From 1000 to 1: The Reality of the Dance Job Market
The odds are brutal, but the conversation often skips the bottom-up issues: education, training, and how we prepare dancers
Since building Lanced and supporting auditions at scale, we’ve been able (or at least made a start) to develop a macro view of the European dance job market. By aggregating audition data across countries and roles, a striking trend emerges. Receiving over one thousand applications for a single audition isn’t unusual; it’s the norm. One thousand dancers putting themselves forward, often for just one or two contracts
I know that feeling of hope intimately, having auditioned for many professional dance roles myself. So when I saw these numbers consistently, the reality is confronting. The chances of actually securing the job are vanishingly small, far smaller than in most other industries. It’s a painful truth about how unbalanced the job market for dancers really is.
And yet, we can’t point the finger at companies for not offering more contracts. Their ensembles are limited by funding, space, and artistic vision. So the real question becomes: why are there so many dancers competing for so few jobs? And if this imbalance is here to stay, how should we rethink the way we train and prepare dancers for the careers ahead?
Today’s Dance Workfield
To understand the imbalance, we need to look at today’s work field, not just in numbers, but in how dancers actually live and work.
While a good number of dancers do still find their way into a full-time company contract, those contracts are no longer the norm. The majority of work today is freelance, forcing dancers to be agile, adaptive, and constantly hustling for the next opportunity. Careers are built less on long-term security and more on a patchwork of short-term projects, teaching hours, residencies, and side jobs.
In the UK, a 2019 research report revealed that out of roughly 21,000 dancers and choreographers, nearly 17,000 are freelancers. In the Netherlands, Germany, and beyond, the pattern is similar. Much of this work is hidden away. Small-scale gigs, unpaid collaborations, community projects, or commercial jobs that never make it into official statistics. The true scope of dance work remains largely invisible on paper, but palpable in practice.
Today’s field looks very different than even a decade ago. There are more dancers than ever; more graduates from academies, more independent makers, more international mobility. At the same time, a wave of subsidy cuts across Europe is hitting companies and festivals hard, shrinking the very institutions that once offered stability. With ensembles downsizing and project funding becoming ever more precarious, the gap widens: more dancers entering the field, fewer stable jobs waiting for them.
To be a dancer today is to live inside that tension. It is to carry years of rigorous training into a professional world defined by reinvention. It is to audition relentlessly, to accept rejection as routine, and to celebrate when even a three-month contract comes through. It is to sustain your artistry by teaching, freelancing, or side hustling, while still being told that this is simply the price of pursuing the life of a dancer.
This is not the same profession it was ten years ago. The market is more oversaturated than ever. It is more global, more competitive, more precarious and more invisible.
The Invisible Majority
For every dancer who secures a contract, many more quietly fall away. Some reapply season after season; others transition to teaching, choreography, or entirely different careers. Few of these exits are tracked or recorded.
There are some notable exceptions. In the UK, the Dancers’ Career Development (DCD) programme has supported thousands of professional dancers in retraining and building sustainable second careers. In the Netherlands, Omscholing Dansers Nederland (ODN) provides both financial support and career coaching to help dancers make the often-difficult shift beyond the stage. These systems show what is possible when institutional support is taken seriously.
But elsewhere in Europe, dancers who exit the stage often do so without any safety net. They are left to navigate an uncertain shift into new careers on their own. That invisibility keeps the market looking healthier than it really is. On paper, there are still thousands of trained dancers. In reality, many are leaving, exhausted and unsupported.
The attrition is quiet, but it is constant.
The Funding Question
The most obvious (and often suggested) remedy for balancing the job market is to increase the flow of funding into the sector. More funding would, in theory, mean more salaries, larger ensembles, and more dancers in stable jobs. But the funding question is not an easy one to solve. Current mechanisms rely heavily on subsidies, which means that resources are tied directly to political agendas, shifting priorities, and the limited budgets of cultural ministries.
For that reason, I will refrain from a deep dive into funding here. It is a top-down issue, complex, contested, and subject to forces outside the profession itself. And while funding is vital, it is also the part of the debate that tends to dominate conversations around dance. For the purpose of this piece, I want to focus instead on the bottom-up issues: the systems of education, training, and career preparation that shape how dancers enter and navigate the work field.
Rethinking Dance Education
When we talk about the imbalance in the dance job market, we rarely talk about education. And yet, this is where the pipeline begins. Every year, schools and conservatoires train and graduate large groups of dancers and makers, while knowing full well that the chances of growing those students into long, sustainable careers are slim.
That reality forces us to ask harder questions of our training systems. The first question that comes to mind is one that most shy away from asking: why do we continue to train so many dancers through our educational programmes?
In the Netherlands alone, looking at contemporary-trained dancers, nearly 100 graduates are entering the workforce each year. There is simply no way each of them will find a permanent position. The influx of new dancers consistently outpaces the number of jobs available. Jobs that are already being contested by those who are already in the scene.
So do we still need this number of dance schools? Shouldn’t we become more selective, plugging the pipeline at its source?”
The fewer dancers entering the field, the greater the chances that those already in it can actually find stable work. We talk about “sustainability” in the arts, but it’s often treated as some vague concept. To me, it’s pretty straightforward: sustainability means being able to consistently secure professional work that pays your bills. That’s what the word professional should imply, and it’s what we should remind ourselves of: we are not just honing a craft, but building a livelihood from it.
My next point of attention focuses on the content of our educational programs. Should we continue educating dancers under the assumption that they’ll end up in full-time company work, when in truth most won’t? Or should we begin to reframe dance education as preparation for a much broader set of futures, many of them freelance, hybrid, or outside of the stage altogether?
Technical and artistic mastery must remain at the heart of training. Without these core skills, the door closes quickly. But alongside that, we need to teach dancers how to build careers in the world as it exists today: a freelance-heavy, project-based ecosystem. That means embedding business skills, entrepreneurial literacy, project management, and personal branding into the curriculum. It means training for versatility across styles and disciplines. And it means creating pathways for lifelong learning and career transitions, so dancers don’t find themselves lost when they take their last bow.
A Call to Reimagine
One thousand dancers for one contract is not an exception. It is the system functioning exactly as it was built: a global audition machine, fuelled by oversupply, constrained by funding, and powered by the resilience (and desperation) of young dancers who still believe they might be the one.
But this system is not inevitable. We can change how we prepare dancers, how we support them, and how we define success. We can expand our definition of a dance career beyond the company contract. We can celebrate the choreographers, teachers, producers, and movement artists who carry dance into new spaces such as healthcare, technology, education, and beyond.
What we cannot do is continue pretending the odds are fair, or that talent alone determines outcomes. The job market for dancers is unbalanced by design. A more just ecology will take honesty, structural change, and collective imagination.
It’s time we stopped seeing the one thousand as failures and started seeing them as proof: proof that there is no shortage of talent, only a shortage of systems built to sustain it.