It’s been your lifelong dream to be a professional dancer. You’ve worked hard, kept your nose to the grindstone, and now you’re closer than ever to realizing your dreams. What will your schedule look like as a professional dancer?
While the schedule of a professional dancer will vary, many dancers start with body preparation, then follow that up with a rehearsal. In the afternoon, they might rehearse again, then perform in the evening.
In this guide, I’ll share more details of what a professional dancer’s schedule can entail. I’ll also touch on other components of a pro dancer’s life, such as their diet, their exercise routine, and when they get any time off. Keep reading!
A Sample Professional Dancer Schedule:
To preface this, I want to mention that professional dance schedules can look wildly different. Even if you’re a professional ballerina, depending on the dance company you’re with, your schedule might not exactly match what I’m about to describe.
Thus, I can’t stress enough that this is a sample schedule and not necessarily indicative of what you’d experience in your day-to-day life as a professional dancer.
With that caveat out of the way, let me share this sample schedule.
Morning Wakeup:
What time you have to be at the dance studio varies based on the dance company’s hours and the type of dancing you do. Perhaps your day starts bright and early at 6 a.m. or you have more of a relaxed start and begin the day at around 8 a.m.
Either way, you need to wake up with plenty of time to feel awake, get dressed, and maybe grab something for breakfast.
Morning Body Preparation:
Even professional dancers don’t just start their day dancing. Instead, they’ll take part of their morning for body preparation.
This prep is usually warmup and stretching exercises to ready a pro dancer’s body for the rigors of the day to come.
A ballet dancer will stretch, especially stiff or sore areas. They might also engage in a light round of Pilates to get their day underway.
Contemporary dancers frequently partake in yoga, especially hatha yoga.
What is hatha yoga? It’s a type of yoga that focuses on the mind, body, and breathing. A hatha yoga session is about 45 minutes long and incorporates elements of meditation, yoga poses, and breathing.
The yoga sesh is supposed to invigorate you and get you stretched, flexed, and raring to go.
Morning Company Class:
Body preparation could then lead to a company class that lasts about an hour to an hour and a half.
Most company classes are optional, but that will again depend on your dance company and the kind of dancing you’re doing.
The company class is yet another chance to loosen up. If you feel limber enough, then you can skip it, but if your body prep didn’t help enough, then stretch more.
Late Morning Break:
By now, the morning is almost over, so you’ll have a break. For the hectic lives of professional ballerinas, these breaks are often very short. You have to choose to use your time to go to the bathroom, respond to text messages and emails, or eat.
Late Morning Rehearsal:
For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, a professional dancer might enter their first true rehearsal for the day. During rehearsal, a dancer will learn new dance choreographies, train on the current choreographies, and run through what they’ve learned.
Lunch Break:
Finally, it’s time to take an extended break for food. Some dancers will undergo 15-minute physical therapy sessions during their break because they simply don’t have the time to do so at any other point throughout the day.
When not eating, a pro dancer might do some exercises on their own such as Pilates. This is to stay warmed up for the upcoming rehearsal.
Afternoon Rehearsal:
Once the lunch break wraps up, it’s time for the second dance rehearsal of the day.
Some dance studios let their dancers review what they’ll learn through videos of the routine that they’ll send to everyone. If so, then now is a good time to brush up on what you can expect in the class!
How long each rehearsal period lasts varies. It can be an hour, two hours, or even three hours. That said, you will get breaks.
These breaks will be discussed in your contract before you sign with a dance company, so make sure you read the contract in full before you sign on the dotted line.
The standard is that you get a five-minute break for every 60 minutes of dancing. Take this time to calm your body down, drink some water, or hit the bathroom quickly. You can also check your phone if it’s close by and even discreetly munch on a snack.
Evening Exit:
If you don’t have a performance coming up, then once the afternoon rehearsal finally wraps up, you’re free to go home. You can eat, relax, see friends and family, or anything else you have the time and energy for.
Evening Performance:
On the days when you perform in front of a crowd, your routine will look a lot different. You could have at least two dress rehearsals on performance day.
You’ll get to work with the orchestra and technical team, as they’ll be present to bring the energy of the performance to life during the rehearsals.
You’ll begin rehearsing for a performance well in advance, often weeks or even months ahead of time depending on what the performance is, how complex, and how large of an audience is expected.
As you rehearse on performance day, you won’t do so for more than three hours at a time to preserve your energy for the big show.
Then it’s time to go on stage and do what you do best: dance!
Who Makes the Schedule for a Professional Dancer?
As a professional dancer, do you get a say in what your daily schedule looks like or is it decided for you? More than likely, the dance company that employs you will create your schedule for the week.
This isn’t unlike working a standard nine-to-five office job, especially one that utilizes a shift schedule. Each week, your boss or manager posts the schedule, and you work the days and hours you work. You can dispute your schedule if there’s a conflict, but otherwise, you have no say over it.
Unlike an office worker’s job, in which they know what their entire week looks like with plenty of advance notice, professional dancers don’t always get as much of a heads-up.
In ballet especially, it’s not unheard of for your schedule for the week to come out a day or two before the week begins.
As you can imagine, this makes it very difficult to plan other aspects of your life.
You don’t want to make plans with friends or family in advance in case you have to cancel or postpone the plans later. Yet when you try to make plans on the fly, you often find that everyone in your life is already booked up.
That’s an occupational hazard of your job, so to speak.
What Is a Dancer’s Diet?
During all the snack breaks and meal breaks a professional dancer has, what do they eat?
Again, this is very hard to say, as diet is a personal thing even among dancers of the same discipline.
Depending on your weight, your age, and your metabolism, your dietary needs are different than mine. Plus, there’s a personal preference at play as well.
This Harper’s Bazaar article from 2018 detailed the diet of ballet dancer Celine Gittens. Here is what she eats in a day. Keep in mind that Gittens lives in the UK, which means some of the dietary choices she makes are not those we’d make living in another country.
Breakfast – Avocado Toast, Eggs, and Tea with Milk:
This is a light breakfast that’s full of nutrition. Avocado is packed with filling fiber and many healthy fats. Toast is a good source of carbs. Although carbs are vilified, when eaten in moderation, carbs are energy and thus fuel for your body.
Eggs contain plenty of protein while milk has lots of vitamins and minerals, among them potassium, vitamin B12, riboflavin, vitamin D, and calcium.
Morning Snack – Oatcakes or Banana with Water and Salt:
Oatcakes are light, which is what a dancer needs when munching on something in the morning before or between rehearsals.
A banana is a powerhouse of a fruit, as it contains carbs, vitamins and minerals, and minimal fat.
Gittens mentions drinking water with salt, and this is a good practice to emulate. Here’s why.
Water might hydrate you, but it contains very few electrolytes. You lose electrolytes in sweat (not to mention whenever you go to the bathroom), so you must restore them throughout your day, especially when you have an active profession such as working as a professional dancer.
Most people who need to renew electrolytes choose sugary energy drinks such as Gatorade and Powerade. These beverages aren’t too bad on the calories (although they’re certainly not light calorically), but they contain sugar that can lead to an energy crash.
By adding salt to water, you can renew your electrolytes and hydrate yourself.
Lunch – Sandwich with Veggies and Cheese or a Stir-Fry Veggies and Pasta Dish:
These lunches are filling, but that’s what you need after dancing for several hours of your day already and with a long rehearsal period coming up. The meals aren’t so heavy though that your body can’t begin processing them by the time you’re back out on the floor and dancing.
Dinner – Chicken and Stir-Fried Vegetables or Grilled Fish and Salad:
Gittens’ dinner isn’t all that different from her lunch. She chooses a filling meal that contains protein, carbs, and nutrients without piling on the refined sugars, fats, and calories.
How Often Does a Dancer Workout?
Professional dancers are almost always moving their bodies. They might train six days a week, and during those days, between stretching, doing yoga, rehearsing, and performing, they’re exercising quite a lot.
Yet many pro dancers don’t take it easy when they leave the dance studio. They’ll engage in other physical fitness to stay healthy. Perhaps they hit the gym, take a Pilates class, or enjoy some fresh air with a hike, a jog, or a swim.
How Many Days Off Do Professional Dancers Get?
The schedule of a professional dancer seems strenuous, but they do get time off.
Some dance studios might give dancers two days off per week and others just one day off. These days likely would not be Saturday or Sunday but might be a weekday instead.
Many dance companies aren’t open year-round. Some dance companies start their season in January through May and others from August through April. During the time in between, dancers will have four or more months off.
Of course, when you’re not training or dancing, you’re also not getting paid.
Although the dancers are still employed by the dance company, they’re effectively laid off. Some dancers might take a well-deserved vacation at this point, but many more will begin seeking alternate short-term employment to pay the bills until dance season starts again.
Conclusion:
The schedule of a professional dancer varies by dance discipline and dance company or studio. That said, I hope this inside glimpse into the lives of professional dancers helped you better understand what your own schedule could look like.
Although working as a pro dancer is hard work, it’s also incredibly rewarding. Many people who are lucky enough to call themselves professional dancers couldn’t imagine doing anything else.