If you grew up dancing all your life, decided to go to college to pursue a non-dance career, and found yourself at a crossroads of how to keep dance in your life at an advanced level, I hear you loud and clear. After graduating from college with my BA in English and planning on entering the advertising world as a copywriter, I went through a bit of an early-life crisis. I was not ready to give up dance. And yes, those various voices came screaming through my head saying, “You never have to stop dancing! Keep taking classes!”. And while those statements are true, they ignore the fact that many of us more advanced dancers still want to keep performing. Don’t get me wrong, I love taking open classes. I think they are crucial to improving and staying in practice, but they just don’t give you the performance aspect that many advanced dancers crave after graduating college.
The reality is that if you want to continue dancing after college, you have two paths to choose from: pursue a professional dance career, move to NYC or LA and drop everything for your dream, or pursue a different field and take dance classes on the side for “fun.” While both routes are equally valid, as someone who chose the latter path, I have found it quite challenging to discover more professional dance opportunities that are “part-time.”
That said, while it was difficult to discover those opportunities, they do exist, but few and far between. I was lucky enough to learn of Pantos Project Dance through a college dance friend. This contemporary-focused company is Boston-based and just opened their own studio in Waltham, MA. In addition to their professional company, they offer an Ensemble program, which is meant for intermediate to advanced adult dancers who are looking to perform and be a part of a part-time program that works around a 9 to 5 schedule. I have enjoyed every minute of being a part of the Ensemble, from taking weekly class and learning choreography that would be performed at in-studio showcases to partaking in professional dance photoshoots. It’s a great way to continue dancing and performing at an advanced level and, most importantly, be a part of an advanced group of dancers who have chosen a similar path as me.
Other than Pantos Project’s Ensemble, similar part-time professional programs consist of Danceworks Boston, Danceworks NYC, and Urbanity Underground. These programs do the heavy-lifting when it comes to providing advanced dancers in different careers the opportunity to keep performing, and I personally think we should continue this trend, especially extending similar opportunities to Boston and NYC intensives and workshops. There are so many talented dancers who I know would jump at the opportunity to partake in weekend or week-long professional intensives that were flexible for a 9 to 5 work schedule. However, the truth is that most big-name professional studios and companies offer intensives that are at least a week long with all-day schedules. In my search for an intensive program, there were very few weekend-long options, and the intensives that were over the course of a weekend had a cut-off age of 21. If famous companies offered advanced weekend intensives in addition to their longer intensives, I can promise you those programs would fill up within minutes.
If you think about it, just about every other career can be done part-time. Why should it be any different for dance? I'm not saying that people shouldn't go the full-time route if that's what is best for them, but for those who decide to go into different fields, it would be helpful to have more accessible professional opportunities. Because if studios don’t start offering more part-time, flexible programs, the world will continue to miss out on the talent of thousands of advanced dancers who made the difficult decision to go into a different field after college.