The trouble with being a dancer is you go into it knowing you're never going to make any money, and then you have to spend the rest of your life contending with that fact if you want to stick with it.
I was told I would be a starving artist from a very young age, which if you think about it is a ridiculous thing to say to a nine-year-old who just said she wanted to be a ballerina. But the more serious I got about dance, the more often I heard it: "you're so smart, you're so good at math and science, why would you want to be a dancer?" I remember teachers, high school counselors, even near-strangers saying that to me so frequently I could predict when someone was about to bring it up. Everyone had an opinion on my brains, talents, and where I was putting them to use. Everyone had a justification for why this time it really was their business what I wanted to do with my life.
Of course, as an adult the irony of it is I know people who went into science and they're not in any better shape financially than I am. But those high school counselors and random people's busybody parents didn't really think I should go into research. They didn't want a scientist. They wanted to make an office worker out of me. I was meant to go to my well-off, predominantly white high school, take all AP courses to make the school look good, attend a prestigious college, and come back to Seattle to work at Boeing or Microsoft or Amazon. Because that would have made Redmond High School look so good on paper.
There's a lot of problems with this narrative. The ratio of good-paying to bad-paying jobs at such companies, and the kinds of work those jobs actually do. The way prestigious universities will invite kids with good test scores to apply, knowing full well they'll reject all but a bare, privileged handful in order to keep their college looking fancy and exclusive. The fact that, although the adults around me couldn't know it at the time, most companies are in the process right now of doing their level best to automate away every job that requires thought, skill, or training so they don't have to hire anybody - or, if they do, so they don't have to pay. In terms of job security and pay rate, I think my work as a dance teacher and personal trainer actually is better off than peers of mine who went into those jobs my school tried to funnel me into.
But dance doesn't matter. It's the silly thing kids do on TikTok, the elitist thing where white women prance around on their tippy toes, the part of musicals that movie musicals seem most eager to put behind them out of some strange kind of shame. The aesthetics of concert dance, the mystique of the backstage space, these fascinate the average nondancer. There are a plethora of stories told about the cutthroat behaviors people imagine for ballerinas (and always, you will note, specifically ballerinas. Modern dance does not exist in the imagination of the nondancer.) Dance is sensationalised, sexualised, either racialised or whitewashed, and when a movie casts a dancer it is only for their feet. We spend all our lives onstage, but only Natalie Portman is allowed to portray a dancer in film, never someone who understands how to carry decades of that training in the body.
And I catch myself being as elitist as people accuse us of, at times, even in this last paragraph. It's hard not to - I feel like my experience and training, my passion, the hours of literal blood and pain I've put into this are ignored and devalued. The world I live in is so incredibly divorced from the human body. People I train can't tell what muscles are working when unless they're moving weights that are too heavy for them. I'm asked about getting rid of fat deposits that aren't even visible on the person asking. Kids in my class come in afraid to move their pelvis younger and younger, when the only thing that saved so many dancers I know from feeling as though their own hips were unforgivably sexual was that early dance training. And isn't that awful? To fear your own body? To not know what it's doing? To think you have no control over how others see you? Isn't staving off that fear why we dance?
Or, at least, why I do.
The truth is I don't know how to tell people they should care about dance, at least in any form that comes with dancers getting paid. But we have to get someone to. Nobody knows better than a dancer that you can't make money without spending it: on rehearsal space, dance shoes, music, even other dancers. You can apply for a grant, if you have a piece in mind. Those come with expectations, and limits, and aren't always available for what you want to make. In the end, the money to dance so often comes from other dancers. We're the ones going to shows, we're the ones paying for class, we're the ones liking what other people have to share and saying "yeah, I want more of that." If it was a closed system, maybe that would be fine, but dancers have to eat like everyone else. Restaurant workers, on their limited salaries and scrambling for tips, aren't going to funnel that money back into the dance world when they have things they care more about, and as much as I hate to hear from nondancers that dance isn't a priority the fact is I'd be a hypocrite to blame them. Art is not frivolous, but getting involved in an art you don't know can be, because until you know what you like and care about and what you don't, every bit of it is a new risk. It's easy, with books. You have the library. With the performing arts, it's harder.
I started this off thinking about money. I'm still thinking about money. The problem lies, though, in something deeper than a question of what people are willing to pay for. I think to make money as an artist these days, any kind of artist, you have to either break yourself to fit into what capitalism asks of you, a content creator on par with generative AI so people don't get bored of you and forget you exist, or you have to somehow break apart this narrow mold we've created. And artists don't have that power. Business leaders do. The overlap is rarely there, and the gap between people with the money to make art and people with the knowledge for it is growing bigger every day.
I don't have a solution. I'm not even sure I'll see a real solution in my lifetime. For now, all I can do is try to create a situation where people pay me for what I would create anyway, and hope that someone out there feels the same way I do - that as much as we wish we could ignore capitalism, the only ones who can do that are those who've already won, and so we just have to keep paying artists for their work until the people with the big bank accounts get the message about what really sells.
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