When I started dancing in my 60s, I wasn't prepared for what it would do to me.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

It might have become a hobby—a once-or-twice-a-week, “just for fun” activity that I eventually would have replaced with a ceramics class or relearning my long-forgotten college French. Enough of that, I might have come to feel about ballet after another year or two, the same way I came to feel about other things I’d loved: darkroom photography, voice lessons, poker, swimming laps, songwriting.

Or I might have actively grown tired of it, of its repetition, the plié-tendu-jeté-rond de jambe-fondu-frappé-adage and little warm-up jumps into petit allegro of it all—every day so much the same. Or of my glacial progress (inevitable, given that I’d started at the age of 62). Or of all the times I did make progress, but then after having to sit out for weeks, having managed yet again to hurt myself, I found that I was right back where I’d started—that over-90-degree grand battement à la seconde I’d been so proud of finally achieving, that nicely aligned and lifted attitude derrière I’d worked so hard on, gone, just as if they’d never happened.

I might have missed a week or two while traveling, and afterward was busy tending to the things that had piled up, then one day realized that my life had quietly closed over the space I’d been devoting to ballet.

It might easily not have survived the worst of the pandemic—those long lockdown months, the lonely daily classes over Zoom—or, even if it had, it might have faltered on returning to the studio, just six or eight of us per class, masked, blue stripes of tape defining our barre slots and boxes on the floor.

But none of those things happened. Instead, just over eight years after my first-ever ballet class, I’m still dancing every day. At 70, my daily classes (often more than one a day: on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for example, two; on Sundays, four) are as much a part of the rhythm of my life—an absolute necessity—as my morning coffee or the hours I spend at my laptop, writing, once I’ve finished drinking it.

It’s improbable, I know. I’ve seen a lot of people come and go since I first started dancing. But I’m not the only diehard at the studio. Cheryl and Tamie started taking classes in 2018—the year after I did—and, for a long time, Tamie seemed to take every class the studio offered, dancing for so many hours a day that I felt lazy by comparison. Some of the newer folks—Cynthia, Madeline T., Dena, Tawny, and most recently Ana—are in the studio almost as much as I am. Some people have come several times a week, without fail, for years, like Lindsey, Madeline B., Brad, and Pat. Some have come every day—like me—but only for a year or two, and then abruptly stopped. Sometimes I’ll find out why (Rian moved to Miami; Bronwyn switched to pole- and hoop-dancing and fire-eating; Laura and Elise both finished Ph.D.s at Ohio State and got tenure-track professorships elsewhere). Sometimes people disappear, and the why remains a mystery.

My best dance friend, Judith, who was with me from the start, took every class I did, and when we were first offered the chance to perform in 2018, she and I threw ourselves into it together. We rehearsed in my living room before every rehearsal at the studio, determined not to be the two old women who could not keep up, who could not keep the choreography in their heads. Judith died two years ago this fall. If she were still alive, I have no doubt she’d still be at the barre beside me every day, with her beautiful épaulement, saying outrageous things. She always greeted new people to the studio with the deadpan warning to “Be careful, you know this is a cult,” or by saying, solemnly, “Welcome to Dancers Anonymous.”

By now I’ve spent upward of 5,000 hours in ballet classes, and roughly 1,600 hours more in other, non-ballet dance classes (contemporary, modern, improv, jazz, West African, tap—not my genre, I decided, after giving it a fair shot, twice a week for a good two years—and some, invented by the owners of the studio, that defy categorization). These numbers don’t even include the semester-long course in Bartenieff I took at Ohio State, just me and seven undergraduate dance majors. Or all the dance workshops I’ve taken—or the two dance retreats I’ve been on. Or the many, many hours I’ve spent in rehearsal for the dozen or so live performances and dance films I’ve been in by now.

I dance as if it were my job.

It feels like one, too. Not in the sense that dancing ever seems like drudgery to me, or that I ever have the urge to call in sick, but in the way that waking up and heading off to work doesn’t feel like it’s a choice. Or rather: Being aware that it was once a choice—to take that job in particular; to pursue that career—and then became, after a while, what one does, day after day, month after month, year after year.

I’m sore all the time. We all are, of course, even Lizzie, Ian, and Olivia—the under-30 crowd. But the soreness of a 70-year-old body working this hard every day just for the joy of it is something special—both special-bad (my poor knees and back) and special-wonderful (it sometimes seems to me I spent years without knowing that I had a body, that the satisfying ache I feel at my first forward fold each day is what keeps me aware that I am in one).

In the studio’s anteroom, as we sit stretching, waiting for the class before ours to get out, my friends and I trade the day’s complaints—a stiff hip, an unsteady ankle, cranky feet—and tips and resistance bands for stretching out our feet or warming up our turnout muscles. I offer my recipe for post-class hot baths (equal parts Epsom salts and colloidal oatmeal—because the Epsom salts are drying, I warn the younger dancers, who have not considered this—and a splash of jojoba oil for good measure) and share the latest revelation from my favorite dance performance physical therapist, Tessa, whom I’ve spent more time with over the last six years than I have with anyone I’m related to. (In one recent session—weeks into my latest round of twice-a-week PT—I discovered that my ankles aren’t injured, that it turns out I’ve been scrunching up the toes on my standing leg when I’m not in relevé, as if this would help me balance. Now that I’ve stopped doing that, the ankle pain I’ve had for months is gone!)

Although my body aches at all times, my injuries are more likely to occur outside the studio: when I’m working in the garden, driving tensely through a rainstorm, or even only leaning over to pick up a stray piece of paper on my desk (or none of the above, but just by sitting still for too long). Once I threw my back out while taking a (slow) two-mile walk to campus from my house (apparently, while thinking about what I would be teaching that day, I wasn’t walking carefully enough—I wasn’t concentrating, as I do in the studio).

After an injury, which is almost always in my lower back but sometimes in a hip, an ankle, or a shoulder, I have to give up dancing for a while. I hate that. I start yet another round of physical therapy, even though by now I know by heart every exercise that will help me get better. (I just can’t count on myself to do them without Tessa supervising and asking me at every visit, “Are you doing this at home?”) When at last I’m cleared to return to ballet, I start slowly—protectively: no forward folds, no jumps, no one-legged balances—before I finally return full-force … and with one too-high arabesque will often undo the weeks or months of rest, ice, heat, and monotonous exercises. And so it begins again. You’d think I’d get discouraged.

I do not get discouraged.

I’m a dancer: Ice and heat and rest and elevation, the mind-numbing planks and squats and lunges and wall-sits Tessa prescribes, the Epsom salts, the Tiger Balm, the TheraBands, the foam roller—rolling, rolling, first one hip and then the other, every evening—and the ice pack wedged between my back and the chair’s as I eat my late dinner after two dance classes are just part of the deal.

When I first started writing about my relationship to dance, I was careful not to call myself a dancer. Or I put “dancer” in quotes. Not a real dancer, I hoped the quotes made clear. I was a person, a writer, over the age of 60, who took dance classes. A lot of dance classes. But not a dancer. The distinction was obvious to me.

I’ve called myself a writer without embarrassment or fear ever since I was a child. But writing came naturally and was absorbing in a way that almost nothing else was. So, almost from the beginning, writer felt like a good fit. When I became a teacher, in my 30s, that felt like a perfect fit too. I was lucky, I thought. Some people spend their whole lives without finding even one. (And then I found a third, six years ago—as an advice columnist.)

But the practice of ballet is not a natural fit for me. I’ve long disliked group activities. I’ve never been someone who enjoyed—or even tolerated—being told what to do (and in ballet, one is constantly being told what to do and exactly how to do it). I’ve never much appreciated classical traditions, either. I never even listened to much classical music—I felt I didn’t have the patience for it. Until I became a ballet dancer, I was not even a regular at the ballet.

And I was not—I am still not—someone who moves slowly, gracefully, precisely through the world. I’m not strong. My balance has always been terrible. My body is soft (still soft, despite those thousands of hours in the studio). I don’t have “good feet”—on the contrary, my archless feet are all wrong for ballet. My ankles are weak. My legs are short. My hips are wide. Nothing about me is “right” for ballet.

Alex Kirshner
We Now Have Our Ted Lasso of College Football. It’s Surprisingly Great.
Read More

But I love it so much. I love it more with every class I take. Sometimes I love it more within a single class. I work hard at it, with as much intense focus as I’ve ever had, at every fondu, every rond de jamb, every développé—while at the same time doing my best not to look like I am working hard. Because that’s how ballet works: It’s always hard, and it has to look easy. I love that paradox. I love all the paradoxes of ballet. Solid and fluid. Grounded and buoyant. Lift while descending. Descend when you lift.

Of course I’m still at it eight years after I started. How could I not be?

I dance for the pleasure and the difficulty of it, for the discipline and beauty of it. For the camaraderie—the dance studio is now my whole social life. I dance for the singular experience of making art with my own arms and legs, my feet, my hands. And heart, Fili, my first ballet teacher, would say. (Haht, Fili pronounces it.)

Check back with me at 80. Kinehora, I’ll still be dancing. For now, I’ll be opening my calendar and blocking out a bunch of time: I just signed on for a project that will have me in rehearsal on Thursdays, before ballet, and on Sundays after the four classes I already take. The rehearsal period is just a month, though, so it’s not as grueling as it sounds. And it’s Fili directing it, so it will be shot through with sweetness and drama. Haht. Eventually, life will go back to normal—my normal, anyway.

So here I am, day after day. Doing something beautiful and hard and full of paradoxes. Gathering with the people who’ve become my dearest friends to chat while we stretch and then to dance—plié through grand allegro—for the 90 minutes of a ballet class. Clapping for each other after each group has completed the adagio and tendu combinations in the center, and again after everyone has flown from one corner to the other. I high-five Cati when she executes her first triple pirouette and Mia when she pulls off her first double on the left. They cheer for me after my first-ever double on the right—which I never thought would happen but then did, on the very day that I turned 70, a day when I brought flower crowns and disco ball antennae to the studio for everyone.

On Tuesdays, in the intermediate class, our teacher, Leiland, calls out, “Very nice, Michelle! That’s it!” as I balance in passé, and immediately I fall out of the balance (as I do every single time he praises me; you’d think Leiland would learn). In the intermediate/advanced class on Sunday afternoons, Caitlin calls out to us all, “Beautiful port de bras! Gorgeous! You all slay me, you amaze me.” In the advanced beginner class on Thursday nights, as the music starts for our first combination at the barre, Fili asks, rhetorically, “Is it too early for drama?” then, “Is it ever too early for drama?” and answers for us, “No! It is never too early for drama!” and two minutes later sings out to us, “And now allongé and … over, reach, reach, reach, and up—up, up, sous-sus … and say goodbye, and soutenu.”

I have never been happier, I think.

I think it every day. In every class I take.

When I started dancing in my 60s, I wasn’t prepared for what it would do to me.

Tags: