as a whole have supported dancers. But what I think it highlights is that there’s a lot of funding systems that aren’t catching up with where the artists are and what they need.”

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Agreement on standard rates of pay across the industry is important, but dancers need more than just money. As a former producer in the UK, Creevey sees a gap in producing and management skills within the sector here. Filling this gap could streamline the process from getting a dance from the rehearsal studio to multiple stages.

The international success of Irish contemporary dance has highlighted the local deficits. “Forty-nine per cent of dancers work outside of Ireland in a typical year, and 71 per cent agree it’s necessary for their career to work off the island of Ireland. So in order to develop and export that level of quality in dance, we need to be resourcing it,” says Creevey.

“We’re in a strong position as a sector right now, and we just need to grab that moment and really push forward. Trust the voices of the artists, trust the initiatives coming from the sector and trust the expertise of those working in the art form.”