Onstage a dancer is present, polished, unflappable, peaceful. You get the feeling, as the choreography comes together and the music resolves, that the dancer is experiencing a personal denouement as well. 

But for most performers, the curtain falls, and the work continues. Between productions, even professional dancers performing full time often have to stitch together side hustles, grants, part-time jobs, teaching gigs, or even additional full-time work to make their onstage vision a possibility.

Across the country, professional and semiprofessional dancers made an average of $24.62 an hour in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This number encompasses those working at performing arts companies, colleges and universities, sports games, amusement parks, and “drinking places.” According to the same statistics, the mean hourly wage is slightly higher—$28.19—at professional companies. Within D.C. city limits there is just one professional company, the Washington Ballet. TWB employs dancers full time except for a summer break—known among dancers as the “summer layoff”—in June and July. The company has declined to share its pay scale or benefits information with Washington City Paper for this series.

D.C.’s living wage—the minimum income needed to afford basic necessities—hit $17 this summer, but that’s not nearly enough to afford living near the company’s main studio in Cathedral Heights. At least, not if a dancer wishes to live alone. The rental site RentCafe says an apartment in the Northwest neighborhood averages $2,175 per month. 

To make it work, many of TWB’s dancers have at least one extra job, and many earn extra income as guest artists at other U.S. and international companies. Gian Carlo Perez, one of Washington Ballet’s stars who left the company and D.C. earlier this year, gave private dance lessons and sold photography prints online while living and working in D.C. Victoria Arrea, who also left the company this year, designs and sells leotards through Instagram. Current company member Samara Rittinger sells custom cakes and baked goods, also through Instagram, and Nardia Boodoo, who graced TWB’s campaign this fall for Such Sweet Thunder, models for brands such as Nike, Chanel Beauty, and Tory Burch and works as a social media influencer.

Before the pandemic, former Washington Ballet dancer Sarah Steele taught Pilates and barre classes at MINT Gym in Adams Morgan. “I wanted to earn extra security for myself,” she tells City Paper. When COVID put an end to in-person classes, Steele took her workouts to Zoom and eventually registered as SteeleSculpt, a subscription-based digital fitness business.  

Ironically, though, D.C. has a thriving arts scene when it comes to dance and robust funding for the art form. Located in Northeast, both Dance Place and Atlas Performing Arts Center, for example, offer fellowships for dance makers. Dance Institute of Washington runs the Allegro program, designed to help dance students make the leap to professional dancing. And the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds dance projects across the country, is located in our backyard, as is the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities, one of Washington Ballet’s 2024 funders. 

Still, most dancers in D.C. are freelance, and much of the available work in their field is project-based. Performers are generally paid an hourly wage or a stipend to work on specific dances for specific productions. This doesn’t necessarily cover the preparation work a dancer must do just to get hired. 

“One of the biggest things is taking class. You know, thinking of your body as an instrument,” says Max Gorman, a local dancer and choreographer who founded GRIDLOCK Dance. “There’s the cost of networking, too. Going to a master class or going to see dance performances yourself so you can chat with people in the lobby, or you can talk to that choreographer whose work you really like and kind of get to know them and maybe next time they’ll ask you to be part of a project.” 

With freelance work, there are no benefits, which leads many dancers to take full-time jobs or part-time work to pay for a marketplace health insurance plan. DMV-based dancer and choreographer Lauren DeVera originally took the full-time route. “There was this pressure that I needed to get to L.A., but I graduated college [in 2010] and got a full-time job with benefits. It just made sense,” she says. On the side, she rehearsed with D.C. Culture Shock and other local dance collectives, traveling to Atlanta, San Diego, and Canada to perform. 

After several years of this balancing act, DeVera left her full-time, non-dance job in 2013, eventually landing in what she calls a multi-passionate, multipronged career choreographing, teaching dance, wellness coaching, and podcasting. 

Dancer Kit Aylesworth is navigating these questions now after graduating college in 2020. “My plan before COVID happened was to continue becoming a professional dancer,” Aylesworth explains. “I had like my toe in the door at a couple of places.” 

Today Aylesworth works full time at East City Bookshop and 10 hours a week running the box office at Bethesda’s Round House Theatre. Both jobs matter to Aylesworth, but ultimately they’re means to an end. 

“I am really, really passionate about books and about the work that we do at the bookstore,” says Aylesworth. “But it is something that I just need money so that at night I can moonlight as an artist.” 

In the coming week, City Paper will take a deeper look into how these four dancers—Steele, Gorman, DeVera, and Aylesworth—make a living and life as artists in Washington. The performers share how this balance can feel vulnerable, from the cringiness of marketing your business on TikTok to the precarity of holding down three separate jobs. But dance matters enough to each that the stress is worth the reward.

Continue reading our Dancing in the Moonlight series here:

Part 2: SteeleSculpt Took Sarah Steele From Ballerina to Entrepreneur
Part 3: Max Gorman of GRIDLOCK Dance Doesn’t Dream of Fair Pay, She’s Offering It
Part 4: Not a Side Hustle: Lauren DeVera Is a Multi-Passionate Dance Entrepreneur
Part 5: COVID Hit All Artists Hard, But For Dancer Kit Aylesworth the Pandemic Put Their Life on Pause