Job Creation
Question: What’s the fastest way to attract a waiter’s attention in a crowded New York restaurant? Answer: Just yell: “Actor!” or “Dancer!” It’s an old joke, but a revealing one because it tells an inconvenient truth about the way many young artists in the United States – and various other countries – actually pay the rent.
In fact, when I first visited Jason Akira Somma in New York, he told me his own real-life version of the joke: “A European film crew recently asked if they could shoot some footage of me ‘at work’. I said: ‘Sure’ and provided them with the street address. But when they arrived at the location, the director looked really confused. It took me a moment to figure out why. They were expecting to find me in some pristine rehearsal studio choreographing a dance – rather than waiting tables at the Jaffa Café in lower Manhattan. ‘I thought we were going to film you at work,’ said the director, trying to conceal his obvious frustration. ‘But this is where I work,’ I told him.”
The ironic twist to this tale is that the dance company of Somma’s mentor for the 2008/2009 Rolex programme is one of the most generously subsidised in the world: the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT).
Jason Akira Somma grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and attended an experimental public school that allowed him to spend 50 per cent of his time studying visual arts. Later, during his time studying dance at Virginia Commonwealth University, Somma’s passion for the visual arts began to creep back into his life: “I made an important discovery very early on in my college years,” he says. “Other dance students started commissioning me to do photo shoots for them or to document their choreography on video.
Economic pragmatism played a role in helping to define Somma’s eventual career path: “In the U.S.,” he observes, “public funding for the arts hardly exists; and dancers and choreographers are the peasants of the art world. My hybridization is partly a new way of trying to survive as a dance artist in America. By transferring dance from its ephemeral state to a more permanent state via photography and video, I have more options for showing and selling my work.”