We are a mixed age group in a wide range of bodies, taking our places, ready to respond to improvised music and random light beams from a particle physics installation. My shoulders go down and I breathe, gather myself in, that old 'up and beyond' look in my eyes:
The choreographer won't be counting or calling out the steps now. Your moves are up to you.
We make all kinds of spirals and lines and circles in the massive hall of the former steel works - my first time dancing for an audience since I was a schoolgirl, over 40 years ago.
Decades ago, I was at dance class nonstop: ballet, tap, modern, stage. It was pre-contemporary days in the Northern city where I live. It was doing shows and pantos; it was happiness and I thought I'd always do it. Ballet in a church hall, using chair backs for barres; pouring over photos of dancers and dreaming of being one….
I didn't become a dancer though and really, from being 17, 'not dancing' was one definition of me.
Perhaps this ‘not dancing’ will resonate with others of my world and age: if you weren't off to full time megabuck ballet and stage school or into showbiz, like on cruise ships, that is, if you weren't going to wear one kind of feather or another, it was hard to know where to go, so we stopped. Just stopped. So now, at 61, to be able to dance? It's a gift.
Last year, I stepped back into myself when I took my first 50+ class. Music transports me, it takes over from clock time, releases all fractiousness and frets. My face felt like light was shining on it. It felt like home in the studio, the light spores, long floorboards and high windows. We all turned to face the front - all on our own, yet together. I love that. Moving to music, I recognised myself, despite how much my body has been altered by everything it's absorbed over the years, including illness and surgery, since my dancing class heydays.
My journey into 'elder' dancing has come in stop-starts and by word of mouth. It makes me nervous, how opportunities like this depend on chance: on us spotting a callout posted online or an advert on a shop noticeboard and on whether there's a teacher where we live who likes working with older bodies.
I love all people when they are dancing. However madly chattery (and older dancers can chat, some through class!), once they're dancing, I love them.
We come from such different movement backgrounds - tai chi, yoga, Bharatanatyam, a 1970s degree in sculpture or circus skills training in Paris five decades ago, from football or simply loving to boogie or waltz. There is unlikely gracefulness in unexpected bodies. One powerful performer, who can control breath and space with her skilled presence, does all that from a chair. Yes, some of us need chairs now or (like me) the floor, to move from or rest on. On stage and off, we make a characterful world.
There are differences, of course, dancing now to dancing when we were young, and not just our lost agility. Changes to memory, for example: I used to pick up steps almost by osmosis but now have had to really concentrate to absorb a new phrase. Repeating moves until they were right, though, was something that I always loved to do (Again! Again! From the start!). I still love it - the more repetitions, the better. We just need time.
Then there are the memories we contain, years of them, some of them traumatic and people do accumulate grief over time. When we are devising, associations can bring flashbacks. When we explored falling with the choreographer, Emilyn Claid, by lowering each other's full weight to the ground, I wanted to bolt away from one memory of my mother falling and to run out of the studio. (A disproportionate number of us seem to be family carers). Two other dancers, including a mum who'd lost her son, were blindsided when we played at looking over the imaginary edge of a high building. Dance is hard on us at such moments. There’s nowhere to hide, no words to disguise or distract emotion.
Music, however, makes it easier. It is not just another time scale, it's a landscape, an elsewhere, and the moment it starts: ping! I'm in it. Gone are intrusive and hurtful thoughts. It's an enormous subject, the music we elders are given to move to: e.g. How to select music for a new production? Chirpy cheer 'em up tunes aren't my thing but others like them. One of the positives of multi-generational (rather than only 'elder') dancing, is that music is chosen without age in mind; something pacy that stirs us, stretches us, a pulse pushing us, polyrhythms, a groovy depth of bass - I love being let dance to it. Because really, you get this feeling that: 'Now is the moment. Time is short!'
Performing again has been a revelation: the feeling of gathering myself in the hour before and the feeling of presence.
Some performers who don't have dance experience say they don't know where to look where they're on stage or what to do with their faces or eyes, something it would be wonderful to explore creatively. I seem to look weirdly enraptured - a look acquired in Baby Ballet and my first time on stage, 'pointing and closing' whilst singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and believing the lights out there were the stars we were singing to and that the tabs were night.
Ballet ... it hasn't called me back yet, despite the appeal of a live pianist in class. Perhaps I'm fearful of being confronted by what's been lost - depth, height, reach, elevation. It is hard to conform with an ideal of lightness and flight now; easier to explore forms that emerge from what we've become.
We are altered.
One thing I didn't like on re-entry to dance was the studio's mirror. I'd never danced in front of one as a girl and avoid it now. And there is another novelty since I was a child: every project today seems photographed, filmed and shared. I'm not bothered about how I look (except for the memories there are in the injuries), but I do care about how the dance looks on me. So I refuse the self-consciousness that cameras and mirrors bring and focus on how it feels to dance again. Which is grateful, so grateful for the dance and full of breath and music; grateful to be alive.
Frances Byrnes is a member of Yorkshire Movement and Dance and of Sheffield's Third Bite Dance (Artistic Director/choreographer: Lucy Haighton). She was also a participant in Bradford City of Culture's commission Memories of the Future, a collaboration between Akram Khan Company and Dance United Yorkshire funded by Bradford City Council, Arts Council England and the Maria Marina Foundation now under the banner of Medicor Foundation.
Image credits:
Top and bottom right - Particle Dance, Magna, 2024. Members of Third Bite Dance and Dance to Health
and from Rotherham Children's City of Culture
Artistic. Director, Lucy Haighton (c) James Mulkeen.
Frances Byrnes portrait - (c) Laura Page.
Middle left and right - The Fallen at Ageless Festival, 2024. The company, Third Bite Dance, Artistic Director, Lucy Haighton (c) David Lindsay.
Bottom left - Frances Byrnes, The Fallen, rehearsal, 2025, Third Bite Dance (c) Laura Page.