In his interview, Francisco Gella of COLABO Youth Dance Collective asked his fellow Celebrate Dance 2013 artists: How have they attained long standing success as a concert dance company within a city where commercial dance seems to be the dominating industry?

Here is the answer we have received so far.

Laura Karlin
Artistic Director
Invertigo Dance Theatre

Invertigo is only 5 years old, so I don't know if it can be categorised as a long-standing success . . . yet! I founded the company in 2007 right when the recession began and it's taken time to build a solid foundation. We have to be creative in our fundraising and our administrative set-up so that we have the budget and infrastructure to support our programming. It is not possible without an amazing team of dedicated people.

I don't view the commercial scene as being in competition with the concert scene. I think they feed one another. Some of our dancers also dance in commercial projects and because we schedule things in advance and have contracts in place, that hasn't been disruptive to our rehearsal process. It's also really important to me that we pay our dancers per rehearsal and per performance, which allows them to make our projects a priority if money is an issue.

Also, concert dance has been growing in LA over the last 10 years and we have a really vibrant scene at the moment. That's why Celebrate Dance is so amazing - Jamie picks out artists from a really rich array of talent that's out there.