Last night I met a young woman named Rebecca, the new girlfriend of my favorite little cousin. Rebecca is about 23 years old and has a lot of nervous energy. The whole time I was preparing dinner for the two of them, I could see her (OK, what I really saw was a girl-shaped shadow, but still) moving about in a very graceful and athletic way; I was hardly surprised when I learned she had trained as a ballerina from about the age of four. I was more surprised that she had stopped when she started college. When I asked why, she said that she had not been able to get into a school with a good ballet program, and so head decided that it was better to stop than to associate with unskilled fellow students gand teachers.
If she’s happy and satisfied, then for sure she did the right thing.
Dancing is a punishingly hard career, and if you are not 110% committed and 110% in love with the whole thing, you are just about guaranteed to fail. If you didn’t have the love and commitment and you somehow miraculously didn’t fail, you’d be miserable anyway.
People make decisions for the right reasons, or the wrong reasons. But in the end, what matters is whether the decision turns out to have good effects, not whether it was arrived at in an ideal manner.
I danced pointe through college and it was brutal. My feet were already a mess when I went into college. I successfully ruined both ankles and one knee. I did a few performances a year, which was great fun and exciting. The daily grind was horrid. I had class every day except Sunday, and preparing for performances added stage work at night a few times a week. Unless you have the fire in the belly it’s not really worth it. IMO.
Did she mean she stopped dancing entirely, or that she stopped pursuing ballet as a career. If it’s the latter, I can understand preferring not to pursue a career at all as opposed to being in a bad program. It’s harder for me to understand not doing something you (presumably) love because you’re better at it than the people you associate with.
It’s like any artistic endeavor, there are a lot of talented dancers and a very small percentage gets picked up into a company. In a famous dance company the percentage is even lower. Injuries sideline a big segment. And new, younger, and better taught dancers come on the scene every season. It is a tough career choice even if you are talented. Not for the faint of heart.
Also, don’t lose sight of the fact that the reasons people decide to give for their choices in life are often convenient fictions because the truth feels hard to explain.
I wouldn’t think being with bad dancers would be a problem, but having bad instructors could be. You’d be busting your butt for stuff that wouldn’t actually help you improve. That said, it’s also possible she decided that, since she wasn’t good enough to get into a good dancing program, she couldn’t make a career out of it, and her time learning would be better spent elsewhere.
Either way, if you enjoy dancing, you can just do that on your own free time. It would only be if you enjoyed bring in productions that it might make sense to go ahead and join.
I don’t actually care very much whether she is happy. I barely know this kid. My question was only Weather her contingent that a sub-par ballet program is worse than no ballet program at all is accurate.
Private dance studios are geared toward young dancers, age 2 to 14 or so. After that unless you find a small company, you will have to audition for community art centers or college productions. You have to audition for scholarships to study dance at a University, anyway. Those spots are hard to get. Every year you are not guaranteed a spot you have to compete with the new Dancers trying to get in. It is cutthroat, lots of tears and drama. I never was prima-ballerina stuff, I was a good dancer with good technique but I was too tall. I fit well in the back line center position. I held my scholarship through my senior year, and injured my knee that year. My career, as is were, was over.
The girl you’re talking about was probably looking into private studios, they are not looking for older or teenage dancers. The dance teachers want babies and tots to teach. They make a bunch of money that way.
In the fine arts, sometimes you have to be among the best, or else you don’t exist.
I know someone who dropped out of one of the best music schools in America for this reason.
His professor said: You’re good enough to earn the highest grade in this course --but only as an amateur. So if you change your academic major to a different field, I’ll give you an A.
But if you stay in this field, I’ll have to fail you, because you’re not good enough to join the professionals at the top.(i.e the Met in New York).
And this guy was a musician. There are lots of ways for a musician to make money at less-than the top level(such as playing in the symphony of a smaller city.)
But for ballet, the market is much smaller. I would guess that if you are only good enough for a sub-par program, you may never be able to earn a steady salary.
It makes sense to me that dancing with people who are less well trained would tend to gradually degrade one’s own skill set. It might be different with teachers, but otherwise, every time you look around, you see people doing more or less the same moves you are, and you kind of internalize that the way they are doing it is normal or right.
Which is fine, until you realize that you aren’t worrying as much about proper position or timing or whatever.
Obviously I didn’t speak with her but she seems honest enough: She couldn’t get into a college with a good ballet program so decided to drop out rather than spin her wheels with a mediocre program. I’d imagine that, unless you’re hitting the top of the top at every step, you’re already largely disqualified aside from teaching ballet at the YMCA. So if the good ballet programs weren’t interested in you, you might as well cut bait. You’re not going to get “discovered” in a lower tier program.
Breaking your body to pieces to dance with people who aren’t good and teachers who don’t improve your skills? It would be ridiculous . . .tragic. The whole point is to perform. If everyone else in the corps is less talented, then your audiences will only be their parents and grandparents. You are going to be killing yourself for very little return.
And you may as well take a vow of poverty, because the recruiters from the best NYC companies are not going to visit those performances either. So it’s not as if you could just keep dancing in that program for the love of it and hope to move on to a higher level in future.
There are people who love dance so much that they don’t mind going through a subpar program to get a degree and then teach in a suburban strip mall. And Og bless every one of them, because they give a lot of kids a lot of joy. But she wanted to Dance. And she was able to accept that she wasn’t good enough for that, and wasn’t interested in the lower level careers available to her.
Think of it like a baseball player who only gets accepted by a low-grade farm league with poor players and lousy coaches. Are they smart to go waste five years of their lives living on spam? No. The smart ones take the position in Uncle John’s used car lot and work their way up that business instead.
I entered a top conservatory as a music performance major. I burned out pretty quick, and I stopped playing altogether for most of a decade. Without lots of regular practice, I was acutely aware of how much my skills degraded… so I suppose you could blame that on my perfectionism. I tried joining the non-conservatory orchestra, but most of the group wasn’t anywhere near the same level.
I’m actually just now starting to play regularly again, having mostly* got past the baggage of burning out. It’s taken months of regular practice to get back even rudimentary technique. Now, I’m hoping to find an amateur orchestra that’s good enough and challenging enough to keep my interest.
And as others have pointed out, dancers have fewer amateur opportunities, and the added challenge of maintaining physical condition.
Yup. Acquaintances don’t want to listen to a lengthy monologue about me figuring out how to deal with my mental health issues and become a responsible adult. So in polite company, I just say “practicing 4+ hours per day wasn’t any fun” and “I wasn’t good enough to make a reliable living”.
*in writing this post, I’ve typed and deleted “mediocrity” way to many times…
One of my college classmates had done ballet since toddlerhood, but at over 6’ she would have needed to be Isadora Duncan reborn to make it into the pros. She entered engineering school and joined a group of folk dancers (which eventually got her into the Liceu!) and one of contemporary dance. She separated “I want to make a living” from “I really enjoy dancing” and chose to focus on types of dance which don’t turn your feet into jigsaw puzzles.