Supporting the Dance Sector. Does Efficiency Clash with Success When Programming?

Dance has received scant attention in economic literature perhaps because it is an activity that appears under a number of legal forms and diverse formats and due to the fact that –in many instances- it is affected by a high degree of instability time-wise, thus making it difficult to have the necessary data available required for economic analysis. Nevertheless, this sector’s dependence on public funding provides grounds for it to be the subject of performance related studies. This work aims to offer an evaluation process for a public project designed to spread dance in Spain. The project involves a number of stakeholders: public authorities, performance venues and dance companies. Each participant plays a role in the project: public authorities provide the funding while the theatres and dance companies offer the artistic idea that is taken to the audience. By applying Data Envelopment Analysis techniques (DEA), the present work seeks to evaluate the efficiency of the stakeholders involved in the project, as well as the efficiency of the programme itself by relating resources and objectives. We find that efficiency in resource performance often runs counter to other cultural aims such as increasing audiences or extending repertoire diversity.