Identity Attachment Influences Contemporary Dancers’ Career Transition

The career of a dancer in Western concert dance is often short, owing to factors such as family, injuries, low level of income, change of interests, unemployment, ageing, and frustration with working conditions. In this field, career transition has been portrayed as a multi-layered and comprehensive life change in which one of the key features is the loss of the identity as an artist. Despite this general understanding, there is little research on dancers’ identity and its possible relation to career transition. The paper focuses on describing the relationship between a dancer’s identity and injury based career transition through concepts of self and identity drawn from social psychology. The concepts of the self and identity are described through the metaphor of a circle that consists of three layers: the innermost (the self), the middle (the personal identity) and the outermost (the social identity) layer. In the article, the function of these layers and their inter-relationships in dancer identity is approached by interpreting stories constructed from the interviews of three former Finnish contemporary dance artists. The paper reveals that the vocational identity of the interviewed dancers is emphasized differently. This suggests a connection especially between the occupational (e.g. social) identity and the personal identity. In relation to career transition, attachment to dancer identity by the interviewees is described either as a facilitating or hindering factor. Thus the article suggests that the attachment to dancer identity does bear significance to the process of the life change of dancers.