The job: Professional dancer
You might like this job if: You like dancing, grooving, popping-and-locking, pirouetting, or grooving to the music, and want to make a career out of doing almost-acrobatics in front of a bunch of people.
The good: “Holy shit! Did you see that?!” might be echoed ad infinitum by your audience as they watch you masterfully pull off moves that dazzle and amaze. Or they might be captivated by your grace and majestic fluidity. Either way, you will use your body to tell an expressive and beautiful story to many. It’s man-made art that is never quite the same on each performance.
The bad: Do you know how many dancers there are in the world? Here’s a hint: watch the audition parts of any dance reality show, look at how many people there are in the crowd scenes, and multiply that number by at LEAST 10,000. There’s a huge amount of talented competition that you have to go up against to make it as a dancer, and even then, it’s difficult to really get acclaim. Besides Mikhail Baryshnikov, there are very few people in today’s world who got famous solely from dancing (and that’s if you even know Baryshnikov from something besides Sex and the City). Also, your talent is based on your body, which means that you must consistently keep yourself in good shape, avoid injury as much as possible, and will have to skip out on certain other activities that you might enjoy, like, say, ultimate fighting.
Also, it’s a very subjective field. I don’t think that there is a real uniform consensus on certain styles of dance (in terms of people who like them or not), and there’s almost an in-group pretentiousness that develops among those in the dancing community.
Summary: Dancing requires a lot of time, effort, personal maintenance, and sacrifice in order to get skilled enough to make a career out of it. And regardless of what movies may tell you, dancing at a performing arts school does not guarantee success. It’s an incredibly competitive field, and you have to really judge the pros against the cons if you want to do this. And if you’re in your 20s or later and are thinking of starting now, you might already be too late. Unless you go for ballroom or something.
Rating: Four pretty ballerinas out of five
