Super Bowl half-time arrangement under scrutiny over unpaid ‘volunteers’

It’s an annual tradition as ingrained as throwing Gatorade on the winning coach: the moment when the Super Bowl half-time performer takes to the stage and the football field is filled with “fans” cheering them on.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that those audience members are in fact hundreds of unpaid “volunteers” who participate in nearly two weeks of rehearsals ahead of the Super Bowl, many of whom are trained dancers recruited from the same agency that represents the paid dancers on the halftime show stage.

The arrangement is now under scrutiny after Taja Riley, a professional dancer, who called out the people behind the nation’s highest-grossing sporting event for not paying the trained dancers used in the show. She accused the NFL and Roc Nation, who are producing the half-time show, for exploiting the labor of mostly Black artists.

Riley, who has been paid to perform in two previous half-time shows, said the unpaid dancers are treated as volunteers but are required to attend nine days of nine-hour rehearsals. While she hasn’t been privy to this year’s preparations, Riley said that at the previous Super Bowls she participated in, “the schedules those volunteers were given, and what they were coaxed into … they will be doing more than just acting as ‘concertgoers’”.

This year, the call for volunteers went out to dancers represented by Bloc, the same agency that represents Fatima Robinson, who is choreographing the performance. Riley was tipped off about the recruitment of dance artists for unpaid work. She said she was surprised because Robinson is someone she admired and looked up to not just as a dance artist but one of the “African-American leaders for our community”.

“She’s done what I hope to do, of