Ageing Dancers and the Shift from the Outer to the Inner Body

Youth being an essential condition for a dance career is a notion that is still widely unchallenged in cultures obsessed with youth. Once in their late thirties, dancers are expected to retire. Only recently did "mature" dancers become more visible on stages "emphasising the boundless waste of artistic talent and embodied knowledge".

Choreographers responded by developing works for mature dancers. The Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, for instance, reinterpreted "Kontakthof" - originally created in 1978 - in 2010 using dancers in their sixties. The aim was to confront the audience "to face up to its ageist society". Several works were developed by different choreographers in the 1990s celebrating the dancers' maturity, showing effort, emotion, and vulnerability instead of dazzling technique. Involving them was seen as an artistic need and the question arose whether "the older dancer has a stronger message to voice as opposed to the youthful one". Seeing professional dancers still working in their fifties was - and still is - rare.

Years of knowledge and wisdom stored within these older bodies go to waste and audiences lose transformative experiences as we, as a society, revel in the virtuosity of youth and fail to see physical feats as merely one aspect of an artistic investigation. Jillian Harris

Dancers notice a shift from the emphasis on physicality to the thought process of and about the movement, a shift from the outer to the inner body. The dancers' passion, however, remains unchanged. 

The transformation moves from quantity to quality of movement with perceptions of agility over ability and maturity over youth. There is an inner subjecivity and honouring of experience that can only be perceived or embodied by a mature dancer. (York-Pryce, 2014)

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- York-Pryce, S. (2014). Ageism and the Mature Dancer. Conference: time space & the body 3 inter-disciplinary /probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/time-space-and-the-bodyAt: Mansfield College Oxford University UK, link
- photographs of Pina Bausch via and via