NANCY UMANOFF Executive Director, Mark Morris Dance Group
HEADQUARTERS Brooklyn, N.Y.
FOUNDED 1980
PRE-CORONAVIRUS EMPLOYEES 240
EMPLOYEES NOW 122
COVID IMPACT ON REVENUE PROJECTION -35%
COVID IMPACT ON EXPENSE PROJECTION -31%
PPP LOAN $1.1 million
PPP RAN OUT July

When New York City went into mandatory lockdown, the nonprofit Mark Morris Dance Group instantly lost its two biggest sources of revenue: performance fees and dance-class tuition. At first, Executive Director Nancy Umanoff tried to hold on to her staff. She took a 50% pay cut, and Mark Morris, the celebrated choreographer who founded the dance company four decades ago, waived his entire salary. But it wasn’t enough. More sacrifices were needed.

In early April part-time teaching artists at the dance school, which serves 2,000 children and 600 adults annually, were furloughed. A dozen members of the facilities team followed a week later. The stress kept Umanoff awake night after night, playing Wordscapes on her phone.

On Friday, April 17, she woke up anxious. She was ready to announce the third round of furloughs and finalize the details of 10% salary cuts for the remaining staff. But Umanoff got a reprieve. A loan from the Paycheck Protection Program came through. She could call off the latest job cuts.

Then more bad news hit. Some 1,200 miles away in Boca Raton, Fla., her father was rushed to the emergency room for a worsening heart condition. Umanoff drove off with her sister at dawn the next day. Her father’s decline colored much of the spring, and the family buried him on June 21, Father’s Day. “What Covid did was to deny us the ability to mourn in a way that traditions and customs make meaningful,” she says.

At work, the drumbeat of challenges remained constant: keeping dancers—working from home—healthy and socially distant in an art form that requires physical proximity and movement; helping performers afford to keep living in New York.

Umanoff also had to figure out if reopening the dance center at a reduced capacity made financial sense. She says she concluded that it didn’t. “With the increased cost for sanitization, for disinfection, for monitoring, it becomes impossible to make that financial model work,” she says.

Fortunately, the growth curve of new infections and deaths went down and then flattened in New York, and the city’s restrictions began to ease. Some furloughed workers returned in September, and the 10% salary cuts were reversed. Teachers started providing online lessons from the dance studios again, improving the quality. In January some students may be able to return, alternating in-person and remote practice.

Budgets and class offerings remain down, but Umanoff says there are silver linings and new areas of growth.

On May 28 the company premiered Dance On!, four short dances choreographed by Morris and rehearsed via Zoom. The video event was viewed by 4,400 people, some as far away as Australia—more than twice the number who attend the dance group’s live theater performances.

“Technically that was the largest premiere we’ve ever had,” Umanoff says.

From March through August, the company gained 1,400 new donors, who gave from $5 to more than $5,000. In the same period last year, there were 300 donors. Online programs, including Dance On!, added about 6,000 names to the company’s mailing list.

Virtual classes for people with Parkinson’s disease attracted more than 1,200 participants from 38 countries—twice the number of in-person students in New York before the pandemic.

From now on, some of the company’s dance instruction will remain virtual, Umanoff says, and the company is looking for ways to monetize these new online offerings.

“Mark said a couple of months ago, ‘You can’t keep thinking, When this is over, we get back to life,’ ” Umanoff recalls, quoting her boss. “ ‘This is our life. This is it. And this is what we’ve got to live. This is what we’ve got to embrace.’ ”