The contract ends.
It’s almost as if we, as artists, can feel that memory in our bones — the final Sunday matinee of a Broadway run. The closing weekend of a regional theater’s season. The abrupt load-out of a multi-city tour. Whatever the situation, the transition is jarring, practically instantaneous, and never once is it something you’re prepared for. You pack up your dressing room station, turn in your mic belt, and suddenly, you’re back home. You wake up on a Tuesday morning to a disorienting stillness. Your joints throb from the cumulative, repetitive impact of the run. Your nervous system is still desperately wired to a phantom call time. And then, that familiar, crushing psychological weight descends. You’re paralyzed.
This is the Adrenaline Cliff of the performance industry. It’s that inevitable (yet dangerous) psychological and physical crash that freelance dancers face following high-intensity contracts, tours, and gigs. We don’t talk about it in the audition room, and we definitely don’t include it in our bios for the world to see. Yet, every working dancer knows the feeling of stepping off the ledge. It’s the ever-present, quiet epidemic in our industry — and, in complete honesty, it’s entirely crafted by design.
To even begin to understand the Adrenaline Cliff, it’s important to take a glance at the physiological reality of our work. What we, as artists, breezily brush off as the “post-show blues” is actually a psyche-crushing bout of physiological and emotional withdrawal. Clinical researchers and medical professionals, such as Dr. Bonnie E. Robson and Eleanore Gillies, have studied this phenomenon under the term ‘Post-Performance Depression’ (PPD). Whenever we’re in a state of performance, whether that be during our time in shows or rehearsals, our bodies become flooded with neurotransmitters — dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline — that result in a biochemical state of ecstasy and heightened survival. Our artist selves operate on a sustained fight-or-flight high to mask chronic pain and push through exhausting schedules. The freelance dance gig economy relies on this incredible emotional and physical vulnerability to sell a “product” — an illusion of self, or a beautiful escape — yet provides zero psychological safety net for the independent contractor. But when the project abruptly ends, that dopamine rush screeches to a halt. The nervous system crashes as it frantically attempts to recalibrate. In the case of PPD, this biochemical rollercoaster causes extreme emotional lows that mirror clinical depression: artists carry forward lingering sadness, severe anxiety, and often a crippling, terrifying loss of purpose. It’s almost as if the biological scaffolding is removed, leaving us in a perpetual psychological freefall.
If we take out our magnifying glasses to examine how the Adrenaline Cliff manifests in dancers, the concrete realities are staggering, alarming, and all too prevalent in the history of our art form. This feeling could never be compared to a fleeting melancholy, but instead is more akin to a disorienting, full-body shock. I’ve seen dancers experience this crash as a deep, unexplainable physical hunger, like some sort of primal attempt by the body to counteract an emotional and spiritual depletion. I’ve watched unspeakably talented artists stare into the void of their living rooms, paralyzed by an apathy that makes even the simple act of unpacking a suitcase feel insurmountable.
Then, there’s the displacement of identity and community. The freelance dance gig economy relies on immeasurable emotional vulnerability. In the audition and rehearsal rooms, we often chip away at our boundaries (again, a high personal cost) and end up sacrificing pieces of our personhood. We go into the trenches with our castmates, sharing sweat, tears, and our rawest humanity to build a temporary, albeit beautiful, ecosystem. When the show closes, that bond is severed overnight. Psychologists studying PPD have noted that large portions of post-show grief can be traced to this sudden social isolation. We grieve the loss of those comrades, while simultaneously grieving the character and the daily purpose that defined our waking hours.
This begs the question: how do artists begin to exist as people rather than products? Unfortunately, the severity of the “crash” is inextricably tied to how we are viewed as artists. This dynamic is rooted in two foundational ideas of the theatrical industry: one, the entertainer has no other purpose than to entertain the audience, and two, the audience must be entertained. On paper, the expectations are simple enough. Be charming. Be dramatic. Be mesmerizing. Be unaffected. And, above all, even if you have talent, be workable. That word sticks with me. Workable. Synonyms that come to mind are moldable, malleable, changeable, compliant. Words that are more often associated with inanimate objects than human beings. In the rehearsal process, dancers are routinely asked to suffer for the work. We are expected to surrender entirely to the craft — but where does that lead us? Feeling fulfilled?
All evidence points to an opposite feeling: hollow.
When the gig concludes, this same industry that molds us abruptly severs ties. The vulnerability that was so highly prized — and highly profitable for producers and organizations — is left completely unmanaged. There’s no human resources department checking in. We are, quite literally, unemployed. This pattern of extraction without care has never been just about individual experiences; this is a systemic byproduct of the Western arts industry. Injustice has always been at the forefront of its conception.
To cover for this glaring systemic failure, the entertainment industry has developed a well-oiled, highly effective gaslighting technique: the romanticization of suffering. Within my career, there was a mantra drilled into me early on: if you are “good,” the industry will always try to “break” you to “make you stronger.” You will be picked apart to see if you really have the stuff to keep going. They call it “tough love.” We were taught that withstanding verbal and emotional abuse is a badge of honor. Yes, we beat you down, but did you flinch?
Yet, despite this suffering — that silent unraveling behind the curtain — artists are praised for pushing through. The industry weaponizes the concept of “resilience” to romanticize what is actually a structural policy failure. If you struggle after a contract, or even deign to ask for support, you are met with cold dismissal or told that “the show must go on.” The message is clear: your pain is a distraction; your humanity, a liability. The demand for perfection is so overwhelming that any sign of vulnerability is treated as weakness. We are told to sacrifice our bodies and minds, reinforcing a toxic environment where personal worth is tied entirely to performance output. I believe resilience to be, perhaps, one of the most beautiful human qualities, but it shouldn’t be required to survive basic, systemic neglect.
I approach this crisis not just from an advocacy standpoint, but from a deeply personal one. I’ve spent my life enmeshed in the machinery of the performing arts and have painstakingly navigated every iteration of this relentless cycle. I’ve experienced what the freefall from the Cliff feels like firsthand. Like so many of us in this industry, I know exactly what it means to be celebrated under stage lights one night and completely unmoored the next, sitting in the stillness and trying to figure out how to piece a human identity back together.
Too often, I find myself fantasizing about an arts ecosystem where we stop treating mental health care like an add-on and instead view it as the actual bedrock of a creative’s career. The clinical data has already made it abundantly clear; we know that democratizing access to psychological resources fundamentally enhances human capacity. When performers have reliable, systemic support, their allostatic load (the compounding physical wear and tear from chronic stress) drops by inconceivable amounts. For dancers, whose bodies and minds are truly inseparable, this shift is revolutionary. If your nervous system isn’t locked in a permanent state of fight-or-flight, your neuroplasticity actually improves. You heal faster. Injury rates go down. Empathetic bandwidth grows. Art begins to reflect our actual, lived, human experiences. When we aren’t burning up all our metabolic energy just trying to survive a plunge off the Adrenaline Cliff, we finally have the capacity to make bolder, deeper, and far more sustainable art.
The decades of denial are over: art is at a breaking point. There is dwindling profitability in treating dancers as cogs in a machine, as battery-powered toys valued by their productivity and discarded when their charge runs out. If the system we know is cracking, it signals there is change afoot. Artists are ready for structural reckoning. Could it be that our humanity, at once overtly commodified and painfully neglected, is the very thing hurdling us towards collective arts evolution? As I reacquaint myself with my true, authentic, artistic desires, and in my work as the Executive Director of the Broadway Mental Health Foundation, I believe that by viewing the democratization of mental health care as a vital vehicle for social justice in the arts (not to mention a medical necessity we’ve long been denied), we can genuinely change how this industry operates. My hope is that we finally stop asking dancers to just grit their teeth and endure.
Moving towards this evolution requires practical, systemic shifts: embedding mental health liaisons into our rehearsal spaces, providing structured psychological transition care at the close of high-intensity contracts, and treating behavioral health resources as standard, non-negotiable union benefits. We must become reacquainted with the notion that performers are deliverers of beauty and keepers of the human spirit. Stewards of legacy. I invite us all to step away from the edge of the cliff and shift the industry standard from “The Show Must Go On” to a new foundational ethic: “The Artist Must Be Whole.”
