EN
The study deals with the motivation of Czech dancers to carry on their profession. The author focuses on contemporary dance, meaning on the environment outside ballet ensembles, and in particular on the entities founded after the “Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution” in 1989. An exploration about artists´ thinking is based on the qualitative analysis of interviews with the leading representatives in that realm, and on the analysis of already published texts dealing with important aspects of researched persons´ working life. As resulting from the research, the major motivation factor for the dancers is their personal and strong tie to the dance; the drive to carry on the professions comes solely and exclusively from the inner intellectual world of artists. The dance is a personified life philosophy for the respondents; it is a paraphrase of the meaning of life. The investigated materials also point out key personal characteristics, which can influence the quality of their lives directly: flexibility, assimilation, self-reliance, self- discipline, and liability.