Dance Magazine: For ballet dancer Megan Hug, landing a company job was a journey—but not an unexpected one. Last season, she was an unpaid apprentice with Canyon Concert Ballet in Fort Collins, Colorado; before that, she paid tuition for three years as a trainee at BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio, and for one year in the Professional Division at Nashville Ballet. Now she’s an artistic associate with Canyon Concert Ballet—her first paid contract.
5 comments:
I found this article resonating to read as I’ve experienced this “funnel industry” indirectly. My sister is a professional dancer and student of The Ailey School, a program mentioned specifically in this article. Seeing her experience of paying to dance with different companies has left me dissatisfied. While Ailey does not profit off of their unpaid performers, one quote about this from the article resonated with me. “Factors can lead to dancers feeling like they matter more to an organization as sources of income and free or cheap labor than as artists and human beings. And yet, getting a job in concert dance without first passing through a trainee program or studio company can feel close to impossible.” This phenomenon can be seen in arts industries as a whole as the job market is competitive, and thus, rising artists will throw more money at more education. However, as long as arts organizations have unpaid interns, they do not need to hire entry level artists. I don’t have a solution to this phenomenon, however, I am curious to how it will pan out on an individual level for my dancer sister and across the industry as a whole.
While this article was about the process for apprenticeships in the dance industry, I think that some of the same ideas can carry over to internships and apprenticeships in the world of DP. It is definitely important to be aware of what the benefit to you is from the position versus what benefit the organization has. It is important to choose a program in which you are getting at least as much as you are putting in. Another idea that was brought up in this article was the idea of some training programs being “pipelines' but those pipelines are not being guaranteed. I think it is important to remember that just because a program claims to be able to get you to one next step in your journey you might end up somewhere else than you thought. Overall, when finding opportunities for training, it is important to fully evaluate the option, the experience you will get, what you will gain, and whether you will end up where you want to go.
I do not think that paying for a trainee or apprentice program should guarantee you a job in the industry, but at the same time, the current scene makes it nearly impossible to get a paid job without first going through one of these programs. All of these apprenticeships that force the dancers to pay only restrict the pool of talent that they have available by making the opportunity unavailable to many lower-income dancers. Getting a professional job should be based on your talent and personal skills, not on whether you are able to make the commitment to either pay to dance or receive no payment for dancing. However, the article notes that these programs seem to be almost necessary in order to get a job later. When considering apprenticeships and trainee programs, applicants should look at the program details as a whole and see if they are being taken advantage of or properly provided for.
This article resonates with me on an extremely personal level. As someone who is going to be an upcoming theater artist, interacting with the industry through internships and other pre-professional opportunities. I am terrified of the instability of this industry, and how competitive the industry is. I am incredibly curious as to how we are meant to grow and thrive in the hostile environment that currently defines the artistic world. However I will say, if you find a good enough gig, you can definitely grow a lot and learn how to thrive. Something I really like is the line “not getting stuck in the pipeline”. I think it is very important to not be stuck in the intern phase and make sure that we can grow out of our original shells. Another random fun fact about this article that I liked was that I’m from Colorado, and it was kind of fun to hear the name again!
As someone who was really into dancing, I totally resonate with a lot of the things that she was saying and referencing in the article. Now, going into theatre, I feel like it’s very similar in the way how you have to pay to work in the industry, until you are in a company and they want to keep you. I completely agree with the fact that trainees have to pay to be in the system, because they’re using the companies time resources to build on their own resume. If the company is doing a larger production, you might get onstage, as said in the article, because they need more people. But not all companies will always do large shows, and you often don’t even get a chance to be onstage. It’s the same in theatre, except you’re just doing small jobs here and there to build up your resume, and I know that auditions also takes money and time, and you might not even get in.
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