Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#269: Emily Haussler (Dance) (pt. 2 of 2)
This week on the podcast is part two of our interview with Emily Haussler.She’s a director, choreographer, teacher and the founder of RESILIENCE Dance Company—a nonprofit dance company based in St. Louis, MO. Her work centers on building healthier dance communities by equipping dancers with resources for their mental health, physical well being and artistic success. Emily’s choreography draws on contemporary, modern, and improvisational techniques that reflect the contemporary human condition and our relationships to one another. If you want to hear an in-depth account of what it takes to create and maintain a nonprofit, you won’t want to miss this interview! https://www.emilyhaussler.com/ and https://www.resiliencedancecompany.com/
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise and.
Nick Petrella:I'm Nick Petrella. Emily Haussler is joining us today. She's a director, choreographer, teacher and the founder of Resilience Dance Company, a nonprofit dance company based in St Louis, missouri. Her work centers on building healthier dance communities by equipping dancers with resources for their mental health, physical well-being and artistic success. Emily's choreography draws on contemporary, modern and improvisational techniques that reflect the contemporary human condition and our relationships to one another. We'll have her website and Resilience Dance Company's link in the show notes so you can read more about Emily and all of her activities. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Emily.
Emily Haussler:Thank you for having me, Andy and Nick. I really appreciate being here.
Nick Petrella:What do you look for? What do you consider when sending an invitation?
Emily Haussler:We also look for choice making. The way that I direct and create, I'm very much an editor or a shaper, I am not so much a generator. So the company that comes in these dancers have to be able to generate and make movement vocabulary, and then I will shape and edit and kind of tweak and overall compose that movement into the choreography. But there's days in rehearsal where I'm like I don't know, make a choice, does your leg go this way or that way? What does your head do? And these dancers have to be able to make those choices and commit to them fully. So I would say you know, that's kind of our main handful that we look for.
Emily Haussler:Ultimately, I'm interested in a company where every dancer is a soloist in their own right. Every dancer could pop out and someone could say that's their strongest dancer, that's my favorite dancer, they are the most captivating. But it's true for everyone in their own style and their own voice and then when they move together that they're able to create this shared emergent voice. So rather than, I guess, rather than trying to cast all the same type of dancer, I look for different voices that have this soloist and then collaborative feeling to them. Does that make sense?
Nick Petrella:It does, yeah, and it's interesting. So you place a lot on, I would say, emotional development and mental health and things like that. So everything you gave was basically technical experience. So no interpersonal, intrapersonal interviews, nothing do that.
Emily Haussler:So yeah, I, if I were to detail our whole audition process, it might take some time.
Andy Heise:I was going to ask that, but I, so I won't yeah.
Emily Haussler:Yeah, we. We have a day long audition that we don't make cuts from. We work with everyone for about seven hours, uh, which is intense, and then we do callback interviews where we'll get into some of the stuff you're talking about. How do you handle conflict? How do you view mental health? What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are? Are you able to perceive those? How do you work in a group setting? All of that type of stuff we'll then interview for, and then we'll check references as well for that.
Nick Petrella:Fantastic and that's helpful for any young dancers listening yeah.
Emily Haussler:Yeah.
Nick Petrella:Emily, you have revenue streams in directing choreography and teaching. Where do you see the most growth in the next five years and why?
Emily Haussler:Yeah, for me personally directing, it's taken a lot of time to build this company ground up, but we're starting to unlock the grants for operational support and connect with some larger dollar donors who are really interested in the company's long term sustainability. So, moving forward, I will actually be able to pay myself a full time salary and that salary can increase proportional to the company's growth. So for me, that's really where I see my sort of direction and my revenue increasing over the next five years. And I think that ties into choreography as well, because, again, like I said earlier, that's part of my job as a director. Tied into that is choreographing.
Emily Haussler:I will say generally, more broadly, looking at the dance industry, I think there's a lot of growth in teaching. There are so many teaching opportunities out there. Dancers can connect with a bunch of different studios, whether they're concert studios, they're competition studios, competition studios, if they're studios that are dedicated to, like early childhood dance, there's a lot of options out there for different skill sets. They can also market themselves, as you know, their own like masterclass instructors offer privates, offer personalized coaching, not to mention going down like the university route of adjuncting and teaching those classes. So I've just experienced a lot of teaching opportunities. There's no shortage of that in dance and I think that will continue to grow as the industry as a whole grows.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, yeah.
Andy Heise:Yeah, and something you said made me think about and this is sort of a tangent here, really based on the last question but something you said made me think did you kind of, when you started the dance company, did you look around St Louis and say, hey, there's really not many small dance companies happening in St Louis, or were you just like this is what I want to do, so let's just get it started? And I guess that kind of does relate to my next question, which is about, like, has it always been a nonprofit, or did you just kind of get started and then evolve into a nonprofit?
Emily Haussler:Totally so. St Louis actually has a ton of small dance companies. Some may say it's oversaturated with small dance companies. I will argue that the future of the dance world is more horizontal, less hierarchical, with more small company spaces and independent artist spaces and project spaces. And just because these things already exist doesn't mean like that's, that's not a good reason to me to not start something. I view, you know, the work that we do and the work that other companies do as as growing. The industry as a whole, um, and St Louis in particular, is really trying to market itself as an art city as of late. Um and you know this is this is part of that. There is lots of dance going on here. Everyone has their own niche, everyone has a little bit of overlap, um, and there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I would say my drive to create it came from, you know, wanting to, wanting to try a model, wanting to challenge a model of, you know, a dance company that did put artists first. I wanted to see if I could make that space and be successful at it.
Emily Haussler:In terms of starting, I definitely did not start as a nonprofit. A nonprofit is a huge undertaking, as probably some listeners will know it's a ton of work. It's a decent financial commitment and it takes a lot of time to hear back and get it finalized. So when I started I began just really simply as a DBA was really my first step. You know it's like a $5 filing. So I got my name, I did the DBA and I then went to Fractured Atlas, which is a national fiscal sponsor for the arts, and I applied for fiscal sponsorship. Emily Housler DBA Resilience Dance Company Got that. That gave me some legitimacy to start collecting tax deductible donations, to start building a donor base, to have a central platform where all our campaigns could be, all of our company information could be. Even before we had a website, you know, we had our Fractured Atlas page.
Emily Haussler:From there, I think it was about six or seven months later, I made the jump to an LLC, which was I don't know a $60 filing and about 20 minutes of work, not too much more. But we set up that sole proprietor LLC, I think, as a tax entity. I held it as a disregarded entity, but the LLC had its own insurance. Now we started kind of like being able to separate like that. I've always maintained separate bank accounts, which I might have said this at this talk, but my my separate, you know business bank account was just a copy of my standard bank account with the nickname business and it was just like it was nothing fancy. But that way I could kind of keep everything separate and keep track of it, moved it to the different entity and the way that fiscal sponsorship works. You know they take an admin cut and Fractured Atlas. They're nationally known, they manage a lot of projects. Their admin cut was a little higher, it was 8%. So as we're growing and we're taking, you know we're getting more donations, we're building our programs, we're starting to watch that 8% get larger and larger and larger.
Emily Haussler:And we hit this point about a year and a half in where we said, okay, within the next year, that chunk that's going out is going to be the same amount that we would invest to start a nonprofit. So we decided to make the jump at that point. So it was a financial choice. It was also a commitment after a couple years to saying, you know, yeah, we still want to do this. This works. It's an investment in St Louis. I wasn't going to up and leave and move somewhere else. And you know also, fiscal sponsorship is great. I really recommend it as like a stepping stone to anyone getting started. Uh, but there are some grants that really just won't give to fiscal sponsors and, um, you have to be your own nonprofit to unlock this next level of grant funding. Um, so all of that kind of factored into the decision there.
Nick Petrella:Is that for those grants that are only eligible for nonprofits? Is that why you decided to become a nonprofit or no? There was another reason entirely.
Emily Haussler:Both, and so I think being your own nonprofit gives you more control over the organization, gives you more control over the organization. It builds more legitimacy and trust from your donor base that you're sort of large enough and committed enough and invested enough that you're now going to have your own board and you're going to have all these policies in place. And there's just a level of seriousness for lack of a better word when you become a nonprofit that we were interested in making that jump. So, yeah, the grant unlocked the sort of financial benefit of not having to pay that admin fee and then just the building legitimacy as well.
Nick Petrella:Sure. So just a quick follow-up question what are some of the unexpected challenges you've had to contend with as a nonprofit?
Emily Haussler:Absolutely. In creating the nonprofit, I would say the challenge was the long-term and holistic planning that's involved in filing that 1023. Nonprofit status. It was tough to envision three future years of full budgets and every program that we might want to do. So we did work with both a lawyer and an accountant throughout this process who helped us create the language and make tangible projections in terms of those budgets, because that just felt so out of the scope of what I had experienced. I would also say that the time commitment was a huge challenge. It took us a year from when we filed to get our 501c3 status. The IRS was really backlogged when we were doing it. Yeah, so that was really tough to communicate with donors for a year that their donation may or may not be tax deductible if they give it this way or they could still give it through the fiscal sponsorship, but their impact is lessened or like it's just that was hard to navigate. Clearly and maintain those relationships. Clearly and maintain those relationships and you know, also because of that timing delay, we missed a grant by like a month, um, when we we could have applied for that, and so then that affects our whole next year of funding. So sometimes these. You know these funding cycles, the way that, um, the timing plays out, I think it's it's just tricky, just tricky in nonprofit world.
Emily Haussler:I think some other challenges are building out a set of policies that works for you as an organization, that also meets donor expectations and sort of nonprofit like industry standards. Again, we worked with a lawyer to help construct our bylaws, but I had to do a lot of research into different bylaw setups. And you know, do we want term limits or not? How do we stagger terms? What do we like? We had to build a handbook and what goes in our handbook and how do we handle hiring policies? It's a whole different insurance that you have to get directors and officers insurance, whole different insurance that you have to get directors and officers insurance. And so there's all these puzzle pieces where it felt like starting a whole new business again, even though I was continuing the same idea. It was a different game now.
Andy Heise:Yeah yeah, you were playing by different rules and different structure, so, yeah, you had to redefine a lot of those things, yeah, exactly.
Nick Petrella:Emily, do you find it difficult to?
Emily Haussler:ask for donations or support.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, exactly, emily, do you?
Emily Haussler:find it difficult to ask for donations or support. It depends on the person and the type of ask. I'm not sure anyone finds it extraordinarily easy to ask for donations and support. I try to view this as if I'm just a salesperson. Fundraising is just sales, but instead of selling shoes I'm selling a mission and an impact, and it's normal and it's part of the job and it's nothing to feel guilty about. So that's my baseline framing.
Emily Haussler:I try to also operate under the assumption that people want to help and that has generally, in my experience, proven true. So the way that I will communicate the ask is like I'm just providing information for people who already want to help and they already want to support, rather than convincing them that they should help or support, rather than convincing them that they should help or support it. You know it depends if it's a, if it's a person I know supports the company and it's an easy, like a hundred dollar ask, no problem. If it's like a $5,000 ask with a new donor that we're approaching and we're trying to build a relationship to, you know, get them to give in addition to another arts organization, to give to us as well, or to maybe move some of their donation. That is way trickier.
Nick Petrella:Um, I imagine those bigger asks in the multiple thousands do you have some sort of lead that you know? Do you have a conduit, somebody who kind of floats a trial balloon, say, hey, would you be interested? Or surely these aren't just cold calls.
Emily Haussler:I don't think any of them are pure cold calls. We are always trying to build the relationship first, one of our favorite, you know I'll say that we get connected with these potential large donors, sometimes through our board members. You know they're networking within their circles, sometimes through our company dancers, sometimes just through friends of the company in the community who say, hey, do you know so? And so they might. They might be interested in supporting this. I think there's an alignment there. So whoever our connection is, they'll set up the initial email connect and then we'll usually spend a good amount of time just cultivating the relationship.
Emily Haussler:Getting coffee, asking for a phone call, asking for advice, is one of my favorite things to do with. Like larger dollar donors, you know what's their experience or advice, what's interesting to them about the work, and the first conversation I have, you know, never even has a money ask attached to it. There, as we kind of keep going, we'll try to scale our ask to see if there's interest. So I also won't do a cold ask for, you know, 10 grand right off the bat, but it's usually once I've ascertained their interest I'll try to do a really targeted ask. You know, hey, we're launching this new program. It's going to have a scholarship for a student. I know you really value dance education access. Could you give $500 to sponsor the scholarship and and kind of get them in that way and then tons of thank yous for the impact that that has and then kind of scaling up. So I mean, you know it's, it's a process, yeah.
Andy Heise:That's good. I love your comment about you know you think people generally want to. If you're having the conversation with them, you think they generally want to support what you're doing. And in order for them to do that, you have to make the ask right. You do, and here's how you can help.
Emily Haussler:You do.
Andy Heise:Yeah, yeah, you have to be direct. Yeah, I think Eduardo Placer maybe mentioned that in our last podcast series. Anyways, so at the time of this recording, you're getting ready for your biggest show of the year. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Emily Haussler:Absolutely so our show that's coming up. It's called Falling Forward. It is an original evening length modern dance concert choreographed by myself in collaboration with the Full Company. We have been in progress for this show since late October of 2023. So by the time it goes up, it will have had about five and a half months in rehearsal and I think we've worked on this for over 130 hours would be my best estimate of it really in-depth creation process. We have probably created about two hours of dance and then honed and cut it down to a 50-minute piece. So there's a lot of research, a lot of work, a lot of refinement that goes into these original full-length creations that the company does.
Emily Haussler:This will be my fourth with Resilience and this particular show. It really deals with humanity's encounter with ai technology and this um, this idea that the world's always been ending, that each generation deals with its own technological, like panic and like crisis moments, um, and so know, what does AI kind of look like in that scope? We didn't want to make a doomsday piece. So, considering this, this historical context, it's a little bit comedic. And then also working with this, this feeling that that informed the title, but this feeling that technology and progress is starting to move at a rate that really feels impossible to keep up with, to try to perceive, to understand, to educate ourselves about, to learn about potential risk and benefits. It feels near impossible to do that before. It's just on top of you and it's snuck into your life in ways that you don't even realize yet.
Emily Haussler:I was talking about this example with the company where I feel like all of my softwares integrated with AI and I just popped up to work on my computer one day and now it's just there and it's built in and I had no say in the matter. So we're also kind of reckoning with that feeling of falling forward through time and space as progress outstrips humanity, and how do we deal with that? How do we cope with that? So this show it'll be 50 minutes long will be this main work. It has a short piece that opens it by another local choreographer, jacob Haynes, and it'll take place April 12th through 14th at Intersect Arts Center in St Louis. You can get tickets online through our website, there's a link in our Instagram bio and we'll also have virtual tickets available after the in-person premieres, and the tickets range between $15 and $20, but we always hold open an accessible option of a free ticket or a sliding scale ticket for those in need.
Andy Heise:That's great, I'd say. There's certainly people out there that can identify with that theme.
Emily Haussler:Yes, yes, definitely.
Nick Petrella:Emily, you seem to create a lot of collaborative pieces. Who owns those pieces and do you have agreements in place for each collaboration?
Emily Haussler:Yeah. So the employment agreement that the company dancers sign indicates that all of the work that they create kind of during resilience time is going to, as part of a resilience collaborative process, that work is going to belong to resilience. So when we're in these collaborative full-length pieces, technically the company owns those works. It's not as if each company dancer builds their own section and then we stick them all together. As I was kind of saying before. They all generate these different movement vocabularies and phrases and then we work kind of emergently to put them together in interesting ways and then I come in and edit and shape and rearrange and squish them all up so that it would be really really hard for a dancer to even identify like oh, that one was mine and like take it to use somewhere else. So it's usually not a point of contention in the style of collaboration that we use, where the company owning it, you know, might feel exploitative, we don't really hit that. It feels organic and integrated.
Emily Haussler:When we have guest choreographers in and if those guest choreographers work in collaborative ways, then those commitments, you know, those movements generated, are the property of the choreographer. We have licensing agreements with the choreographer so they retain their original rights to the works and then we license those works as part of their artist fee for two years. And then the only other situation I'll mention is sort of like what's going to come up with collective realities? If the company is commissioning our employees to make choreography, to set their own original works, then we're going to have that licensing agreement again. So the company dancers for this upcoming show will actually own their works versus the company owning their works. So yeah, I will also quickly mention that we don't have a non-compete, so the company dancers are always free to create and make and perform outside of resilience, without any type of issue.
Andy Heise:Yeah, and I think you know that's another sort of interesting dynamic with a nonprofit is you know, while you started it and you're the director and you manage it and do all of that, anything that belongs to the nonprofit doesn't necessarily belong to you. The creator right. It belongs to the public, right, it's a public benefit. So it's just another interesting dynamic for artists who think they want to start nonprofits realize that when you do that, you're giving up the ownership of the stuff that you create in that company.
Emily Haussler:You absolutely are. Yes, Usually by default usually yeah.
Emily Haussler:You can make policies to not, and I think you know, depending on how resilience grows, and you know, if I were to get like commission opportunities and really want to take choreography elsewhere, then it would be a conversation about okay, well, is my resilience salary going to increase, and you know resilience would keep the rights to all of this, or do I need to start having licensing with the company? To you know, up to this point I haven't, I haven't felt that pressure or been concerned, but that is definitely an element to consider.
Andy Heise:Yeah Well, Emily, we've reached the part of the interview where we ask all of our interviewees the same three questions, and the first question is what advice would you give to others wanting to become an arts entrepreneur?
Emily Haussler:Absolutely Get out and see the art that you're interested in you know working with.
Emily Haussler:So for me, it was getting out and seeing dance and meeting the people who are creating it, following people on Instagram who I'm inspired by, learning more about their work and how they made that work a reality.
Emily Haussler:I did send a lot of cold emails to people who I thought were inspiring, asking for coffee, dates and that's you know. Their generosity is how I learned to make contracts and build a resource system and set up baby accounting and just hear on the ground sort of anecdotal evidence of how to run a company. Um, so I really just encouraged people interested in in starting their own arts businesses to to go out and see what's being done and get connected with the people who are doing it. And then after that, like, just don't be afraid to try things. I say frequently, throw things at the wall and see what sticks, but make sure you collect the data from each experiment that you do. So just don't be afraid to try, but then learn from that and it'll help you shape your programs and serve your audience better and kind of know who you're hitting through these different ideas that you may have. Ultimately, I think you need to make the art and the business that you want to make, and not the one you think you have to make as well.
Nick Petrella:That's good yeah.
Emily Haussler:Yeah.
Nick Petrella:What can we do to ensure the arts are more accessible and reaching the widest possible audience?
Emily Haussler:I would say, continue to educate on the breadth of art that occurs and keep uplifting it in a very non-hierarchical way. I think about assumptions that people hold about the arts industry and it's usually that old institutions are the only ones making art, that your general artist is usually starving and not making a lot of money from this field, and that the arts are expensive to engage with and only for a limited few. And I try to challenge those assumptions wherever I can, whenever I come up against them, by normalizing dance and art as really far-reaching and a very successful industry that has so many different pathways and so many different nuanced offerings for your different audience members. I think you know engaging with dance doesn't have to mean going to a theater. It could mean going to a street fair or an art gallery, dance collaboration or taking a class or watching a video or any of these many things. So just challenging those assumptions and sort of broadening our view of the arts industry as a whole.
Andy Heise:And lastly, what's the best artistic or entrepreneurial advice you've ever been given?
Emily Haussler:I was given this advice very early on. I think my second coffee date that I had before resilience was born after I made an independent concert and another creator, another business owner, said don't be too quick to try someone else's way of doing things. That option will always be there for you, but try your idea first and see what happens. Build a new model, take a risk, and the old ways will still be there if you need to fall back on them.
Nick Petrella:Love that, Emily. It's great hearing your story and learning how you're growing your nonprofit in real time. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Emily Haussler:Thank you so much for having me.
Andy Heise:Thanks for your time.
Announcer:Thanks for listening. If you like this podcast, please subscribe. Visit artsentrepreneurshippodcastcom to learn more about our guest and how you can help support artists, the arts and this podcast. You.
