Dance is about life, movement, energy, people. Even when you stand still, movement pulses constantly within you. Your heart is dancing (in ¾ time), electrical impulses whizzing through your nerves, glands pumping, balance mechanisms kicking in to keep you upright, brain whirring and clicking, blood forcing at high speed through capillaries, arteries and veins. Your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, muscles, tendons, joints and skin are firing front-line SITREP intelligence inwards, deploying at lightning speed in response to rapid-fire commands from your central control module. It’s a three-ring circus in there, every millisecond, and that’s when you’re merely breathing. (What happens when you actually start dancing? It gets intense.)
“Dance is a spiritual experience in a physical form“.
— Merce Cunningham
Most dancers appear youthful, compared with the general population (your audience, for example). Even if you’re not chronologically young, you look and move as though you were. Your joints are good, your range of movement exceptional, stamina’s fine, you carry yourself very well – in short, you look great. People stare at you, fascinated by your posture, walk, alertness, that wonderful dancer’s deportment, your clothes and how you wear them, your air of being what the French call, “good in your skin”. Dancers stand out in a crowd. It’s the way they move.
“The philosopher’s soul dwells in his head. The poet’s soul is in his heart; the singer’s soul lingers about his throat, but the soul of the dancer abides in all her body“.
— Kahlil Gibran
You move wonderfully, all through your dancing life, growing, developing, changing, and here’s the thing: everything else is moving, developing and changing with you. Your dancing, too, will change (nothing stands still). The signs are subtle, but you’ll start to pick them up eventually, maybe a minor discomfort – slight stiffness of knee or hip, a nagging back, a wry neck, a foot wanting TLC.
This is your body, telling you something important. You might find it unnerving. Dancers always worry about what people think; not surprising, it’s their job to look great. They know their technique, and they mind when the easy steps gradually become problematic. You keep on dancing, of course. Maybe no-one will notice.
“Dance, dance, as long as you can. We must travel through life, but why make a dead march of it?”
— Eliza Cook, Dancing Song (Eliza Cook’s Journal)
You can go on like this for a while, but not for ever — the problems don’t go away. One day, inevitably, you recognise that your beloved profession, all that sacrifice, hard work, suffering and joy, is starting to slip out of your life. The pain-to-satisfaction ratio is different. Dancing seems nowadays to cost more in discomfort than it brings in delight. It’s disconcerting, even traumatic. Dancers dance – that’s what they do. If they don’t (or can’t) dance, what are they? At some point every dancer must face this question. The answer may be hard to find.
“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art“.
— Carrie Fisher
Yet age happens (sooner or later), and one of the best ways you can deal with it is … to dance. Everybody knows, dance is good for you (check our last post, The Dance Inside the Dancer). Indeed, dancing is good for everyone, at any age; no need to be young and beautiful to get the benefits. The title of this post is literally true – you really have got to “Dance For Your Life”. You’re programmed to dance. You inherited this from your earliest protohuman ancestors — ignore it at your peril.
“I found that dance was key to keeping depression out of my life. When you dance, things just go away, things don’t seem so bad. There’s no better way to take care of health than through something as joyous and beautiful as dance“.
— Patrick Swayze
Dance comes in all sorts of disguises. It’s not always about technical brilliance or exquisite execution. Perhaps it has been for you, up to now – the thrill of performance is central to a professional dancer’s life. But when you enter the next phase of existence, when you’re not ripping off multiple turns or dazzling feats of artistry, dance is still there for you. There’s social dance for example, and you’ll have done plenty of that. You can carry on with social dance for a long time after you leave the stage, and you’ll always look good in it, as everyone will tell you.
“He capers, he dances, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May“.
— William Shakespeare
That, indeed, is my point. People need social dance, and fortunately there are multiple opportunities for you and me and all of us to enjoy dancing at almost every age. Dancing is like oxygen – essential for the body and the brain.
The science backs this up. Many of the afflictions we associate with old age can really be helped by dancing. We know, for example, that dance brings greater freedom and movement to patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis [1]. It also improves the ability to react, to think and to perceive. This is partly because it stimulates production of Brain-Derived Neurotropic Factor, that useful protein which boosts and maintains nerve transmission and memory [2]. Dance is good for old people in so many ways – it gives them better flexibility, strength, lower body muscular endurance, agility and balance [3].
Several mainstream professional dance organisations now actively promote dance for older participants. The Royal Academy of Dance® has a project, Dance for Lifelong Wellbeing, featuring dance instruction for 50-to-75-year-olds; this provides Continuing Professional Development programs, and a formal qualification in Dance Practice with Adults. English National Ballet and Roehampton University developed an outreach programme for sufferers from Parkinson’s Disease, and other ensembles (e.g. Mark Morris Company) do similar work.
This approach is also valid for people with severely limited movement potential – for instance, it’s perfectly possible to dance while sitting down, and the therapeutic benefits are well documented. (Quite apart from the question of age, there is the wonderful Candoco Dance Company in which many of the professional artists dance magnificently in wheelchairs, inspiring audiences and other professionals, and touring at the highest level all over the world.)
Worldwide, people now live longer than they used to. At the same time, the birth-rate is slowing down. This means fewer young people taking care of more and more old people. As the proportion of elderly continues to rise, it becomes increasingly important to maintain their physical and mental health (no society can support an expanding population of long-term invalids).
“All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing“.
— Molière
This is where dance makes an essential contribution. It’s an excellent form of exercise for an aging population [4][5], improves their aerobic and general fitness [6], cheers them up, and brings important improvements to their psychological health [7]. It’s good for posture, heart health, circulation, bone strength, weight control, sleep patterns, anxiety reduction, mental acuity and of course, social life. People who dance regularly look and feel alive, and they enjoy themselves. Dance does everyone a power of good on so many levels: humanitarian, social, socio-political, psychological, physical. Also, it’s fun!
“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance“.
— Japanese Proverb
Dancing is a glorious way to spend some of the most rewarding parts of this dancing life.
© Jeremy Leslie-Spinks
References
1. Moffett H, Noreau L, Parent E & Drolet M. (2000). Arthritis Care & Research 13(2),pp.100-111.
2. Kattenstroth J-C, Kolankowska I, KalischT & Dinse HR, (2010). Superior sensory, motor and cognitiver performance in elderly individuals with multi-year dancing activities. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 2, pp.1-9
3. Keogh JWL, Kilding A, Pidgeon P, Ashley L & Gillis D. ( 2009). Physical Benefits of Dancing for Healthy Older Adults: A Review. Journal of Aging and Physical Activity 17, pp.1-23.
4. Arslan T. (2011). The effects of an eight-week step-aerobic dance exercise programme on body composition parameters in middle-aged sedentary obese women. International SportMed Journal 12(4), pp.160-168.
5. Nelson et al
6. Vandervoort AA, Hayes KC, & BlangerA. (2009). Strength and endurance of skeletal muscle in the elderly. Physiotherapy Canada, 38(3), pp.167-173.
7. Nelson ME, Rejeski WJ, Blair SN, Duncan PW, Judge JO, King AC, Macera CA & Castaneda-Sceppa C. (2007). Physical activity and public health in older adults: recommendations from the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association. Medicine and science in sports and exercise 39(8), pp.1435-1445.
8. Hui E, Chui B & Woo J. (2009). Effects of dance on physical and psychological well-being in older persons. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 49, e45-e50.
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