Task 4C...

Being a self employed performer you are your own boss most of the time and without always having a stable job it is hard to have a mentor and someone you can look to for guidance. Personally I think my agent and my dance teacher from college would be the best people for me to turn to for guidance. I think there input would be great for my inquiry as they have been in the business a long time and both had very successful careers in the musical theatre industry.

While being on tour in china surrounded by a cast of 18 dancers and company managers, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to use my fellow colleagues and employers to develope my questions further! As everyone in the cast is of different ages, from different backgrounds and all have different experiences within our professional industry it will be interesting to see the feed back I receive from them regarding certain areas of our practise.


Here are my set of questions I have put forward to my cast members:

• Do you think it is important to continue training while you are out of work?
• How do you keep physically fit and audition ready while you are out of work?
• Do you know anyone in the industry personally or from previous contracts who has suffered from an eating disorder?
• Have you ever felt pressure to be "skinny"? 
• What advice would you give to someone starting out in the musical theatre industry to help them succeed? 
• How do you become audition ready? 
• How do you deal with rejection and negativity surrounding your career, do you find it difficult?
• Do you believe that effective networking within the industry can help your success?
• What Internet based networks do you use and find effective in helping you forward your career? Facebook,dancerspro etc?
• Do you believe it's "not what you know, it's who you know" in this industry? Does this effect your success?
• Do you agree that CPD(continued professional development) in musical theatre is important? Once we become "professional" does that mean we should stop learning and striving to be better?
• What would you say is key to a successful audition?
• As a dancer in training are you aware of what your daily calorie intake should be?

I will blog my results at a later date as as you can see I have gave them a lot to think about! 

As always I would be hugely grateful for some feedback and please feel free to answer some of my questions if you have the time :)