You'll find most professional dancers in the studio teaching, not onstage performing - because paid performing work has always been scarce, and keeps getting scarcer. And with President Trump's policies gutting arts funding and devaluing cultural work at every turn, the squeeze on dance artists is getting even tighter. So these highly skilled artists do what actually pays: They pour everything they know (and it's a lot; 15-50 years and more of intensive dance and fitness training) into the next generation in studios across America.
Lauren Woods launched the project in May after growing frustrated with what she saw as some publishers' focus on sensationalism and the lack of bookstores focused on local authors in the area. "I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal, or the book buyer didn't think they would be profitable," Woods said. "And that always seemed wrong to me."
In May, the World Arts West Dance lost a $60,000 National Endowment of the Arts grant, part of the millions of dollars of funding cut from the NEA that forms part of the generational assault on the endowment summed up by the Cato Institute in April: "The NEA's modest grant budget substitutes individuals' preferences for those of committees, crowding out private provision, politicizing art, and violating freedom of conscience."