Labor Without Employment: The Rise of American Ballet Trainee Programs, 2000-2025 Público
Casel, Rebecca (Spring 2025)
Abstract
This thesis explores the reasons for the growth of ballet trainee programs in the United States from 2000-2025 and examines the relationship between skilled labor and compensation in ballet companies. I posit that instead of hiring more dancers, small companies exploit trainees by allowing them to perform unpaid labor in the company under the guise of “education” while paying thousands of dollars in tuition to the company-affiliated school. While dancers in previous generations joined companies in their late teen years, trainee programs are delaying dancers’ entry into the profession and extending the time in which they must rely on outside sources of income to support themselves. I detail the history of ballet’s birth in the courts of Europe to contextualize how the American economic context fundamentally shaped the development of ballet in the nation and explain why trainee programs are a uniquely American phenomenon. I then turn to analyze the funding patterns for the arts in the second half of the twentieth century to explain the impacts of the reduction in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts Dance Program in the mid 1990s. I argue that trainee programs emerged in the wake of the continuous financial struggles faced by American ballet companies during an era of neoliberal reform and a lack of robust federal funding enjoyed by European and Russian ballet companies. Relying heavily on fifteen original oral history interviews that I conducted, I examine how trainee programs can expand a company’s artistic abilities at little to no cost, how the system endangers young dancers, and perform a case study of one ballet company to examine whether it could function without its trainees. I argue that trainee programs constitute labor without employment, wherein trainees perform the same function as company members but do not enjoy the benefits and protections of employment. I conclude that companies’ financial reliance on free labor provided by trainee programs is an unstable system that hinges on young dancers’ compliance with their own exploitation and question how the system can change.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Pulling Back the Curtain……………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Making an American Ballerina…...………………………………………………….10
Chapter 2: Dancing for Dollars…………………………………………………………………..32
Chapter 3: “The Experience is the Pay”: The Growth of Trainee Programs……...……………..53
Chapter 4: Washington Ballet Trainees: Marginal or Essential?...................................................69
Conclusion: A House of Cards…………………………………………………………………..84
Bibliography…………………………………………………………….…….….……………...89
Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………..102
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