In September, the New England Foundation for the Arts announced that one of its core programs, the National Dance Project, would be ending, at least in its current form, as the Mellon Foundation concludes the funding arc that’s supported the program for the past several decades. The preliminary application for NDP’s final funding cycle in this form, which will support works touring from 2026 through 2029, opens this month.
“It felt terrifying,” says choreographer Ananya Chatterjea, who has received NDP funding three times, of hearing the news. “I was really heartbroken.”
The loss of NDP could indeed be a worrying prospect for the dance field: Since its founding by Sam Miller in 1996, the regranting program has played a crucial role in the dance ecosystem, supporting the creation of new dance works, funding touring, and fostering relationships between artists and presenters. “I worry that smaller and midsized companies like ours just won’t be able to tour,” says Chatterjea.
But NEFA says it’s not really the end: The organization is currently undergoing a strategic planning process to reimagine NDP. “We will continue to provide guidance, connections, and opportunities, and are working to develop further opportunities for support,” wrote NEFA executive director Harold Steward in a letter announcing the change. “We encourage you to take advantage of these resources as our organization, partnerships, and programs evolve.”
With information not yet available about what the new iteration of NDP could look like (a representative from NEFA was not available for comment), it’s difficult to predict exactly how the impact of this change will be felt across the dance world. Michèle Steinwald, who consulted on NDP’s Regional Dance Development Initiative and worked with NDP as the assistant curator for the performing arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, sees Mellon’s shifting priorities as likely part of a trend towards granting to artists directly rather than through regranting organizations like NDP.
While there are potential upsides to that kind of funding model, Chatterjea worries that such a system wouldn’t be able to replicate the ways in which NDP facilitated connections between artists and presenters. “Artists, unfortunately, can’t just say ‘I want to show my work at the Kennedy Center,’ ” she says. “The mechanism for that was NDP.”
Presenters could be negatively impacted too. Christy Bolingbroke, the executive and artistic director of NCCAkron, explains that artists have been able to use their NDP funding to subsidize touring fees. (In other words, NDP would match or supplement what a presenter was able to offer to meet the artist’s full fee.) This, in effect, has made presenters’ budgets go further and expanded who they’re able to program. “It really helps manage the presenter’s relationship to risk,” says Bolingbroke.When she ran ODC Theater in San Francisco, NDP “was make-or-break for my curatorial season,” she says. These subsidies also put power in artists’ hands, giving them more control over where they’d like their work to be seen and incentivizing presenters to come to the table for conversations.
In these ways, NDP hasn’t just injected funds into the field, but also impacted the behaviors through which dance is made and toured. Whether or not that money reemerges in another form is yet to be seen, as is whether systems will change in response. But Bolingbroke points out that adaptation is built into the history of NDP, which was founded to fill the hole left by major cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s.
“Of course it’s heartbreaking, because a lot of artists have built their structures based on this pipeline,” says Steinwald. “In the short term, this is going to make things really difficult for them, and it’ll make dance programming harder to do. But this is an opportunity for composting, and seeing what new crops come up.”
