Dancers train like athletes, perform like artists, and somehow still get paid like neither. Maybe the question isn’t why footballers earn so much, but why dancers earn so little.
While, as a little boy, there’s this dream to became a successful football player AND getting a fat pay check, the dream of a little girl to become a dancer, starts with knowing how unappreciated and undervalued they are. Growing up, holding onto this dream, the reality’s just getting clearer yet darker.
Across the performance industry, to pursue dance as a career, it takes a professional level of perseverance, agility, mobility, stamina, and drive. Still these are not the main problem of sustaining a successful dance career on the long-term.
“If athleticism is valuable, why does dance still struggle to be valued as a profession?”
Dancers work just as hard as football players. (Some football teams even take ballet for balance btw…)
In the UK (2015) a survey of dancers were asked about their payment and it reported that “more than half of professional dancers earn less than £5,000 a year from their performance work.” “The statistics also show that around 50% of dancers’ jobs pay less than the minimum wage-”
Based on a similar questionnaire in LA, 15% earns nothing, half earn less then $5000/year from dance. 70% earn less then $40,000/year from all sources (meaning they have to take other jobs to fund their own dance career) and only 18% make a full-time living in dance, exclusively.
We pay people to play games, but rarely pay the people who make movement an art form. The strange economics of a world that pays more for goals than for artistry. But how does it affect the length of dancers’ career? What does the way we pay dancers reveal about how we value art, labour, and the body?
Dancers’ careers are short enough due to physical limitation and burnouts but adding the lack of money and resources making it even more difficult to sustain a career in this field.
But is dancing all that a dancer does?
“Considering the recent shift from in-person to virtual audition: professional dancers have been forced to adapt to the industry before them, taking on many more responsibilities than merely dancing, or even performance related.”
A dancer’s training involves repetition of movements in order to perfect even just one movement, not to talk about a whole routine or choreography. But because dancers practice and perform, mostly in a studio and on stage instead of on a field or in a pool, the work of dancers are discredited tons of times.
A professional dancer also embodies other jobs, such as music and video editor, makeup artist, hairdresser and many more, without any technical training to do so. Other than just “moving our bodies to the rhythm of the music”, they added self-taping and filming from scratch to their responsibilities. And even tho dancers run these extra miles and working overtime, sometimes 7 days a week, they are far from getting compensated by it pay-wise, meanwhile taking up as many skills as possible to shine through the crowd and trying to be unique.
“Unfortunately, despite the countless responsibilities and skills that dancers have acquired along the way, we are still being offered incredibly low wages for the amount of work that the industry requires.”
“Sports are a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry, and for franchises, particularly in the NFL and the NBA, cheerleaders and dancers are part of the show.” - David Berri
As a dancer myself, who still believes she can break through all of these, and be a professional dancer one day: my fellow dancers, know your worth and accept anything that’s below the skill, years of commitment and dedication it required for you to get there where you are at the moment! Because it can affect all the future dancers’ payment, the money that companies are willing to pay, and if dancing as a career can be sustainable.
So, are we worth less than minimum wage…? I don’t think so.
yours truly, adri 🤍