Frequently Asked Questions

ARCOS offers the Dance Artist Development Award (DADA) in recognition of the critical need for support to enable independent artists working at the professional level to expand their creative horizons. The award is intended to give dance artists in Austin the opportunity to take a risk by exploring methods beyond their established practices in two ways. First, by offering financial and peer support to the awarded finalists, and secondly, by providing a process by which all applicants can practice and improve the necessary skills of successful grant writing. Three finalists are selected to receive awards by a national panel of dance artists.

The artists with the three highest-scoring applications will receive $1,500, $750, and $500 to carry out their proposed development plans—for example, to participate in a workshop, class series, training, or another development opportunity that will broaden or propel their artistic practice. Awardees are required to submit a final report upon completing the activities, confirming that they used the funds as proposed.

The DADA program is designed to encourage the pursuit of ongoing training and lifelong learning for contemporary performing artists to cultivate sustainable, refined creative practices. Consider a direction you would like to take your personal practice and propose a step or two that the DADA could help launch you in those directions. Prior recipients have proposed to use the development funds to carry out educational, training, or development activities at a professional level to stretch the boundaries of their artistic practices into areas with which they are not already deeply familiar: exploring new movement modalities within and outside of our community, working with mentors to strengthen their self-producing capacity, and conducting leadership training in the arts as a method of social engagement and activism. General examples may include an ongoing class series, specialized workshops, interdisciplinary seminars for artists, private or group somatic training, or individualized mentoring or lessons in specialized techniques.

Simply put, the DADA supports people, not projects. As mentioned above, the purpose of the DADA is to catalyze the kind of personal artistic growth that can happen in the rare instances when we give ourselves the time and space outside of the context and demands of regular creative projects. Proposed training or mentorship plans should be designed to benefit the applying artist in the longer term, though it may also serve a shorter-term, project-specific objective. The DADA microgrant funds cannot be used for any ARCOS educational or development programming. 

Applicants for the DADA must satisfy the following eligibility requirements:

Applicants should clearly articulate and demonstrate an established personal practice in dance performance and/or choreography and a vision to broaden their creative horizons through a detailed plan of training and development. Ideally, the proposed plan will also align with ARCOS’ mission to experiment rigorously to discover adventurous new forms.

All applicants will be reviewed by a three-member panel of professional dance artists based outside of the Austin community. ARCOS assembles representatives from diverse artistic, educational, personal, and cultural backgrounds and at various stages of their careers to evaluate applicants’ submissions detailing past creative accomplishments, current practice, and the articulation of their development goals. Panelists do not have explicit ties to Austin’s dance community. ARCOS considers the application process a significant part of the development opportunity for applying artists, especially for those who have not applied for a grant before. Each applicant is eligible to receive feedback on their applications from panelists in an online meeting. Information about the 2024 panelists can be found here.

There is no fee to apply for the DADA. However, for those interested in supporting the award fund and the program’s expansion, ARCOS accepts tax-deductible contributions, which can be made here.

Fill out the online application when applications are open. It is recommended to write the responses in a separate document and paste them when completed into the online application fields for submission; writing directly in the browser may result in lost work.