Public Movement: Dancers and the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) 1974-1982

Abstract

For eight years, dancers in the United States performed and taught as employees of the federal government. They were eligible for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a Department of Labor program that assisted the unemployed during the recession of the late 1970s. Dance primarily occurred in artistic or leisure contexts, and employing dancers as federal government workers shifted dance to a labor context. CETA dancers performed “public service” in senior centers, hospitals, prisons, public parks, and community centers. Through a combination of archival research, qualitative interviews, and philosophical framing, I address how CETA disrupted public spaces and forced dancers and audiences to reconsider how representation functions in performance. I argue that CETA supported dance as public service while local programs had latitude regarding how they defined dance as public service. Part 1 is entitled Intersections: Dance, Labor, and Public Art and it provides the historical and political context necessary to understand how CETA arts programs came to fruition in the 1970s. It details how CETA arts programs relate to the history of U.S. federal arts funding and labor programs. I highlight how John Kreidler initiated the first CETA arts program in San Francisco, California, and detail the national scope of arts programming. In Part 2 of this dissertation, CETA in the Field: Dancers and Administrators, I focus on case studies from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York, New York CETA arts programs to illustrate the range of how dance was conceived and performed as public service. CETA dancers were called upon to produce “public dance” which entailed federal funding, free performances in public spaces, and imagining a public that would comprise their audiences. By acknowledging artists and performers as workers who could perform public service, CETA was instrumental in shifting artists’ identities from rebellious outsiders to service economy laborers who wanted to be part of society. CETA arts programs reenacted Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts programs from the 1930s and adapted these ideas of artists as public servants into the Post-Fordist, service economy of the 1970s United States. CETA dancers became bureaucrats responsible for negotiating their work environments and this entailed a number of administrative duties. While this made it challenging for dancers to manage their basic schedules and material needs, it also allowed for a degree of flexibility, schedule gaps, and opportunities to create new performance and teaching situations. By funding dance as public service, CETA arts programs staged a macroeconomic intervention into the dance field that redefined dance as public service.