For this particular task I sat down and thought about my professional practice. For me its being a dancer, currently finishing off my last few months on my first job, a cruise ship. As I am coming to the end of my contract a lot of questions started popping up in my head, exactly like they did when I started auditioning at the end of college.Soon I will be entering the audition cycle once more and I realized it will be important for me to be in tip top condition for when I come home to again look for another job. Why ? Because I want to sell myself looking the best that I can possibly be, Why ? because I am the product the audience will pay to watch and why because I am the dancer the agency/job want to potentially employ.
Going back to the beginning of my job why did I get employed ? well after working with my other two fellow dancers I soon got a large part of the picture. We are all the same height, generally the tallest girls on the ship ranging at either 5 foot 6 or 7. We all have long legs, we all have the same body types and the three of us have dramatic hair colors, I am red and the other two are blonde and brunette. After also looking at pictures from other Silver Sea ships the other sets of dancers all share the same features as we do.Blatantly from analyzing this I can already see that image is an extremely important part of being a dancer, but then does that mean that if you were an incredible dancer but didn't have the correct look, would you still succeed in a professional career?
Before I started auditioning for jobs, The Hammond was the first ever audition that I had ever attended, after successfully getting in I trained hard in the three years and tried to catch up on all the technique and training I had never received. There were a lot of stronger dancers I noticed who always stood out in my year. They had been brought up on ballet and jazz unlike myself and so generally could pick up everything a lot quicker than myself. I knew this would all work well for them in the future and when it came to our final year maybe I would start off the auditioning in the worst position.
I was wrong! Auditions came and I found myself getting through on a lot more rounds than I thought I would. I also found that I had developed a strong image that seemed to work well for me. I would show off my long legs in tight shorts,tights,new yorkers and wear a bright red crop top that worked with my hair color and showed off my stomach, a toned feature that I had always been lucky with. In the first month alone I had already got onto 3 agencies and had been offered jobs. Watching my friends doing the same routine as I had just performed across the room was depressing as they performed it brilliantly, even the next day in our audition classes we would perform the same routine we had learnt, everyone giving it loads of attack and expression like they did 24hrs ago.A large percentage not getting through.It just showed me how image was so important, from experiencing this I can easily see how a lot of dancers suffer from anorexia and health problems, this topic can lead onto so many more questions about the dancers reflection.For example what is the “perfect image” ? How can it be achieved or does it just depend on your physical structure and what you were born with ? Should teachers inform us about the image factor before we start training or leave it till the end where in some cases we sadly find it out for ourselves. Should colleges and teachers be more strict with students and the image they portray to potentially help them or will this just drive them into low self esteem and feed the growing health problems of young dancers today.
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