How dancers survive amid L.A. dance company closures

Earlier this month, Bodytraffic celebrated its 20th anniversary in unorthodox style: by taking its final bow in Los Angeles at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The company is the latest L.A. dance troupe to shutter in recent years, joining L.A. Contemporary Dance Company, Crawlspace LA, Live Arts Los Angeles and EDGE Performing Arts Center.

Dance in L.A. frequently feels fleeting, especially as institutions continue to reel from the COVID-19 pandemic, diminishing grant opportunities and economic headwinds. The L.A. dance scene is known for being scrappy, but the latest closures make every moment in the studio and on stage even more precarious. Dancers are turning to each other for support and professional favors, and are performing in unconventional venues, including art galleries.

Andrew Pearson, a choreographer and founder of the dance collective Bodies in Play, grew up in the Bay Area but personifies L.A. dance, having studied Horton technique under Loretta Livingston (a former dancer with Bella Lewitzky’s company), landed his first big dance company gig in L.A. with Bodytraffic and performed with L.A. Contemporary Dance Company for seven years.

“Their values, their ethos, their creativity do not stop,” Pearson said of dancers.

“I like to think of L.A. as the wild west, so there’s this entrepreneurial spirit in L.A. and in art in L.A.,” Andrew Pearson of Bodies in Play said.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

On May 27, Pearson announced that Bodies in Play had officially become a nonprofit organization after 10 years as an independent, project-based collective. Bodies in Play began as he tried to navigate dance in the city as a choreographer, searching for the professional steps needed to advance his craft. Then he got caught up in the race to perform at certain festivals and venues, turning his career into a checklist.

“I was like, ‘This is not why I started making dance,’” he said over coffee in East Hollywood in April, days after filing his nonprofit application. “‘How do I get back to that 5-year-old who made dances in my playroom just for fun?’ I started giving myself permission to play and see what I made.”

Seeking 501(c)(3) status is a big leap, even as the dance landscape drastically shifts, but it felt inevitable.

“I like to think of L.A. as the wild west, so there’s this entrepreneurial spirit in L.A. and in art in L.A.,” he said. “If you have an idea, and the gumption enough to go for it, you can probably find an audience for it.”

This entrepreneurial spirit led Kate Hutter Mason to establish LACDC in 2005 and the El Sereno dance studio Stomping Ground in 2020, and it brought Lillian Rose Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett together to start Bodytraffic in 2007. More recently, it motivated Dani Burd to start Indigo Dance Company in 2024.

“Everyone has their own trajectory, and I think every season for us has been so different each time,” Burd said. “I don’t think that it’s a deterrent seeing these companies close down, I just think that it’s information on how things have changed. The blueprint that used to be followed might not be the blueprint that works today.”

Burd appreciates creating with her company, because “everything is impermanent,” she said. When she starts a new project with her co-director, Madi Thomas, they never know what will happen in the dance studio, but then there’s this moment when everything clicks, when all the risks reach a reward. Burd recalled locking eyes with Thomas in those instances, smiling wildly as they realized their big ideas landed.

“A lot of the challenges that are happening right now are of the times,” Burd said. “They’re reflecting what’s going on in our country, and I think it’s important that we all try to stick together through it and keep dancing.”

Pieter Performance Space, a Black- and queer-led arts space, turned to a dance-a-thon on May 16. The event was part of a larger emergency fundraiser to raise $75,000 by June 30 to stabilize staffing and operations for the rest of the year.

Rosalie Tucker stands near a house plant in a studio.

“I would say, most, if not all, small nonprofits, particularly small arts nonprofits, are experiencing the result of losing access to grant funding,” said Rosalie Tucker, the executive director of Pieter.

Grants for the arts have been severely cut during Donald Trump’s presidency. In his 2026 budget proposal, Trump called to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, directly impacting artists in L.A. Following the 2024 election, Pieter reported receiving almost 75% less grant funding. The space had obtained grant support from the California Arts Council every year since the 2017-2018 cycle, with its last one being an almost $38,500 grant for general operating support for 2023-2024. The council has since had its funding cut by Gov. Gavin Newsom from $33 million in 2023 to about $19.5 million by 2025, and Pieter has not secured funding from the council since.

Jmy James Kidd founded Pieter in 2010, and it operated as a DIY community space before becoming a nonprofit in 2015. The pandemic forced the prior location to close and shift to virtual programming, but it has since reopened in Lincoln Heights with a stronger focus on accessibility. Part of the effort was to subsidize its community rentals, which were funded by grants that are now gone.

Lena Martin leans against Mandolin Burns as they dance.

Crawlspace LA, which closed in February, similarly started as a space for dancers to congregate and experiment. Co-founders and partners Lena Martin and Mandolin Burns graduated from CalArts, and in their search for a place to live, they found a loft in the Arts District where they could potentially perform.

After signing the lease, they turned their living room into a makeshift performance space and announced its debut in February 2024. It opened with concrete floors and later received Marley flooring from Live Arts Los Angeles, which closed in August 2023, and foam pads from ICA LA’s “Infinite Rehearsal” exhibition, which ran until January 2024. They collected from the community to create something new.

“The L.A. dance scene feels very tired because everybody has to work so hard and create all these DIY spaces, process-based spaces,” Burns said. “The dancers are making it all happen themselves all the time, and right now, with the way things are shifting politically and economically, the dance world is tired and dry, and it needs life breathed into it.”

The decision to end Crawlspace came as Burns and Martin started to rely too heavily on the income from programming to afford the space, and they were preparing to get married in May 2026.

“Somebody told me that DIY has to die in order for it to stay what it is,” Martin said.

Adie San Diego sits on a chair in a studio.

For independent artists getting started in L.A., like Adie San Diego, who received a master’s from CalArts in 2025, finding places to create requires a lot of community support. She just presented “Terms of Agreement” at the Santa Monica performance space Highways after starting the rehearsal process through a CalArts-run residency at the Reef in downtown L.A. It was a saving grace.

“For dancers, we want the space and sometimes the privacy to create this world that we want to build, but if the finances don’t align with that, you’re not always given that space,” she said.

She enters the dance landscape following major closures, which made her realize nothing lasts forever. She sees beauty in it, because “artists can have more than one life in these lifetimes,” she said. “What they’ve achieved in the many years in L.A. shows that their purpose was really seen through, fully.”

In April 2024, Bodies in Play presented a counter-tribute to “A Chorus Line” at LA Dance Project. In it, Pearson delivered an opening monologue about his desire to quit dancing. At the end of the routine, he recalled quoting Cassie in the musical: “I’m a dancer! A dancer dances.”

“I don’t know what else to do,” Pearson added.

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