The Aching Body in Dance

In the late 1950s I attended a recital by Ruth St. Denis. It took place in a New York dance studio, maybe Dance Players on Sixth Avenue. She was about the same age as I am now (seventy-eight years as of January, 2013). Taller than I by a good four or five inches, she was clad in a long, sleeveless black gown of a filmy texture. Her hair was white, but it was her arms that drew my attention, for not only were they snowy white in contrast to the blackness of her dress, but also were the sole source of movement. The flabby undersides of her upper arms created their own autonomous swaying motion. That was my primary recollection: those ivory undulating arms lifted in supplication or some such appeal to a transcendent spirituality.

Around the same time I attended a “Farewell to Dance” concert of Maria-Theresa, Isadora Duncan’s last surviving foster daughter. In a bare studio she was accompanied by an elderly, white-haired man hunched over an upright piano as he played a Beethoven Sonata. It may have been the Tempest (No. 17 in D Minor). I was impressed that she could still run. Trailing a dark piece of diaphanous fabric in the air, she dropped repeatedly to the floor, only to rise again and run while looking apprehensively over her shoulder as though pursued by a gathering storm. It was poignant but a little sad. This was her fifth annual “Farewell,” and I suspected it would be her last.

My favorite Martha Graham performance was Cave of the Heart, when she was in her sixties playing the role of Medea. Still riveting, she bourréed ferociously from stage right to left while seeming to gobble the long red entrails of her murdered children, which she pulled from her bodice in a bloody stream. Later she could be embarrassing as she tried to inhabit the roles that she had created for herself in her younger days.

So when is it time to say “farewell to dance?” When and how must we begin to think of ways to avoid becoming objects of pity or caricature as we attempt to engage movement that is ever — and obviously — more difficult? Traditionally the choreographer/dancer performs alongside younger dancers even as she becomes demonstrably older than the members of her consistently youthful company. The young performers leave and are replaced by similarly youthful dancers while the aging choreographer continues to perform. Merce Cunningham made special solos for himself until withdrawing from the stage. Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown both stopped dancing under physical duress at a certain point while continuing to choreograph. When to leave is a highly personal matter, contingent on will, pleasure, and physical fitness, all of which are subject to the decline that inevitably comes with aging.

My own situation has taken a different turn from those mentioned above. Never having wanted the complications of maintaining a stable dance company, by the age of forty I had quit the field entirely to concentrate on making experimental narrative films. By the time I returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the White Oak Dance Project (“After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”), I found myself face-to-face with the problematic of aging and dance in the person of Mikhail Baryshnikov, who, though a kind of éminence grise, would be performing alongside the five other much younger dancers in his group. Even though Misha was still at the top of his game with regard to the technical demands of the choreography I was dredging up from my past, both his age and celebrity were issues that I felt I had to foreground in some way as an alternative to putting the audience in the position of having to choose whether to notice or ignore his difference from the others. So, in order to shave his aura or stature down to human scale, so to speak, I inserted moments of sly intervention, such as having someone walk on his heels, forcing him to adjust his shoe, retie his laces, and catch up with the...