The apprentice zone. (Audition Guide 2003).

What is an apprentice dancer, and why bother to become one? According to Merriam Webster s Collegiate Dictionary, an apprentice is "one bound by indenture to serve another for a prescribed period with a view to learning an art or trade." But who becomes an apprentice and why, how long it lasts, and how much it pays all depend on the company you join. * In general, an apprenticeship denotes the "end of the beginning." It's the transition phase that can follow formal training and comes before professional standing. It also tests whether a dancer's success in school translates to the stage. "Sometimes you see someone in class," says Rosemary Dunleavy, ballet mistress of New York City Ballet, "and they might happen to have a good day and look fantastic." Then, she says, "you realize afterwards they're either better than they were or worse, or they're not musical, or they can't learn movement quickly."

Given that it's impossible to tell in the studio how a dancer will appear onstage, apprenticeships allow a company, in Dunleavy's words, "to look at a product before buying it." The process, she says bluntly, "is like purchasing art from galleries that allow prospective buyers to take a painting home and hang it in their living room before making a monetary commitment." For the dancer, it is an opportunity to see if the company, or the life it offers, fits.

The terms, pay, and status of dance apprenticeships vary widely from company to company. San Francisco Ballet has a well-established apprenticeship program, which is associated with its professional school. Apprentices are both part of the school and part of the company; they have a union contract, but are required to take school classes when not actively rehearsing with the company.

Union guidelines allow SFB to hire up to five apprentices each year. Although there is a national audition process to select candidates, for the 2002-03 season, four of the five apprentices were selected from the SFB school. Sarah Vardigans, the company manager, says the goal of the yearlong program is to introduce young dancers, most of whom are teenagers, to the professional world of ballet, while providing an intermediate point between school and the "shock of real life." Of the sixty-nine current SFB company members, twenty-four completed the apprenticeship program. Apprentices receive full benefits, including health insurance, and earn 50 percent of the first-year corps salary, or $409 per week, plus a touring per diem.

Whitney Herr, 19, an SFB apprentice since July, finds that she now has to be more self-motivated about her training. "No one's there telling you if you're doing a good job or not, or if your musicality's good or not. You have to make more of your own decisions about how to execute a movement, or how to phrase it," she says. Although apprentices can be cast in ballets like any other company member (they receive corps salary if they dance in lead roles), they tend to spend more time understudying than performing. When she was a student, Herr appeared in SFB's production of Giselle. Since becoming an apprentice, she has gone on tour with the company and learned many parts in ballets, including Paquita and Don Quixote, mostly as an understudy.

Another SFB apprentice, Ashley Ivory, 18, says that her biggest challenge is trying to get her high school diploma. "You want to be good at your job and get good grades, too. But it's a balancing act." Is it awkward having just one foot in the door? Ivory admits it is. Apprentices haven't yet proved themselves as part of the company; yet they've moved on from most of the ballet school's activities.

With a maximum of ten apprentices per year, the program at New York City Ballet is larger than SFB's. Almost all the dancers come through the School of American Ballet, and, as with SFB, they are still officially affiliated with the training program. NYCB apprentices, who usually live in the SAB dorms located in the Rose Building at Lincoln Center, range from 16 to 18 years of age, and are strongly encouraged to complete high school. If they had scholarship support as students, the aid continues during their apprenticeship; this funding can include tuition for private schooling as well as room and board.

These young NYCB dancers receive no set salary but get paid for rehearsals and performances. They are allowed to perform in up to eight ballets per season in addition to The Nutcracker. During the Nutcracker season, former NYCB apprentice Savannah Lowery, 18, performed eight shows a week for seven weeks. It was hard to find time to study, she says, and she had only thirty-six hours at Christmas time to spend with her family.

Erin Derstine, 26, became an apprentice at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago after dancing with the junior company, Hubbard Street 2, for more than two years, and was recently elevated to full company membership. HSDC Artistic Director Jim Vincent says he doesn't take anyone into the second company who he doesn't see as potential for the main one. In a sense, Hubbard Street 2, a six-member professional troupe, functions as a pre-apprenticeship program. By contrast, apprenticeship in the primary company is a six--to twelve-month trial phase that allows Vincent to evaluate a dancer's ability to adapt his or her dynamics to the workings of the twenty-one-member ensemble. Vincent is looking for dancers who know how to be individuals onstage and how to adjust their "volume levels" to the tune of the group. Apprentices receive salaried contracts of up to fifty-two weeks, with benefits, including health insurance.

During her tenure with HS2, which was also a full-time, year-round engagement, Derstine says she would often dance in more pieces in a single program than she does currently, because the second company had fewer dancers. Nevertheless, she has danced in almost every performance since joining the main company, including a leading role in Daniel Ezralow's Read My Hips. To Vincent, there is no formal distinction as far as casting goes between Hubbard Street's apprentices and other dancers. With a diverse repertoire ranging in style from jazz and modern to classical dance, the company's structure is closer to a modern dance troupe than a multitiered ballet company. "Because we're a smaller company," he says, "we can't afford to have benchwarmers or banner bearers. We need everyone moving."

Since Michelle Yard was hired as the Mark Morris Dance Group's first apprentice in 1997 (she still dances with the company), dancers who join the company generally start out as apprentices. Morris usually selects apprentices from auditions or from a pool of supplementary performers who were used in special, large-scale projects such as The Hard Nut and L'Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato. "It's not a program," says Executive Director Nancy Umanoff. "It's a process of getting into the company."

During the six-month, renewable trial phase, dancers are paid at a slightly lower scale than full-fledged company members (about $550-$600 per week) and do not receive health insurance. Bradon McDonald, 27, and Gregory Nuber, 36, were hired as apprentices from the same men's audition a couple of years ago. Although both had been members of other companies--McDonald danced with The Limon Dance Company and Nuber with Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre--and an apprenticeship might seem like a step backward to others, they gladly entered Morris's apprenticeship process. McDonald went to the audition purely for the opportunity, having had no previous experience with Morris's work. Halfway through the day, he says his attitude switched from "Oh, this is fun," to "I have to have this job." Nuber knew that he wanted to dance with the musicality and physicality that are the hallmarks of Morris's choreography.

While MMDG apprentices can be cast like any senior company members, they tend to understudy a lot of roles. Nuber recalls the anxiety-producing experience of filling in for one part in Four Saints in Three Acts in London, and, later on the tour, jumping into a different role in the same production. McDonald didn't fret about whether he would eventually be promoted (he was); instead, he viewed the apprenticeship as almost a formality leading to company membership. In retrospect, he says, he was glad he was oblivious to the fact that not all apprentices move up to become full company members. Nuber fondly remembers the day the asterisk denoting "apprentice" was removed from his name in the program.

The Tulsa Ballet has no professional training school of its own but has entered an apprentice partnership with the dance department at Oklahoma University in Norman. For the ballet's productions of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, Artistic Director Marcello Angelini hires university students for several-week stints. The students get the benefit of professional experience and the company gets extra bodies. Apprentices are paid according to union guidelines, or approximately $340 per week.

All apprenticeships are not created equal, but there are certain commonalities to consider if you're checking out programs. An apprenticeship should not feel like a yearlong audition. And apprentices shouldn't merely be cheap labor. Educational, emotional, and institutional support are key factors to creating a successful working relationship between young dancers and company directors. While it's true that an apprenticeship is a trial period for the dancer, it's also a time when a dancer can "audition" a company, or even the idea of being in a company. As Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of San Francisco Ballet, says, by giving a young dancer the opportunity to work alongside company members, apprenticeships allow dancers "to determine if a career with a professional ballet company is really what they want."

Jody Sperling is a dancer, choreographer, and dance writer from New York City. She is artistic director of Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance.