The motion of any dance begins with a sense of balance.  The dancer is either moving in accord with the principles of balance or against them, and all throughout is combining different levels of effort and opposition in order to create a work of art out of a moment.  As Camilla Jessel well understood, balance is the key to a graceful movement.  It is also the key to a graceful life.

It does not make sense, then, to give up on perfecting balance, even as one is moving into old age.  In fact, it makes more sense to continue to perfect the art of balance.  When we are born, we crawl and we fall until we become used to the rhythms of the earth, and the rhythms of our bodies, and learn how they can work together.  For the rest of the life spent in a body, the balance that comes naturally so early on is something that we continually contend with.  It is based on that central circumstance of the gravitational pull, and occasionally the best dancers can learn how to temporarily break free from that pull, and it looks and feels very much like flight.

In the meantime, there are practical concerns.  The body’s center of balance is always shifting.  This is something that we know instinctually from a very young age.  Perhaps this is because we are more capable of bouncing back, and the bones are more resilient.  For the elderly, balance often becomes something that is no longer a second nature, but something else entirely.  Interestingly enough, dancing is one way of helping us to maintain balance when we are old.  The notion that this is entering into popular consciousness is not at all unwelcome.  Dancers do what everyone else does, but a bit more gracefully perhaps, and grace is something that will serve everyone well as they get older.

For dancers, this is naturally a pleasing idea.  There is a kind of unspoken anxiety that this notion of balance will become difficult to contend with when aging.  There are many methods of learning new tricks of balance, like riding a motorcycle or walking a tightrope, but the prospect of shopping for motorcycle tires is not as appealing as the thought of continuing to dance.  Every age has its challenges, and if old age holds the challenge of balance, then the dancer is already well ahead in the game.

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