The Life of a Performer - A Rant With a Moral (sort of)

When people hear "professional dancer" they usually think of a glamorous lifestyle, performing in beautiful air-conditioned theaters and concert halls for upper class audiences or in lovely clean restaurants where the audience delights as you float by their table, smile, and wink. At least that's what I thought when I first started studying seriously.

Well, here I am to ruin this picture for you. Dancers lead a tough life for their art, though I daresay all artists feel that way. Every once in a while, we get to dance in a nice enough theater that at least has fans if not air conditioning. Most of the time, though, usually the stage itself is cool enough, but the dressing rooms are, more often than not, storage closets, attics, or kitchen pantries. We train 3-4 times a week for several hours at a time, unless it's near a performance time, then we train more. We usually sew and alter all our costumes so the night before a performance it's not unusual to find us up cursing at the needle and thread until 3 or 4 in the morning.

We go to a performance and dance our little hearts out hoping that we have touched someone's heart in the audience, hoping against hope that someone out there in the cheap seats recognizes the hard work and effort we've put into bringing something beautiful to their world. Then we go back to our little 100-degree broom closet that sports an unknown black substance on the floor that we know will take about an hour in the shower to clean off, change into our next costume, sweating buckets, trying to keep the black eyeliner and mascara from running into our eyes stinging worse than it already does, and sucking the last drop of water out of the glass. On to the next dance.

Then when all is over, the owner comes in to pay us and gives you half of what we originally set the price at. We argue with him for 20 minutes, hopefully get the rest of our money and walk out with armfuls of bags and suitcases with all the costumes. Typically we usually have a few audience members then come up and validate us a little bit: "Oh my god, you guys are so AWESOME, where can I learn how to do that?" or "Wow, that was an amazing experience, thank you so much!" But there's always one: "Hey that was pretty good. Who do you guys take classes from?" Never mind the training, never mind that we work our asses off choreographing, never mind that I've been performing and teaching professionally for several years. And never mind that I was up until 4 a.m. last night trying to fix the stupid skirt because I seem to have lost 10 lbs in the past week!

So why do I do it? Why dance at all? There are many times I ask myself that question. Wouldn't it be nice to come home after work and all I have to worry about are my cats, cleaning my apartment, which book I'll read next, which vacation I'll take next? Yes, it would be lovely. And I could never do it. Oh, maybe someday I'll retire from performing and just teach, but if dance is in your blood, there's no getting away from it. The sprained ankles, early-onset arthritis, pulled hamstrings, tendonitis, physical exhaustion, all of it is bearable...for dancing. People who don't appreciate our work, an audience member who didn't like it, the comment made by the drunk guy in the corner about how he'd like to remove our costumes for us...these are the things that really make us question whether it's worth it.

End of rant.