The pitfalls of a dancer’s life

Ballet dancers have to find new careers once they are too old to dance Keystone Archive

Gruelling training, physical agony, and jobless at 30: the grim lot of a ballet dancer's life. In Switzerland, the sacrifices are especially painful.

Aspiring ballerinas are forced to forgo academic schooling from the age of 15 to attend full-time dancing school, which means they must find new careers or face poverty when they are too old to dance.

The Zurich Professional Ballet School is taking an active role to help its dancers cope with the pitfalls of their chosen career. It plans to introduce a series of courses, starting in 2003, to qualify the students to teach ballet — a popular job choice among retired dancers, who currently must travel abroad to get their pedagogical qualifications.

Unlike their counterparts in Russia, Germany or Britain, they do not have the option of equipping themselves for life after ballet.

“Ballet is life”

“What is life after ballet?” asks Lissa Manetsh, an 18-year old student at the school. “Ballet is life, it’s everything – and it’s what I need to focus on for the moment.”

This short-sightedness is very prevalent among dancers in Switzerland, who sacrifice more than most for their job – but it is also a dangerous approach for anyone facing a career lasting a mere ten years – or less. Many dancers’ dreams are cut short in mid-flight by an injury, making the need for a professional safety net all the more imperative.

“I was a soloist with a dance company when I slipped on a spot of grease on the stage during a show,” explains Alex Ursuriak, the head of the school. “The next day, the doctor said to me “I hope you’re trained up for another job” – my knee was completely smashed up. I was 27 years old.”

Ursuriak’s tale is by no means unusual in the ballet world. But the ‘no life after ballet’ philosophy is one he and his colleagues at the ballet school – part of the Zurich Academy for Music and Theatre – are trying to change.

A springboard

Not only would such a teaching qualification fulfil a dire need for qualified dance teachers in Switzerland, says Ursuriak, but teaching is usually a springboard to related jobs, such as choreography or management of dance companies.

“Dancing is an egotistical profession, where you have to focus on the self,” says Ursuriak. “But teaching is completely selfless. You give yourself to your protégées. It’s also another, more global way to see and understand ballet.”

Ruth Weber, a retired ballet dancer and one of the school’s teachers, also got her teaching qualification abroad. She hopes the new training will soon be available to the students in Zurich.

“Ballet is a very risky profession: if you have an accident, and you don’t have a university qualification, it can be quite a problem,” she says. “But in future, we hope that there’ll be a better solution for young people arriving here.”

Hard choices

Until now, the vast majority of students in Switzerland who have attempted to acquire academic qualifications alongside their dancing schedule, often by attending one of the federal Arts and Sports Schools for athletes, have failed.

“I tried to attend school courses in the morning for a few months, but it meant missing out on my training,” says Michelle Seydoux, a 16-year old, full-time dancer at the school. “In the end, I had to make a choice – and, for the moment, I’m 100 per cent convinced that I made the right choice.”

The sacrifice of forgoing an academic qualification is not, however, enough to deter the 65 aspiring ballerinas at the Zurich ballet school, who see it as a necessary evil in the dancer’s life.

“You need to have a very deep love of dancing to cope with all the hurdles,” says Weber. “It’s a very risky profession.”

Obsessive quest

Love and the obsessive quest for perfection are the fuel that catapults the final-year students at the school ever higher into the air – and into the auditioning rooms of the larger, professional dancing companies where they hope to become soloists.

The auditions are notoriously tough and becoming ever more competitive. At most, only a few of the 15 final-year students will make it.

“There are fewer dance companies nowadays and the competition to get in is very fierce,” says Weber. “You really have to be at the top to get in.”

“We have to train our dancers to a very high standard both in classical and contemporary ballet,” Ursuriak adds. “The companies demand far more of the dancers than before – they have to be more mature and more experienced and we have very little time to give them all that.”

Typically, dancers begin taking lessons at the school from the age of ten, and become full-time from the age of 15 until 18. The last, intensive training year is the most important, and one that attracts many foreign dancers on scholarships to the school.

“I have pupils from the Ukraine and Russia and applications from all over the world,” says Ursuriak, who firmly believes that dance training in Switzerland rivals that of any other country. “Dance is happening everywhere and it’s happening here – but it’s not being publicised as much.”

Until the academic courses get underway, the teachers at the school are focussing not only on providing the highest quality training, but also on ensuring their students do not get overwhelmed by their passion for dance.

“Ballet is all about physical limitations – and one of the things we’re trying to get into the minds of our children is that there is life before, during and after ballet,” says Ursuriak. “So we really encourage them to pursue their hobbies and other interests to the full, because they may come to depend on those skills the day their career is over.”

by Vanessa Mock