If you’re a dancer, you’re going to get hurt. That’s all there is to it. It comes with the business and how you deal with the inevitable injuries will determine whether you remain in the business. Every professional dancer has had their share of sprained ankles, pulled muscles and back problems. The conventional wisdom would be to take time off and heal but that wasn’t always possible when I was dancing. The saying “The show must go on” is a loaded phrase and not too far from the truth. Everyone in dance has heard of at least one story of the performer who bravely completed a performance while seriously injured, only to collapse backstage in the grips of pain. Inspiring? Perhaps, but what happens when that example becomes expected. In other words, if you’re not dead or dying – you are expected to perform.
If you had what was considered a minor injury like a sprained ankle – you really had to weigh all your options. If you continued working with the injury – would it get worse farther down the road – to the point where you would have to stop dancing? Could you get away with taking it easy for a few days without the director freaking out? Could you fake your dancing so no one knew how injured you were? And the most important thing to decide was whether to tell the director or not. Every single injury that you sustained and told direction about got filed away in the director’s head. Too many and you would be labeled as “Injury-prone”. Getting the “Injury-prone” label meant that you were about to loose your job. It also meant that your chances of being picked up by another company were pretty small. Directors talk to each other and no one is going to hire a dancer that they think they’re going to have to replace due to injury. Most of us just kept our minor aches and pains to ourselves. Ask any performer with a twenty-year career behind them about how many performances they missed and you will usually get the same answer. Very few. I started to miss a performance – once. My knee was so swollen that I could barely move it. The director suggested that I take the night off and let one of the alternates fill in for me. This was a rare gesture and I really appreciated her offer. I settled down in the audience to watch the performance. During the very first number, one of the girls fell and sprained her ankle. By the time the curtain went up on the second number, I was in costume and back on stage.