- December 26, 2024
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Many dancers spend so much time training and trying to land a job with a company that they rarely think about their second act. What will they do when their bodies grow older or injured and can no longer perform?
At Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Artistic Director Leymis Bolaños Wilmott is thinking about that for them.
Each of the dancers has a job in the company besides performing. Monessa Salley is the production lead, handling lighting and running the In-Studio Series of performances in the company’s studio at 1400 Boulevard of the Arts. Juliana Cristina is responsible for development and marketing. MaKayla Lane is the company’s administrative assistant. Those are just a few examples of the dual roles that SCD team members hold.
The pay structure at the nonprofit dance company is also unusual. “We don’t have a Christmas tree pay structure where the person at the top makes all the money,” says Bolaños Wilmott. “Everybody gets paid the same.”
In case you’re wondering what that number is, SCD is advertising on Indeed for a part-time general manager to work 30 hours a week. The pay is $17.50 an hour.
Like other dance companies, SCD brings in revenue by selling tickets to performances like its upcoming show, “Voices: Rising Choreographers” May 2-5 at FSU Center for the Performing Arts. The company also teaches different types of dance to children and adults in the community.
SCD’s summer intensive series is the pipeline for recruiting new members and artistic works for its company from outside Sarasota. The “Voices” show at FSU showcases the work of choreographers from the SCD 2023 Summer Intensive Series selected by Bolaños Wilmott.
To obtain funding, Bolaños Wilmott applies for grants. SCD also holds an annual fundraiser. Its most recent one was March 2 at the Venice Airport and had the theme “Come Fly With Me.” The event was modeled on TV’s “Dancing With the Stars,” with attendees paired with SCD professionals to compete for prizes.
The daughter of Cuban immigrants, Bolaños Wilmott grew up in Hialeah outside Miami and received all her dance training through public schools. As a child, she knew she wanted to dance, choreograph and teach. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Florida and a master’s degree at Florida State University. “When I look back at my prayer journals, I see I wanted to have a movement studio,” she says.
But she didn’t dream about founding her own dance company. That came about “organically” 18 years ago after she moved to Sarasota to run a dance outreach program for FSU.
“At the time, I was teaching a class at the YWCA with students who had gone to Booker High School, left Sarasota for college and come back,” Bolaños Wilmott says. “We got together to do a performance at Arts Day, which was big outdoor festival that the Arts Alliance used to host.”
One thing led to another. It wasn’t long before SCD’s first president, Nelson Neal, mentioned the company during a Q&A following a performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall. “When Nelson stood up and identified himself as the president of Sarasota Contemporary Dance, the audience went, ‘Oooh,’” Bolaños Wilmott says.
Bolaños Wilmott was convinced that any respectable arts town needed a contemporary dance troupe. “I realized there was a need,” she says. “The ballet was going strong, but there wasn’t a contemporary dance company here.”
Other people shared her belief, including Muriel Gordon Mayers, a dance educator and fiduciary accountant who became SCD’s founding board member. Mayers, who is in her mid-90s, is still active on the board.
When Gordon Mayers turned 90, SCD honored her by putting her name on the box office.
Another early supporter was Deborah Vinton, who let the company rehearse in a warehouse she owned before SCD got its own home on 1300 Boulevard of the Arts seven years ago. Booker High School and New College also allowed SCD to rehearse in their spaces.
Getting its own studio at a marquee address next to the Sarasota Ballet School was a game changer for SCD. Using floor-to-ceiling black curtains in the third-floor studio, the company is able create a black box performance space for its own shows and those of other artists.
“We started these black box series for artists in development,” Bolaños Wilmott says. “We’ve had poets in here. We’ve had actors. We’ve had musicians and we’ve had dance. We love to collaborate. Our company is known to collaborate with visual artists and musicians.”
Having her own studio was a bigger deal for Bolaños Wilmott than it might have been for other artists. When she was growing up in a family as one of three girls, all her dance classes took place at public schools.
If one of the daughters got something, all of them got it. “My parents didn’t have the money to send three girls to lessons at a private dance studio,” she says.
To honor her family’s history, Bolaños Wilmott choreographed a program called “Cuban Project: Mi Historia, Tu Historia, y Nuestro Historia (My Story, Your Story, Our Story)” that was been performed in Sarasota, Bradenton and Miami.
Set to music by José G. Martinez and Hugo Viera-Vargas, the show tells the story of Cuban children who came to the U.S. in the early 1960s unaccompanied by their parents through a clandestine program called Operation Peter Pan.
Both of Bolaños Wilmott’s parents emigrated to the U.S. through the initiative, designed to protect children from the Communist policies of Castro. They were later reunited with their parents in the U.S.
While it brought them to the U.S., Operation Peter Pan created upheaval and trauma among its 14,000 child participants and their families, which Bolaños Wilmott attempts to embody with “Cuban Project.” Although Bolaños Wilmott’s parents both were part of Operation Peter Pan, they didn’t meet until they were in high school.
Bolaños Wilmott says she expects to produce the program again, but she will probably not let her daughter dance in the next iteration because she is getting old enough to understand the painful implications of the piece.
There were some tough times for Bolaños Wilmott’s family members, including a stay in an orphanage for her mother, cramped quarters and infrequent luxuries like “a half-gallon of ice cream on Saturday night where each person got a scoop.”
As Bolaños Wilmott wraps up SCD’s 2023-24 season and gets ready for its summer intensive program, there are still some things on her wish list.
One is no secret. Anyone who looks at the wall in SCD’s lobby can read the words “Future SCD Donor Wall...”
Bolaños Wilmott is looking for a major benefactor that can help secure the company’s legacy and underwrite its rent costs. Despite Sarasota’s seeming abundance of generous arts patrons, that person isn’t easy to find, she says, because the company doesn’t have the funds to attend Black Tie events, where seat prices can be as high as $500.
“We’re thankful to our smaller donors,” she says. “But getting substantial foundation money, we’re still working on that.”
Still, serendipity and hard work have brought Bolaños Wilmott and SCD this far. Surely, the company’s winning streak will continue and the Donor Wall won’t remain empty.
