Dance, Professional Practice, and the Workplace Challenges and Opportunities for Dance Professionals, Students, and Educators

Originally published as a special issue of Research in Dance Education, now with an added chapter, this text acknowledges and celebrates the increasingly diverse careers and employment networks in which dance professionals and dance educators are engaged. Addressing issues and developments relating to the workplace of dance, the text explores what it means to transcend the boundary between dance as passion, and dance as employment. Chapters explore challenges of professional practice including limitations on access, precarity, bodily risk, gender inequality, and sexual harassment, and challenge the status quo to offer readers new ways of thinking about dance, and how this might translate into professional practice and work. Ultimately celebrating the passion which motivates dancers to embark on a professional career, and highlighting the elation and joy which such employment can bring, this volume encourages dance professionals, students, and educators to imagine things differently and develop teaching approaches, curricula, work places, and communities which capitalise on the diversity and dedication of individuals in the field. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals in the field of Dance, Dance Education, Choreography and related art forms, Curriculum studies and Sociology of Education.

Introduction: Dance and Work, Special Issue1. Embodying Precarity, Pain and Perfection: Young Dancers Commitment to the Ballet Body as Aesthetic Project 2. Gaga as Embodied Research3. Creative and Embodied Methods to Tech Reflections and Support Students Learning4. Rebalancing Dance Curricula Through Repurposing Black Dance Aesthetics5. WhoLoDancE: Digital Tools and the Dance Learning Environment6. A Delicate Balance: How Postsecondary Dance Faculty in the United States Perceive Themselves Negotiating Responsibilities Expected for Tenure7. Body Trouble: Sexual Harassment and Worker Abuse in Musical Theater Dance Employment

Angela Pickard is Reader in Dance Education and Subject Lead for Dance Education and Dance (BA), at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. She is also Editor in Chief for the journal Research in Dance Education.Doug Risner is Distinguished Faculty Fellow, Professor of Dance, and Director for the MA in Dance Teaching Artistry program at Wayne State University, US.