Rethinking the Dancer’s Workday

The physical demands placed on professional dancers today are extraordinary. Ballet has always required strength, stamina, flexibility, coordination, and tremendous discipline, but the vocabulary dancers are being asked to perform continues to expand. Classical work has become increasingly athletic, contemporary choreography often pushes the body in entirely different ways, and dancers may move between those worlds repeatedly within a single season. We ask for greater range of motion, more extreme physicality, faster transitions, and a versatility that requires the body to be prepared for almost anything. If the demands of the profession have evolved, I believe our thinking about the dancer’s workday should evolve with them.

In my opinion, one of the most important changes we can make is to stop thinking about conditioning as something that exists outside of a dancer’s work. Strength training, cardiovascular conditioning, Pilates, physical therapy, mobility work, and other forms of cross-training are often treated as extracurricular activities: things a dancer fits in before work, after rehearsal, or on a day off. Yet if those activities are necessary to prepare and maintain the body for the work we are asking dancers to perform, it makes sense to consider them part of the work itself. When rehearsal demands allow, I would rather see a dancer use an open portion of the workday to go to the gym, run, cross-train, see a physical therapist or other medical provider, or address a specific physical need than feel obligated to add another hour or two of training after leaving the studio.

Of course, giving dancers the time to take care of their bodies only goes so far if we do not also give them access to the resources necessary to do it. This is something we have worked intentionally to address at Ballet Arkansas. Our dancers have access to resources including a gym membership, chiropractic care, lifestyle and Eastern medicine, physical therapy, massage therapy, and podiatry. I believe providing that network of support is an important part of employing professional athletes. We cannot continually raise the physical expectations of dancers while leaving them entirely responsible for assembling, accessing, and paying for every component of the physical infrastructure necessary to meet those expectations.

There is an important distinction here: this isn't about asking dancers to do more. It is about organizing the work more effectively and providing them with the tools to do it. If a dancer has a lighter rehearsal day, that may be exactly the right opportunity to mindfully condition, address a nagging physical issue, or work with one of those providers. Conversely, if a dancer has spent six hours being pushed physically in rehearsal, adding an intense workout simply because it appears on a training schedule may make little sense. The goal should be to look at class, rehearsal, strength, cardiovascular conditioning, recovery, treatment, and physical maintenance as parts of one larger workload rather than independent demands competing for a dancer's time and energy.

I think artistic leadership has a responsibility within that equation as well. If we are going to think differently about the dancer's workday, directors also have to be willing to think differently about how we structure it. Company class is training, and training should have a purpose. There is value in consistency, routine, and expectations, but I don't believe those things should become so regimented that we lose sight of what the dancers' bodies actually need on a particular day or at a particular point in the season. A predetermined class length or structure may be appropriate much of the time, but it should not become sacrosanct simply because "this is how company class is done."

At Ballet Arkansas, we try to approach class with that flexibility in mind. There are days when the dancers need a complete, rigorous class, and there are days when the demands of the repertoire or rehearsal schedule suggest something different. Class can be longer, shorter, more technically focused, more physically demanding, or designed specifically to prepare the body for the work that follows. After an especially demanding period, the appropriate class may look different from the class dancers need when rebuilding stamina or preparing for a major classical production. The question shouldn't always be, "What time does class end?" It should also be, "What are we trying to accomplish with class today?"

That flexibility should not be confused with lowering standards. In many ways, I think it requires greater attention from artistic leadership. A rigid schedule is easy to administer. Responsive training requires directors and artistic staff to understand the cumulative demands being placed on dancers and make informed decisions about when to push, when to maintain, and when to allow recovery. The structure of the day itself becomes another training tool. If we expect dancers to listen intelligently to their bodies, I believe the organizations employing them should demonstrate the same intelligence in how we schedule their work.

I also think this approach creates a healthier distinction between work and rest. When dancers are expected to complete all of their supplemental training outside company hours, there is a danger that the physical workday never really ends. You finish rehearsal, go to the gym, find time for Pilates, do your exercises at home, and suddenly the body has been receiving signals to work from morning until evening. Whenever possible, I believe the workday should contain the physical preparation required to do the job so that when the day ends, the body receives a much clearer message: you are finished now. Recover. Rest is not simply the absence of rehearsal; it is an essential part of physical preparation.

There is also something to be said for maintaining a consistent baseline of conditioning throughout the season rather than repeatedly getting into shape for whatever production happens to be next. Put simply, keeping in shape is much easier than getting in shape. An athlete who maintains cardiovascular fitness, strength, mobility, and general physical readiness throughout the year should be better positioned to move from a classical production into a contemporary program, or from contemporary work back into demanding classical repertoire, without suddenly needing to dramatically increase training to meet the next production's requirements.

That is why I increasingly believe in thinking about conditioning with a season mindset rather than a production mindset. A production mindset can create cycles of recalibration: Swan Lake requires one kind of preparation, a contemporary program requires another, a lighter repertory period changes the workload again, and then suddenly another physically demanding production arrives. There will always be production-specific needs, of course, and training should respond to them. But if the underlying conditioning disappears every time the repertoire changes, dancers can find themselves repeatedly trying to rebuild capacities they possessed only weeks or months earlier. Those gaps in training can make an already demanding profession even harder on the body.

A season mindset asks a different question: what physical capacities does this dancer need to maintain from the beginning of the season to the end, regardless of what is currently being rehearsed? From that baseline, training can certainly be adjusted. A highly athletic contemporary program may require a different emphasis than a full-length classical ballet, and workload should rise and fall appropriately. But the foundation remains. Rather than continually getting into shape for the next thing, the dancer remains prepared and makes smaller, more deliberate adjustments as the repertoire changes.

I came to understand some of this later in my own dancing career than I wish I had. Once I reached my thirties, stamina became a real concern for me. Class and rehearsal alone were no longer giving me everything I needed physically, and I began devoting more time outside the studio to running and cross-training. It made a meaningful difference. Looking back, however, I wish I had incorporated that kind of training much earlier and, perhaps more importantly, I wish I had understood it as part of my professional preparation rather than something additional I needed to squeeze into my life.

There is an irony in the way dancers sometimes approach conditioning. We can spend hours refining incredibly specific aspects of technique while assuming that simply dancing more will provide all of the physical preparation necessary to support that technique. Sometimes it will. Sometimes it won't. As the vocabulary of dance continues to expand, I think we have to be willing to acknowledge that preparing the dancer may require tools that exist outside the traditional studio environment. The responsibility for recognizing that shouldn't fall exclusively on the dancer. Companies have a role to play in creating the time, resources, and culture that allow dancers to care for their bodies as professional athletes.

None of this means that every dancer should run, lift weights, or follow the same conditioning program. Bodies are different, repertoire is different, careers are different, and the needs of a twenty-year-old dancer may be very different from those of a dancer approaching forty. Nor do I believe that every available hour of the workday needs to be filled simply because it is available! Recovery matters enormously. The point is to create enough flexibility within the structure of the professional day to recognize conditioning, treatment, maintenance, and recovery as legitimate components of a dancer's job.

We are asking extraordinary things of dancers' bodies. If today's dancers are expected to move seamlessly between classical precision and contemporary athleticism, sustain increasingly demanding choreography, and do so across long seasons and longer careers, then our workplace practices should help prepare them for those expectations. For me, that means looking beyond the rehearsal schedule and thinking about the whole dancer, the whole workday, and ultimately the whole season. It also means accepting that supporting dancers is about more than providing a studio, a teacher, and rehearsal hours. It means giving them access to the resources their bodies need, building space for those resources into their professional lives, and remaining flexible enough to recognize that effective training does not look exactly the same every day.

The goal isn't to fit more work into the day. It is to put the right work in the right place, provide dancers with the resources to do that work successfully, and know when enough is enough. If we can do that, dancers can remain prepared for what comes next while also having something equally important when the workday is finished: the opportunity to truly recover.