Companies: The State of Dancers in NYC

[davidg]

One would expect the distribution of dance companies to follow a power law --- that is, there are a small number of high-budget companies and many small-budget companies. Moreover, the money spent on the small number of high-budget companies --- and audience penetration too --- will dwarf that spent by all the small companies combined.

 

Power laws occur in the distributions of many things: personal wealth, size of hurricanes, size of nations, etc.

 

So the fact that only 15 out of 400+ companies have a budget >$1m is simply an indication that there's an expected power law in effect here. The more amazing thing here is that there are actually 15 companies with budgets over $1m. I doubt any other city in America has close to that many dance companies of that size.

 

Another interesting thing would be to divide the number of dance companies >$1m by the number of people in the city or metro area. NYC is the largest city in the USA, so one would expect it to have more dance companies than other cities simply for that reason. However, LA is the second-largest city and has relatively little for its population.