It was a brutal audition. Hundreds of men and women dressed in skimpy leotards danced for the musical’s choreographer until sweat was flying through the air as much as the dancers were. Hours later, at the end of the day, those hundreds became a lucky few standing before the casting director with a job. It’s a chorus job, so little recognition and little pay, but it’s a dance job. And for the aspiring Broadway dancer, it’s a dream come true.
If this scene feels familiar, it might be because it’s the premise of the hit Broadway musical and subsequent film, “A Chorus Line.” And because it’s real life too: the typical ordeal dancers must go through to land a gig. Even more difficult the emotional toll the rejection takes on the people cut. But for most dancers, the physically and mentally strenuous repetition of auditioning is all worth it if it means that they get dance. As “A Chorus Line” character Cassie says: “God, I’m a dancer. A dancer dances.”
The career of a dancer is short yet passionate. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, most professional dancers retire from performances when they reach their late thirties, and that’s if they have never sustained serious injuries. But just because dancers aren’t performing anymore doesn’t mean that they quit the field altogether; they often go on to become choreographers or teachers. In “A Chorus Line,” a girl named Bebe says: “I plan to go on kicking these legs as long as I can and when I can't – well, I'll just do something else.”
Aside from the low-paying, short-lived nature of dance, there is also its lack of a spotlight. More often than not, dancers are pushed into the background, meant to decorate and enhance a performance but not occupy center stage. Audiences pay attention to the person belting out the popular show-tunes, not the people swirling around them. As Cassie puts it in the song ‘The Music and the Mirrors:” “Well, it would be nice to be a star, but I’m not. I’m a dancer.”
Choosing any career in dance is a precarious decision, particularly for dancers with their eyes on a Broadway career in New York City. Manhattan is a notoriously expensive place to live and as Don from “A Chorus Line” puts it, though one may have dreams about dancing here “dreams don’t pay the rent.”
Despite all of these elements working against them, there are still plenty of dancers hoping to one day see their names in a Playbill even if their faces go unnoticed on the stage. The stories of three dancers in three different stages of their careers provides a window into the passion, drive, and hard work it takes to make it into those program pages. Leanne Sera Jose is just starting out in the business. Jonathan McGill has been making a living on the Broadway stage for about a year now. And Janice Niggeling is an established figure in the dance world with three years worth of experience on Broadway.
Leanne Sera Jose is a dance major with the posture to prove it. As a graduating senior at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, 21-year-old Jose is looking for any job in dance she can get. “I’m honestly open to anything because I feel like you can’t really be picky at this point,” she said. “I mean, you have to start somewhere.”
Leanne Jose started her journey to a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance at the age of five when she saw her older cousin perform in “The Nutcracker.”
“I was kind of like, okay now I want to start dancing!” So her parents put her in the weekly pre-ballet class at the local dance school in Medford, Massachusetts. By the time she was in high school, she was dancing five to six days a week after school. However, this extreme dance schedule that almost ended her dance career before it even started.
“When I was a freshman, I honestly thought I was going to quit after high school,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d last all four years doing it with the work load.” But as her high school days began to wind down and college plans started to get tossed around, Jose couldn’t let go of her passion. “I thought about what having dance out of my would be like and when I imagined that, it just didn’t seem right,” she said. She decided to attend NYU’s Tisch because of its good reputation in academics and the arts.
Jose is now almost done with the intense three-year curriculum for dancers at Tisch, which calls for at least six hours a day, everyday, devoted to dancing. On top of that are the hours of rehearsal for the multiple performances offered every semester, as well as the required academic classes. The rigid schedule matches Jose’s rigid posture. “With dance, you have to be disciplined in that way,” she said.
It’s going to take a lot of discipline for Jose to land a job in dancing. According to the federal BLS, only 6 percent of dancers are employed as performing artists. Most of the other employed dancers are teachers or “self-employed.” In other words, only a small fraction of dancers actually get to make a living performing on a big stage, making it an extremely competitive field. At her first Broadway audition ever for “The Lion King” earlier this year, Jose faced the experience of seeing past Tisch graduates losing the competition.
“It’s discouraging but at the same time I think you’re also aware that it is like that,” she said. “You might want to deny it a little bit, but if it’s what you love to do,hen that’s the price you have to pay.” Unlike a rent check, the price of a dream-come-true is not paid in cash but in sweat, blood, and tears.
Jonathan McGill doesn’t have to worry the same way Jose is doing right now. McGill, 24, is an ensemble cast member of the Broadway show “Wicked” and can currently pay comfortably for an apartment in midtown Manhattan since the minimum required salary for union ensemble members is about $1500 a week. Although he’s been in the show for over a year, dancing eights shows a week, even the most dedicated “Wicked” fans would probably not give the slender, graceful McGill a second glance on the street without his flying monkey costume.
A California native, McGill was twelve-years-old when he began training as a hip hop dancer so he could “hang out with people after school and not have to go straight home and do homework.” However, the casual attitude about dance turned serious after he watched Michael and Janet Jackson perform. “My biggest influences are ‘The Wiz’ with Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ concert,” he said. “I used to watch those alternating everyday. I was like, I want to be the Scarecrow and dance like Michael Jackson. Those are why I wanted to become a professional dancer.”
McGill pursued his dream by studying an eclectic mix of dance styles at the famous Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles. After rejecting his original plan in high school of becoming a lawyer, McGill applied to NYU for dance and hasn’t looked back since.
Graduating in 2006, McGill faced many of the same struggles that Jose now has to look forward to. He went to audition after audition, waiting to hear back from casting directors. Eventually, he landed the second national tour of “Movin’ Out” and then did the “Radio City Christmas Spectacular” in 2008. McGill’s big Broadway break came during this time, a month after a tough two-day audition. McGill said: “They called me back [a few days later] and they said ‘You got it, it’s yours.’”
But being on Broadway doesn’t mean that McGill feels as if he’s at the very top of his field yet. “Now that I’m here, I’m trying not to just settle and be like ‘oh, I made it,’” he said. “It’s a constant process. It doesn’t mean that I’m not happy; I’m very grateful and happy with what I have but there’s always room to grow.” With acting and singing lessons potentially on his list of things to do in the future, it seems that McGill is hoping to step out of the shadows of the background.
On going largely unnoticed, he said: “It’s a constant struggle. I don’t understand why we’re looked upon as lesser. Sometimes I feel like we get the short end of the stick.” However, he also understands that it’s a dancer’s job not to be the star of the show. “I’m supposed to make it look easy, that’s the trick,” he said. “A lot of times we can make it look so effortless that people don’t really see the work that goes into it. We can easily go unnoticed but that’s sort of a good thing.” It may seem against a person’s nature to work most of their lives on perfecting a craft only to make sure that their effort isn’t noticed. Since the age of six though, Janice Niggeling can’t imagine living a different kind of life.
Niggeling’s mother put her in ballet class when she was three-years-old so that her daughter could socialize with other kids her age. “Mom thought, ‘I’ll just throw her in there and let her run around’ and then it turned into much more than that,” Niggeling said. The classically trained ballerina danced about three hours every weekday during high school and often spent the weekends rehearsing for performances. For college, Niggeling moved away from her home in New Hampshire to attend Fordham University in New York City. A fulltime student studying finance, she also spent three to six hours a day dancing at a studio on the upper-east side of Manhattan. “That was a very intense time in my life,” she said. “I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it.” But she did do it, probably with a little nudging from her six-year-old self.
Even with a bachelor’s degree, Niggeling turned her focus back to her first love of dance for the same reasons Jose couldn’t give it up during high school: she couldn’t live without it. After auditioning for the renowned Broadway director-choreographer Twyla Tharp and her musical “Movin’ Out,” Niggeling caught the Broadway bug. She said: “I was like, oh my gosh, I have to do this! This is so fun and exciting!” Shortly afterwards, she nailed a part in the ensemble of a Broadway favorite, “The Phantom of the Opera.” She was 22, only a year older than Jose.
Now 25, Niggeling has multiple Broadway credits to her name as well as one as a current dancer for the Metropolitan Opera. Her demeanor is relaxed when she talks about auditions and the past but she remembers the days when she was in the same tense situation that Jose is in now. “It’s such a scary feeling,” she said. “Now I just feel so much at ease because I’ve done a lot of things and I feel like I have a good grasp on the community.”
As far as being a successful dancer goes, Niggeling knows it all, or at least a lot. She achieved her definition of success when she could support herself financially on dancing jobs alone. “I just wanted to dance and that be my full time job.”
This seems to be the mantra of every dancer, even fictional characters in musicals. Cassie sings “give me somebody to dance for.” Jose said that the greatest feeling is “the thrill and joy of finally doing what you put your mind to for dance, with everyone watching you.” McGill said: “You always just want to be dancing, you always want to grow and explore. That’s what we want to do.” Even though the words may be different, the sentiment is still the same: for dancers, dance is as important as the air they breathe. No matter how vicious a rejection or how exhausting an audition; how high the unemployment rate or how low the pay, Jose, McGill, and Niggeling will never stop because they can’t NOT dance.
