Background of the IOTPD

At an age when others are just entering their productive professional years, the dancer's performing career ends. Years of training and rigorous apprenticeship prepare the dancer for a profession that is relentless in its demands, scarce in its material rewards and fiercely defended by those involved in it. Dance is a vocation, more than a profession. Professional dancers make major contribution to cultural life and economy, but the performing life is intense, insecure and short. When it comes to an end, either by personal choice, physical limitation or injury, the dancer faces a difficult challenge.

Four countries, Great Britain, Canada, the United States and the Netherlands, have developed programs to assist in dealing with this challenge of transition. In Great Britain the Dancer’s Career Development was founded in 1973. Canada’s Dancer Transition Center was created in 1984 as was Career Transition for Dancers in New York (US). The Retraining Program for Dancers in the Netherlands was established in 1986. The success of these programs, together with the universality of the issue, led to the creation of an international organization to promote activities concerning transition for dancers around the world.

The International Organization for the Transition of Professional Dancers (IOTPD) was formed in 1993 in Lausanne, Switzerland with a mission to alleviate the challenges that professional dancers face worldwide when transitioning to a post-dance career. The IOTPD develops all kind of initiatives that documents the scope of the problem worldwide and approaches taken currently to alleviate it; formulating recommendations to improve the career transition process; and publicizing both the problem and possible solutions to all stakeholders in and outside the dance community. The IOTPD aims to heighten awareness of the career transition problem worldwide; help the nonprofit sector and dancers themselves improve the career transition process; extend dancers' creative lives; and serve as a model program for other workforce sectors in which talented individuals confront a short performing career.

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