Dancers Always Die Twice
“A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.”
As a dancer deep into middle age, I feel this pain keenly. My gray hair whispers my age and my body, thicker in the middle than before, echolocates the world with clicks and pops, navigating space with a little less ease as each decade passes. I know there will be a point when I will no longer be able to perform — and this day have may already happened.
I last performed in front of an audience in 2014, with my forever dancing friends. Newly back in Austin, I gathered my old dance company back together to rehearse and perform one of my favorite humorous dance theatre pieces — Danceopoly. It’s “the game of a dancer’s life” and although the underlying message of unrelenting artist poverty and toiling in obscurity is dark, the piece is played for laughs like a cheesy game show. Of course the game is rigged and each throw of the enormous fuzzy dice is manipulated to ensure that the choreographer loses all of their money producing a concert. We even have “hoops” for the choreographer to jump through while trying to secure extra funding. No really…it’s actually funny.
Most performers don’t know when their last performance will happen. We savor each show and hope for more to follow, but each one has the possibility of being the last one. The thought used to fill me with dread.
I’m now in the tertiary portion of my career and I take great joy in teaching classes and writing about dance. I published a Dance Appreciation textbook in January and I recently completed Today in Dance — a daily celebration of the lives and careers of dancers on their birthdays. I’m more interested in sharing the legacy of dance with students right now and less interested in creating live works. But filmed dance beckons…
However, I can’t imagine resurrecting some of my pieces because they represent a different stage in my life, a simpler time before I had a child, followed by a devastating divorce, and finding the great love of my life. Updating a dance/theatre piece about breasts and body image would bring too much reality to the humorous take on my too-big-for-a-dancer bosom. I would have to discuss my utter disbelief and disappointment at the large mammaries that never produced any milk. This dose of unfiltered reality would probably shatter the lighthearted tone of the original piece.
Instead, I look forward to putting repertory on my students and revisiting older works set on different bodies. There is so much left to do and I’m not sure I want to be dancing in the work. Maybe I just want to choreograph.
So, if the show in 2014 was my last performance, it was a fitting end. We made the audience laugh in all the right places and they loved the piece. In fact, we killed. Perhaps, then, the death of my performing career might not prove to be the end of me.
