Tonight, for fun, we’ll look at a few extraordinary dancers at the beginning of their careers and couple of decades later, and talk about what changes—and maybe what doesn’t.
I hope you’ll join me. And if not, don’t worry: more lives are on the way.
Live Link Here 7:30EST ***this event has passed
Most dancers retire from performing by their early 40s, and often much earlier than that—a real loss for the art form and its audiences.
Young dancers are thrilling in their technique and captivating in their promise. But it is the great god of time that molds a dancer into a singular, utterly irreplaceable artist. Just as all that experience has steeped and deepened, just as they’re on the verge of becoming a new version of themselves—poof, they’re gone. Remembered in our hearts, their images captured like ghosts on film and on our phones.
There are a few places where you’ll find a wider range of ages. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch comes to mind. Nederlands Dans Theater once had a company specifically for older dancers. And now a new company called When If Not Now has launched in Stuttgart, bringing together some of the great dancers of the past several decades, all now over 40.
What remains rare are productions with enough meaningful roles—and enough complexity—to make a range of ages possible and necessary. A great example is Scottish Ballet’s new production of Mary, Queen of Scots. Queen Elizabeth I appears as both her younger and older self, allowing us to see memory’s effect on her psyche and to see the long shadow it casts across her life.
