Temporality of the Dancing Body:
Tears, Fears and Ageing Dears
Mark Edward and Dr Helen Newall
eBook Publication by IDP Publishers.
Abstract
This paper examines and highlights the importance of valuing the body as it
gravitates towards maturity (or ‘otherness’) refuting the myth that people do not or
should not dance as they get older. It offers, as context, some of the common
cultural myths of the ageing and injured dancer, and examines the career reality. It
interrogates the shift from performance into dance creation of the ageing
performer, and the prejudices that surround this process. Whilst ballet, as a dance
form, will always remain subject to the authoritarianism of perfect technique, this
paper suggests that issues in dance and the ageing body, physical scarring, psycho
physical scarring and embodied knowledge are being addressed in the wider dance
community, which appears at last to be moving on considerably in its appreciation
of the mature mover and embodied arts practice.
The paper uses as case studies, two practice-as-research projects which
examined the cumulative impact of ageing values and practices as experienced
across the trajectories of individual life-courses of performers, paying particular
attention to dimensions of lived experience, physical and emotional pain and
migrating selves. These projects also explored the subversion of notions which
discriminate against the ageing dancing body, and highlighted and celebrated work
which evolves with the ageing performer through somatic practice, valuing the
lived process and the body as a phenomenological breathing Curriculum Vitae.
The subjective nature of this paper arises out of reflexive research which is less
scientific and more concerned with observations of a practice which exposes and
explores, rather than sanitises, issues like emotion, pain, biography, embodiment
and sensitivity.
Key Words: Dance, technique, pain, injury, ageing, retirement, experience,
embodiment, practice-as-research.
*****
1. The Cultural Context
The ageing performer is both a potent narrative and a harsh reality. It is a story
prevalent enough in show business movies: as Joe Gillis says in Sunset Boulevard:
‘There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twentyfive.’1 And therein lies the problem: much dance technique is about youth. It might
dress itself up as having other themes and narratives, but dance is an athletic
phenomenon which ultimately celebrates an aesthetic of difficult, and often elitist,
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corporeal ability which only the young can attempt and achieve; meanwhile
ageing, for anyone, often privileges loss of ability.
Ballet, especially, is a world within dance which demands perfection and
rejects corporeal difference: the physical and emotional demands are rigorous and
damaging, and the world is littered with tragic little girls who failed to be
ballerinas because they were growing too tall, or too disproportioned. Here, for the
unlucky majority, is the first emotional pain of dance. The next rejection is injury,
which cuts short a career.2
But if the dancer survives without major injury, there is the final emotional and
physical pain of the ultimate and inevitable acquired fault of ageing which brings
on retirement at the age of 35 or 40…
These narratives are encoded into our cultural stories about dance. The first is
that the dancer must suffer and that this suffering is hidden beneath the effortless
beauty: in Black Swan, Nina pulls off her elegant pink satin pointe shoes to reveal
ugly bleeding toe nails.3 The second narrative is that the dancer is prone to tragic,
and sometimes fatal, injuries (from car accidents, or leaps from the set): Daisy’s
ballet career, in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is cut short by just such a
car accident, and this is also the fate of ageing dancer Beth MacIntyre in Black
Swan; and Nina herself leaps from the set, as does Moira Shearer’s character,
Vicky Page, in The Red Shoes.4 Thirdly, dance is all or nothing: Vicky Page must
choose painfully between love and dance, and ultimately between life and death.
None of them will ever dance again… and there is something in all these narratives
of the ‘deaths’ arising out of perfection. This is the lot of the fictional dancer: there
is pain in perfection; there is dancing through the pain, and the pain of not dancing.
In real life, the Not Dancing, however, is more banal: it is rarely because of a tragic
car accident or a suicidal leap from the scenery, but because the dancer is injured
through dancing, or is simply growing too old. Injuries, as noted by Wainwright
and Turner, are a frequent hazard of the profession; 5 but if the dancer is lucky and
escapes these, the growing old part is inevitable: it is a slow, inexorable and banal
decline, but it’s not dramatic and so, in Black Swan, it’s a clichéd subplot which is
wiped aside by the suicide/car crash narrative. In real life, for the dancer, it’s the
main story: the idea, in Western culture, of a professional dancer continuing
beyond a certain age is a social faux pas. Gill Clarke notes:
The assumption is that once they reach a certain age or stage in
their career, dancers will eventually 'grow up'. This means a
move into choreography or teaching, or a management or
directorial role, as befitting their 'adult status'. 6
Thus choreography is the mythical graveyard: ageing dancers flock to it like dying
elephants.
Mark Edward and Helen Newall
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2. More Hip Op than Hip Hop: more HRT than R ‘n’ B.
My own career trajectory has not been dissimilar. I came into the dance profession
at a later age than the average dancer. I sought formal training at the age of twenty
when I walked through the dance studio doors of Wigan and Leigh College and
was asked, ‘What do you want?’ to which I replied, ‘Well, what have you got?’
Not having had dance classes from the age of 5 like most others, I knew very little
about techniques: indeed, I was already deemed too old to start classical ballet
dance training. Fortunately, I had natural ability, and even more fortunately, it was
recognised and nurtured by enlightened tutors. I was lucky, but the clock was still
ticking and there was a countdown running. As I noted in an article for Animated
Community Dance Magazine,7 I am now nearing 40 and I am sitting, as I write this,
contemplating a pair of magi-knickers which are a must for any ex-practitioner of
the Martha Graham technique. This dancer’s decay is not welcome, but it is
inevitable. I have likened it previously to a kind of dancer’s menopause: I am
reluctantly undergoing physical and psychological changes, and the aches and
pains of my parents’ generation now increasingly belong to me. This is not a midlife crisis: in the dancing world, I am considered geriatric. So if ballet dancers must
at some ludicrously early point in their professional lives hang up their pointe
shoes, at what age do contemporary dancers like me wash their feet clean after a
final performance? I am more and more aware that I can no longer do the things I
used to do in a studio with such ease. So what should I do, while I still have some
options? I could seek a younger version of myself to dance my works; I could
explore a slower-moving and more gentle aesthetic which would have less impact
on the joints; I could ignore the situation and become a parody of what I used to be,
like a Norma Desmond of the dance world, with too much make up and not enough
arabesque. At this cross roads in my life, do I continue to make dance, moulding
my choreographies on younger but less experienced bodies, or is it time for the
final curtain call? Or, I could simply change the question from ‘what shall I
dance?’ and ask myself why I am dancing and for whom.
I didn’t leave dance totally: I gravitated from stage to page and became the
Programme Leader for Dance in a University where, ironically, teaching, writing
and thinking about dancing gradually became a way of consciously or
unconsciously cutting myself off from physically experiencing dance. On
reflection, this was probably through fear of being exposed as too old by the wider
dancing community. But in becoming an academic, I found that my passion for
dance was exhausted, or rather sanitised, by administration, and the bureaucracy of
dance making in an environment where data collection counts. The full time salary,
however, for a hitherto freelance dancer, was both lovely and insidious. But,
several times, I caught myself observing younger dancers through the dance studio
door, and (if I am honest) longing to be ‘let back in’ to the hard core contemporary
technique class. I felt I had become a trespasser on a dance territory that no longer
belonged to me, and that if I were to participate, I would, at worst, be a dancing
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parody of my former self, clinging on to material no longer suited to my body and
which was thus evermore physically destructive.
3. Alive and Kicking in the Graveyard
In 2007 I was awarded funding from Arts Council England and a matched
research grant from Edge Hill University for two dance practice-based research
projects exploring the ageing of performers. The aim was to create pieces for
public dissemination which negated the myth that mature movers should not dance,
and, in the process of making, to explore and find a new aesthetic.
The first of these pieces, Falling Apart at the Seams, set out to destabilise the
conventional nature of dance performance by setting at its centre performer rather
than performance. The ethos was that technique should accommodate the
performer and not vice versa. Whilst I was part of the experiment, I also invited
British Variety Circuit veteran, June Sands, to perform alongside me. Ms Sands
was 81 and there were several decades of performance experience etched into her
body: she had toured British music halls with her renowned father, Fred Brand
(who taught Roy Castle to tap dance), and she’d worked with British icons such as
Hylda Baker, George Formby, Old Mother Riley, and Arthur Askey. And she
could still dance.
The focus of my research was not to answer a rigid set of questions, but to
make a practical forum for discourse on the self-awareness and self-understanding
the individual performer has in relation to the ageing process, so I decided on a
more intimate method of semi-structured interviews followed by a rich dialogue of
discussions and debates throughout the making processes. This mode of enquiry
focused on the physical being in space and how the body can be a locus for change,
looking at multiple embodiments, the lived corporeal, phenomenology and
enforced embodied dance forms that can and have resulted in a physical and
psychological scarring through time.
This was a period of creative dialogue where cumulative knowledge
encountered new opportunity and was disseminated. The result was a rich practice.
June Sands was indispensable to the performance making process. The dialogue
was both verbal and physical and foregrounded work and/or technique which
evolves with the ageing performer. This embodied knowledge was understood
through the ‘felt’: the doing and being in the moment. As Sands herself noted in
rehearsals:
when I returned to the studio I was united with something that
was still deep inside but seemed to have been buried alive only to
slip back (although slightly changed) onto the bones the moment
I started to move. I suppose what we bury alive eventually will
come back to surface or even haunt us if it’s strong enough. 8
Mark Edward and Helen Newall
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Sands’s reflection on this somatic architecture draws upon knowledge gained
through connections to the living body over an extended period of time. The dance
making was a phenomenological process foregrounding movement experience
which has histories, ‘meat presence’, endurance and a physical knowledge, or what
might be termed a lived encyclopaedia of dance practice which can be given back
to the next generation of dancers through embodied arts experiences.
The second piece Why Can’t Martha Graham Just F**k off and Die?! was a
dance theatre performance presented at various showcases throughout the UK. The
work explored the politics of dancing past(s) and present by examining sociocultural dancing forms that somehow become psycho-physical imprints/scarring as
the dancer migrates into older physical realms. It is not for nothing that some
dancers are rueful about their pelvic floor musculature after extensive exposure to
the Martha Graham technique, or that one of those cultural dance narratives
previously mentioned privileges the hidden deformities of a ballerina’s feet. Since
some of the participants had become ‘lost bodies’, decentred through physical and
psychological changes, the project encouraged a balance between a shape-shifting
capacity for the ageing performer and a re-connection with the self through the
process of re-languaging the movement of the body. Technique was refocused, and
bodies re-centred. Thus the work interrogated dance forms and their currency, and,
more specifically, the emotional and physical (ill) effects past embodied forms can
have on the dancing body as it matures. Each dancer explored individually the
application of taught techniques and skills in shifting contexts and thus the
development of workable solutions that permitted an engagement with a dancing
past but which liberated the body from what it could no longer accomplish. The
aesthetics of ageing bodies were debated, and discourses of the ‘ideal’ dancing
body, body fascism and what constitutes ‘best’ dance practice challenged. Debates
emerged as to who sets these dance ideals and how these polemics might be
reflexively examined and challenged. This was a performance process which reembodied lost material into flesh which, in re-accommodating it, acted as the site
of representation of the emergence of new dancing freedoms and dance forms for a
more authentic older self in space.
The performance thus debated notions of repertory (learned work inflexibly
disseminated from dance maker to dancer and which discriminates against the
ageing body) versus the individual performer, and foregrounded for its audiences
the illusion of the persistent notion that a dancer’s ability is effortless and painfree: the reality it showed is that the ageing body leaves ability behind, but
experience, which cannot be gained in any other way than by ageing, fills this
absence with a lived richness. In other words, the performance privileged
performer rather than performance, and the piece moved to the performer as
opposed to the performer moving to the piece. As Sondra Horton Fraleigh states
on just such lived embodiment: ‘my dance cannot exist without me, I exist my
dance.’9
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4. Conclusion
It is increasingly apparent that engaging with dance is beneficial to athletes and
older people alike: many recent studies affirm this (Sofianides, 2009;
Gayvoronskaya, 2010; to name but a few). The issue, then, of older dancers
leaving the profession becomes even more nonsensical. Fergus Early, cited in Gill
Clark, states: ‘I see the premature retirement of dancers as a colossal waste. In no
other sphere would your career end at 35’.10 What changes is why dancers engage
with dance, and as previously stated, I think it becomes less about the presentation
of a set piece and more about the individual performer. Ageing dancers who
gravitate to choreography don’t necessarily have to be the older puppet masters of
young flesh. Pina Bausch’s 1978 and 2010 work Kontakthof demonstrates that the
aged dancing body should and can be culturally visible with no ill effects: dance
performance can accommodate age, and this accommodation need not be matched
by the pain, shock and effrontery of its spectators. This is the celebration of a
physical presence, hitherto gagged by a Corpse de Ballet tradition of dance studio
authoritarianism, which may now freely express itself. I offer the penultimate
thought to dance artist Scot Smith when he says,
There is something about the accumulation of experience that
emerges in performing that has very little to do with technique
… As time goes on, dance becomes less about technique and
more about somatics, about the uniqueness of the individual
body, rather than having to conform to a set of practices and
ideas.11
As an ageing performer and dance maker myself, I am developing deep seated
beliefs that our bodies belong to us, not the dance: the body is constantly shifting
and evolving through space and time. Thus, I seek to promote an environment
where the notion of a mature body can be visible and interrogated to allow for an
individual journey that celebrates both the physical and psychological marks of
time, and a physicality that has experienced beauty and pain, and which is valued
and openly embraced for what it is, not what it once was.
Notes
1
2
Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman Jr. Sunset Boulevard. Film.
Directed by Billy Wilder (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1950).
See, for example, Steven P. Wainwright and Bryan S. Turner, ‘’Just Crumbling
to Bits’? An Exploration of the Body, Ageing, Injury and Career in Classical
Ballet Dancers,’ Sociology 40, (2006): 237; Bryan S. Turner and Steven P.
Wainwright, ‘Corps de Ballet: the case of the injured ballet dancer,’ Sociology of
Health & Illness 25 no. 4 (2003): 269–288.
Mark Edward and Helen Newall
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3
Marc Heyman and Andres Heinz. Black Swan. Film. Directed by Darren
Aronofsky (Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011).
4
Eric Roth. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Film. Directed by David
Fincher (Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008); Emeric Pressburger. The
Red Shoes. Film. Directed by Michael Powell (London: Archers Film
Productions, 1948).
5
Steven P. Wainwright and Bryan S. Turner, ‘’Just Crumbling to Bits’? An
Exploration of the Body, Ageing, Injury and Career in Classical Ballet Dancers,’
Sociology 40, (2006): 237; Bryan S. Turner and Steven P. Wainwright, ‘Corps de
Ballet: the case of the injured ballet dancer,’ Sociology of Health & Illness 25 no.
4 (2003): 269–288. P237-255.
6
Gill Clarke, ‘What’s Age Got to do With It? Celebrating the Mature Performer,’
Time Out 1939, 17-23 October 2007.
7
Mark Edward, ‘More Hip Op than Hip Hop: temporality of the dancing body,’
Animated Community Dance Magazine, Winter 2011: 22.
8
Mark Edward, Rehearsal Diaries: Falling Apart at the Seams, unpublished, 2008.
9
Sondra Horton-Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetic,
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), xvi.
10
Gill Clarke, ‘What’s Age Got to do With It? Celebrating the Mature Performer,’
Time Out 1939, 17-23 October 2007.
11
Cited in Diane Parker, “What’s Age Got to do With It?”, Dance UK 67, Winter 2008:
11. Dance UK 67, Winter, 2008 pp.10-11: 11.
3. Parker, Diane. ‘What’s Age Got to do With It?’. Dance UK 67, Winter, 2008 pp.1011:11
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Mark Edward is the Artistic Director of Mark Edward and Company as well as a
part-time Senior Lecturer in Performance and Learning & Teaching Fellow at Edge
Hill University where he was formerly the Programme Leader for Dance. He has
worked for Rambert Dance Company. His research interests include the ageing
performer; drag queen guerrilla interventions and issues of body fascism in dance.
Dr Helen Newall is Reader in Performing Arts at Edge Hill University where she
teaches on the MA in Making Performance. She is also a professional playwright
with work performed by The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton; Theatre in the
Quarter and HTV Television Workshop. Her research interests include the
palimpsests of landscapes and bodies; sound and hearing and visual text..