Dear Antonia,
I have belonged to three different dance companies over the course of 35 years and also worked as a solo artist for a long time. I now am Artistic director of Baharat!! (www.baharatdancers.com).
First, there are a lot of untrained and undisciplined dancers out there trying to put together dance companies. I hope that you and your friends have a lot of dance training before attempting to become a professional dance company. Know what it is you present and how it should be presented and how to define it for your audiences. It also does not hurt to take some performance management classes, so that you understand what you are trying to do, why and how it is accomplished with integrity.
I think it is also good for ALL dancers to be involved in theatre. I worked in theatre at a university as costume designer for 7 years and learned SO much about all facets of presenting a performance that had meaning for our audiences as well as for us. So many times dancers focus on themselves instead of what the audience is seeing. Performance is not just about what feels good to us. I know this sounds snotty, but I see that happen over and over again, where the performance is all about the dancer's ego and that does not really extend out into the audience at all, even when they appear to like it.
I have to say that democracies rarely work out in dance companies, though there are exceptions. Usually there is one person who has a vision and others work toward contributing to that vision, with varying degrees of input through their solo work and the company work. When a company is declared to be a democracy, there is usually a person or two who will end up doing all the work, but still having to share the important decisions... and this leads to resentment.
Many dance companies do not have strong leadership that knows what they are doing and so the whole thing just falls apart.
They just want to be the leader of a dance company because it sounds so artsy and important. Often they have not thought through what hard work it is, how much resentment can build, how many dancers will move on after years of training and how that affects the performance of the company,etc. They think only of looking cool on stage, getting the applause. They also often do not think of the quality of what they are putting out there as opposed to a standard of quality, if that makes sense.
Even the most successful of dance companies sees a large turn over in members a lot of the time. ( How many dance companies did Baryshnikov belong to in his life??) This is a natural thing in the life of a dance company, but it is also REALLY frustrating when a director has spent a couple of years getting a well trained group together only to have one of them quit because she is moving, another because she is pregnant and a third because she is mad because she did not get to dance a solo in the last show.
There are also many rewards, but the reality of dance companies is not nearly as romantic as the idea of having one. This is not a post to discourage you, but to ask you to look clearly at your motives for putting together a dance company, to hopefully prepare you for some realities, and to want to make sure you can do right by the dance and put THAT as your main mission.
Regards,
A'isha