The funding freeze that President Trump instituted earlier this week has had ripple effects in the dance community. Choreographer Jody Sperling, whose company Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance often engages creatively with the issue of climate change, was told that the troupe had lost a major State Department grant—just before leaving for the tour that grant was supposed to fund. During Sperling’s interview with Dance Magazine, news broke that the freeze had been rescinded. As of publication, Sperling is still unsure how her situation could be affected. Here is her story.
Update: On February 1, Sperling received word from the U.S. Embassy that the grant had in fact been terminated.
At 8 am on Sunday morning, I woke up to a missed call from a Washington, DC, area code. It was the day before we were to leave on tour, and I’d been planning to pack and get everything together. The message was from somebody in the State Department telling me to call them back. When I got a hold of them, I was told the $30,210 grant that was partially funding our project no longer “effectuates agency priorities,” so it was terminated, and we should cease activities immediately.
We’d been planning this tour for almost three years. The director of Hakawy International Arts Festival for Children in Egypt—which brings international artists to do really innovative programming for kids of all backgrounds—wanted Time Lapse to perform. We had secured a $12,750 grant from Mid Atlantic Arts. Then the U.S. Embassy in Cairo awarded around $30,000. Time Lapse did a fundraiser to cover the rest.
We spent months working out the programming and logistics for six shows plus workshops in three cities. Mid Atlantic Arts had already told me that we would have to give back their entire grant if we didn’t perform. We’d purchased the plane tickets. The dancers had cleared their schedules, and I had contracts with them. So I realized: It’s not going to cost us much more to go than not to go. We might as well go.
I started making phone calls. I texted anyone I could think of who might have some means or some sway. But by the time I landed in Egypt, potential funders had been inundated with emergency appeals from others who’d lost funding.
We’d already gotten a $10,000 deposit for the Embassy grant, and can document enough expenses that we won’t have to give that back. We have $10,000 in fundraising pledges so far, and a board member and another supporter have offered loans to get us through the next few months.
So whatever happens, we’re not going to go bust over this. But there are going to be a lot of people hurting financially. People are scared, wondering how they’re going to be affected. It’s really concerning—not just the chaos, but also the fear of the chaos.
At one point on Sunday, the festival director asked me, “Well, do you have another show that’s not climate-related?” They assumed, rightly or wrongly, that our project’s climate message was the reason for the termination.
Even before this, I’d had a conversation with a grant writer, because the National Endowment for the Arts deadlines are in February, and I was thinking, Boy, I wonder what’s going to change. If climate change is an integral part of your work, how do you write a proposal to an administration that is actively not wanting to draw attention to that science? I think we’re going to find that some of us are maybe more cautious about how we communicate. Others may feel emboldened to say things that they never would have said before.
I really hope that we can continue not just to survive, but to grow. Because there is power in what we do, and I think it’s time to wield that power. Sometimes it feels so small in the face of the looming storm cloud. But I also feel like it isn’t insignificant.
