Many dancers both new and old, will at some point perhaps question whether they should quit dancing. The common story is the young, high achieving, soon-to-be professional, ballet dancer who has all sorts of pressures to deal with and is thinking of retiring from the ballet world.
However, the idea of quitting dance applies to many different scenarios/dance genres and has multiple answers depending on the scenario you find yourself in.
Our principal author Jake draws on his own 20 years of dance experience across multiple dance genres and his mother’s dance experience as a professional ballerina in Australia to explore why people consider quitting dance and how to navigate this area with skill in order to do what’s best for yourself mentally, physically, and financially in the short and long term.
We will elaborate on several key topics. By considering each of these steps you will be able to make a rational, informed, and thorough decision on whether you should quit dance.
What is your dance situation:
The difference in dance situations between a professional dancer, a professional dancer in training, a competitive dancer, and a social dancer is wide. And the situations each type may face are also wide.
Consider what is your dance situation and why you have chosen to be in that situation (remember we all have choices, and sometimes they are not as apparent in some situations as other situations).
Identifying the ‘why’ is important because that will enable you to ‘hack’ the reasons and also evaluate if your reasons align with the situation you find yourself in.
For example, if your dance situation is that you are a professional dancer but want to be a principal dancer in that company BECAUSE you want to verify that dancing is your identity but the company culture is highly toxic, you may be able to think about if you actually need to be a principal dancer to prove that your identity is one of a dancer. This may lead you onto thinking about what makes up a person’s identity, etc.
What is your motivation to quit:
There can be many factors that motivate people to think about quitting dance, or there might be just one big factor.
There can be:
- Injuries
- Mental health issues
- Financial pressures
- Diet pressures
- Health pressures
- Teacher quality
- Feeling burnt out
- Studio culture
- Relationships in class (both intimate and platonic): Including any baggage from years of gossip or arguments.
Identifying what it is which makes you want to quit dance is very useful as you may be able to address the issue once you have clearly identified it.
For example, if you identify that you feel like quitting dance because you have had a major falling out with a good friend or partner in class (that’s okay by the way, everyone has these at some point), then you can work on some solutions now that you know that is the main cause for why you want to quit.
Other times there are multiple reasons why you feel like quitting. In this scenario, compartmentalizing the reasons for quitting and also perhaps ranking them by either frequency they affect you or how important they are to you, can be an important step in your decision making.
Is your use of dance healthy:
Identifying if your use of dance is healthy overlaps several topics. In essence, healthy use of dance should make you feel good. Unhealthy use of dance may leave you feeling drained, scattered, or perhaps even traumatized or over-exposed emotionally.
Now it is rarely dancing itself which is unhealthy, the more likely culprit is that you are not in a good headspace to do something such as emotionally express yourself through the medium of dance. Some emotions or some headspaces may be too traumatic to express through dance initially.
This is a somewhat subtle topic as dancing is a form of emotional expression. However, the key here is to know yourself well enough to know when you feel strong/ready enough to share such emotion in a public setting, and when you need to work through some issues privately.
For example, if you are on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to numerous issues then dancing in an intense performance is probably not going to help your mentality, and will likely make it worse.
So observe how you are really feeling during and after dancing and compare this throughout different moods or life experiences.
What is your financial situation:
This can be a significant issue for dancers, as dancing is rarely a wealthy pursuit, particularly for those young dancers trying to get into a professional arena. Financial pressures can be a significant motivation to quit dance.
Take stock of your finances, draw up a budget and start keeping track of how much money is coming and going out of your bank account. Keep your receipts for food you eat at restaurants or cafes and enter this into your budget.
Also, consider future costs that you might come across. This could be, a newer car or perhaps a bond for a new rental or physio treatments for injuries. Remember that physio treatments can include scans which can cost:
- MRI scans cost approximately $300 AUD per injury site.
- Ultrasound scans cost approximately $180 AUD per injury site.
- Xray scans cost approximately $150 AUD per injury site.
Factor the above into your budget.
Try and keep a sum of money as a buffer in case you are out of work or lack an income stream at some point. Numerous wealth advisers recommend having a buffer of ideally one year’s worth of expenses, however, this can be unrealistic if you are young. The key here is to try not to be living on your last dollar week to week.
Once you know what your financial status is, you can factor this into your decision-making. Whilst sometimes it may feel as though you are on the verge of bankruptcy, when you appraise the situation you may find you indeed have little money but you are not actually losing money, which is an important distinction to make.
To what extent do you wish to quit dance:
Quitting dance does not always have to be a do-or-die type approach. Granted that some people either want to perform at a very high standard or not at all, but consider your motivations to dance and remember why you got into dance in the first place.
It always seems a shame when a passionate and skilled dancer completely leaves the dance world and sells their dance gear, never to dance again.
A good step to do in your decision-making is to acknowledge that there are degrees of quitting dance.
For example, perhaps you could:
- Reduce the number of hours you dance.
- Take a break, then come back to dance after the break.
- Change dance styles.
- Leave a class, but continue to dance privately.
- Change companies or studios or teachers or even cities.
- Not participate in competitions/performances but continue class work.
If you still want to completely quit dance, ask yourself why, really drill down as to why you want to give up something in totality, something which you obviously have a great love for.
How much time you currently spend dancing:
Identifying how much time you actually spend dancing, is useful because it may be either less or more than you think. Sometimes our minds can play tricks on us because of other factors.
Other factors can include how much time we are working, or studying, or being in a relationship, or commute time.
By breaking down the number of waking hours you have available to you, and how much time you spend dancing, you might be able to reassess how much time you are spending dancing or even how much time you are spending on other things.
Always remember, we only have a certain number of hours in a day, and sometimes we cannot do everything that we wish to do in one day, sometimes something has to give.
Also, consider the time you are spending dancing in relation to your dance goals. If you are spending every waking hour dancing, but your dance goal is just to enjoy dance without becoming professional and you are feeling burnt out, then there is a mismatch of action vs objective.
Align your time spend dancing with your dance goals.
What is your dance identity:
Sometimes people can lose sense of their identity, particularly when that identity gets caught up in organizations, audiences, and social circles.
This can happen with dancers too. Dancers can start to assume that their dance identity is tied firmly to a studio or a group of dance friends or a company or teacher. And if they leave their studio, dance friends, company, or teacher, their dance identity will be less.
This is incorrect. Our identity comes from within. Just as a job does not define us, neither does a dance company or social group.
Remember that true dancing is simply enjoying dancing for yourself, not for audiences, not for parents, not for your friends.
Ironically, someone dancing in their loungeroom sweatpants by themselves can be more connected with the true meaning of dancing than a principle dance performer who is internally struggling with intense pressures, carrying multiple injuries, and is tired and burnt out and disillusioned at dancing 24/7.
How your age might be impacting your decision:
Dancer age can impact their decision-making.
Consider the differences in circumstance, experience, pressures, and life stages of a 15-year-old versus a 35-year-old.
And so, a worthwhile consideration is to ask yourself:
- ‘How is my age affecting my decision?’.
- ‘Am I going through a short-term phase or is this a long-term thought pattern?’.
- ‘Would I make the same decision if I was a different age?’.
Sometimes as passionate dancers, we might forget that we are either quite young and have time on our hands, or perhaps moving into a different stage of life as we get older yet still pretending we have lots of time.
A wise quote to remember when you are both young and older is: ‘This too shall pass’.
Length of time off considerations:
An option as a dancer is to take some time off rather than quitting dance forever.
Sometimes the smallest of breaks can work wonders for our mentality, perspective, injury healing, and realign our priorities.
However, one consideration is how much time should one take off dancing?
Well, this is a personal preference, obviously, there is a threshold where you might start to lose skill and familiarity with dance movements, so years of not dancing will likely reduce your comfort with dancing.
However, ask yourself if 4 weeks of not dancing will really lessen your skill in dancing. 4 weeks out of years of past and future dancing is not much. And, if 4 weeks gives you the mental and physical break you need in order to keep dancing rather than throwing it all away, then that is a pretty good mitigation measure.
One thing you can do, particularly in physically demanding dances such as ballet, is to keep up your physical readiness training whilst you take a break from dancing. So you might continue to stretch, strengthen and massage your muscles or nurse injuries back to health, so that if/when you go back to dancing, you are physically still in shape.
Does slowing down equal a reduced skill level:
The common perspective amongst athletes of all genre’s including dancers is that reducing participation= a reduction in skill level.
The mentality of ‘harder, faster, longer hours = improvement’ is not always a smart way of training. There are authoritative figures who have spoken about how reducing participation can in fact be beneficial to athletic pursuits.
George St Pierre who is a hall-of-fame mixed martial arts fighter has spoken about how he feels that there can be great benefits of reducing training hours and focusing on the quality of training over quantity of training (see 51:33 of the below video titled ‘Georges St-Pierre: The Science of Fighting’).
St Pierre also talks about how everybody is different and we all have different ways of training to bring out our best performance.
Sometimes as social creatures, particularly in competitive arenas such as sport, we worry if we do something different that nobody else is doing. In this way we get caught up in a group mentality rather than paying attention to what works best for us as individuals.
Consider if a reduction in training hours could in fact be beneficial to you.
Observe your own mental and physical health as a result and see if your skill level actually drops. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Also be aware that dance is a creative pursuit, and creativity works best when it is given mental space to work. If you are focussing so hard, and always grinding and pressuring yourself, then your creativity is likely to be constricted.
There is a zen attitude in meditation that talks about having the right amount of effort: too much effort and you will be uptight, too little effort and you will be unfocused. Take that attitude with you into your training schedule.
Use the reduction in training to get some perspective and give some attention to other areas of your life. Remember that dance is about expressing emotions, and emotions come from living life. If you are not fully experiencing life because you are so focused on dancing, then you can see how your dancing might actually improve if you experience more of life and gain a greater emotional landscape.
Making tough decisions: Gut feel vs detailed analytics:
Making tough decisions can be just that: tough.
How does one come to a decision which carries such weight, is usually quite complex and is very important to us?
Well, a useful template to follow is to use both gut instinct and also detailed analytics. Psychologists actually have identified these as two different ways of thinking. Tim Harkness, who is an elite sports psychologist, calls them fast and slow thinking respectively.
Gut instinct is usually automatic and fast and is useful for in-the-moment decisions. Detailed analytics is slow, measured, and thorough. Both are useful.
How to use gut instinct versus detailed analytics:
- Detailed analytics: Go through the previous steps and thoroughly assess your situation and write all your thoughts down. This will mean there will be little you have not covered or thought of. You owe it to yourself to be thorough.
- Gut instinct: Once you have done your detailed analytics, write down what your gut instinct is: This is what you keep coming back to or what your overall desire/feeling is, even if it isn’t rational or logical. Sometimes gut instincts can be visceral, which means it manifests as a physical reaction in the body. So notice if there is something which makes you feel nauseus or disturbs your sleep or pops into your head at random times and makes you feel certain ways.
- Combine the two: Now compare your detailed analytics with your gut instinct. Do they align? Does each method give some different insights into your thoughts?
In my experience, the process of using detailed analytics informs my gut instinct, and my gut instinct is what usually guides my final decision. Whereas if I had just jumped straight to gut instinct without any detailed analytics, I would be less informed and less confident that I had not missed anything.
Look at your decision when you are in different moods or mindsets:
Think of this as looking at your scenario from different angles but at a deeper level. Sometimes when we are faced with a difficult decision, we are anxious or scared or nervous and so we only think about our decision when we are feeling anxious, scared, or nervous.
We also might be focussing so hard on making the decision, that we lack perspective of the bigger picture.
So try and get into a different mood, such as a happy mood, or a peaceful mood, or perhaps an energetic mood, and then revisit your decision-making.
Also, try and stop thinking about it for some time, then come back to thinking about it. You might be surprised at how a different mood or time can impact your thoughts on the matter.
Use rapid comprehensive option comparison:
Whilst this sounds like a big phrase, it’s relatively simple yet useful.
What it means is, once you have gathered all your options, run through them from start to finish.
If you begin to doubt your preferred option, run through ALL the options again. The keyword is all, consider options you may have previously glossed over.
Pretty soon you will have a pretty good feel for what options are valid, and what are not.
Additionally, you will likely notice small things about each option with each pass over.
This overall comparison prevents you from getting tunnel vision on a biassed number of small options.
It enables you to grow your confidence in your decision in a thorough way.
How to reconnect with your love of dancing: Back to basics:
Often when dancers are thinking about quitting dance, it is not dancing itself which they want to quit, it is what dancing has become caught up in which they want to quit.
What does this mean? It means that as something becomes bigger and more complex with greater pressures, what it was initially can become lost. You can see this often in relationships and business.
So, for a dancer, their dancing may have become more about a studio’s culture, or relationships in class, or mental pressures due to a performance schedule that is based on money, injuries, dieting, etc.
It is always a shame when a dancer forgets why they fell in love with dance in the first place, and they rarely dance again because they have become disillusioned with what their dancing has been caught up in.
So, even if you do decide to quit dance fully or partly, try and rediscover what made you fall in love with dance to begin with. Go back to the basics.
Try recreating the original scenario where you started to first really like dancing, away from audiences, judgment, strict teachers, financial pressures, etc. Just do your favorite moves, with your favorite dance music, in your favorite clothes, perhaps with your favorite people, and maybe a mirror.
If you would like some tips on how to get back to the basics, try reading the article How To Become A Good Dancer: The complete guide people need which is designed to capture the essence of dancing.
Always remember, the enjoyment of dancing can be fragile, so defend it and nurture it, and don’t let it become compromised. Always be true to yourself whilst dancing. In this way, your dancing remains pure and beautiful.