Dance Production (Dance Pro) is one of the largest and most popular clubs on Occidental’s campus, with hundreds in the audience during its annual Spring show. According to one of the club’s treasurers, Aenea Briggs (sophomore), one main obstacle lurks behind Thorne Hall’s curtains during these highly anticipated end-of-semester performances: funding. Briggs said that their Spring show costs a total of $8,376, which includes the reservation cost of both Thorne and Booth Center (which is used as dressing rooms and a backstage area), the cleaning fee and the lighting cost.
Assistant Dean of Students and the Director of Student Leadership, Involvement, & Community Engagement (SLICE) Marcus Rodriguez said that he works closely with the students and staff in the SLICE office to support student life and all of the various activities hosted on campus. According to Rodriguez, the Associated Students of Occidental College (ASOC) are available to provide assistance to clubs on campus with fundraising.
“ASOC offers financial stewardship training and support via the Finance Manager for ASOC which is a professional staff member dedicated to assisting clubs, primarily treasurers, with strategically planning their fiscal year spending, financial projections, cost analysis, tracking spending, and preparing finance reports for their organizations,” Rodriguez said.
Recognized clubs on campus are also given access to GiveCampus fundraising and donations from Occidental’s annual giving campaigns to help with their funds, according to Rodriguez.
Briggs said that the biggest event that Dance Pro collects funds for is their yearly performance at Thorne Hall. The club focuses on gaining enough income throughout the year to cover the expenses according to Briggs.
Briggs said that the club doesn’t receive any funding from ASOC, and that the fundraising policies for all campus clubs were changed this year which caused the club to struggle more than usual.
“In the past, you’d use the ASOC credit cards to buy your supplies for your fundraiser, and you wouldn’t have to pay them back for the amount that it cost to get the items,” Briggs said. “But they changed it so this year we have to pay them back for all of the things that we bought, so we’re making significantly less with our fundraisers because we have to break even in order to have a profit, whereas in the past we would’ve had a profit no matter what.”
According to ASOC President Zander Patent (junior), there has not been a single ASOC funding request from Dance Pro this year. Via email, Patent said the only case where students request funding through ASOC and have to return the principal investment is when they apply for funding from the Sustainability Fund. According to Patent, there are no policies that say clubs need to reimburse ASOC for using the ASOC credit card.
A large part of Dance Pro’s funding comes from the dancer dues that all members of the club have to pay. According to Briggs, each dancer pays $20 at the start of each year that is either charged to their student account or paid in cash. She said that if the payment is an issue for a student, then the club will waive the cost in order to make Dance Pro more accessible.
“Because we have so many students, [dancer dues] are a big source of income for us,” Briggs said. “It’s not ideal just because $20 is a lot to ask of students to pay and we want Dance Pro to be accessible to everyone. It would be ideal to not have it be that expensive or to just not have dancer dues in general, but we just don’t get any funding from anywhere else, so we have to charge that.”
One of the other major sources of revenue for Dance Pro is the ticket prices for their performances, Briggs said. This year, the prices are increasing slightly to accommodate for the changes in ASOC’s fundraising policies according to Briggs. The student prices are going up by $1 while the general admission prices are going up by $2. This raises the prices to $11 and $17, respectively, Briggs said.
“There’s a lot of things that we’re spending a lot of money on, so we needed to have more income, which is unfortunate but we just have no other way to receive the funding that we need,” Briggs said. “It hopefully shouldn’t be too bad and if people pre-order their tickets, if you’re a student, it’ll only be one more dollar.”
Dance Pro also hosts fundraisers on campus throughout the course of the year. According to Julia Hutchinson (junior), the other treasurer of the club, most of the fundraisers are food and drink based since those are popular amongst the student body. The club also has special holiday fundraisers, such as Halloween gift bags or chocolate covered strawberries on Valentine’s Day.
Considering the large amount of money that Dance Pro has to raise with only their own efforts, both Briggs and Hutchinson said that they hope to find a way to lower the cost of reserving Thorne Hall as soon as possible. After their upcoming show is finished, they are looking to make a solid plan to create a proposal for cheapening the price of the venue for next year’s show.
“We’re going to put together a presentation and pose it to them and talk about how we don’t get ASOC funding and how it’s kind of ridiculous how expensive Thorne is,” Hutchinson said. “Of course we’re happy to pay fees for the lighting or for cleaning, but the $5,000 just for reserving the hall is kind of ridiculous. We’re just going to make a proposal and see who we can talk to.”
More than anything, Briggs and Hutchinson, along with the other leaders of Dance Pro, wish for the club to become more accessible to all students in future years. This can be made possible if the club is given more financial support from the school itself, according to Hutchinson.
“Whether the money comes from ticket sales or fundraisers or dancer dues, it all comes from the students who already pay to go here,” Hutchinson said. “So we think more of the money should actually be coming from Oxy, especially since we’re the biggest club and they use us so much for promotions and other things like that.”
Contact Izzy Shotwell at shotwell@oxy.edu.
This story was edited at 5:00 pm, March 3, to reflect ASOC’s position on funding policies.
