Dancing as we age... is not a new idea.

It is reassuring to see how many articles and perspectives I have had the pleasure to read about ageing and dance, over the past forty years! Most recently is this one, How dancers navigate changes that come with Age published in Dance Magazine. 

My perspective evolved as I aged, dealt with injuries, dealt with emotional maturity, dealt with identity, dealt with professional life versus personal choice... and so on. At the root of the questions for me was the evergreen "why?" Why was I pursuing dance, rather than some other activity, or profession, or means of expression, and more... 

Me aged 46 in Paul Taylor's De Sueños Que Se Repiten.

So here is how my perspective changed over the course of some sixty years.

As a child I learned that I could grow up to be a dentist, policeman, fireman, architect, and so many more, but not dancer! Dancing was something people did socially, and athletics were not professions even though I grew up watching Olympic track and field stars from Jamaica. Fortunately, I grew up thinking that age only had to do with being at the top of your game, not to do with participating in dance or sports. 

Yup! This is me...

As a teenager with the opportunity to start a ballet career, I thought that by 29 I would need to have a new profession lined up. Then overwork and injuries taught me to critically assess how I used my body as a dancer and a recreational athlete. This period also found me reflecting on defining myself as a person first and my occupation (dancer) afterwards.

Coppelia with Lizanne McAdams...

In my twenties, my world of movement had expanded to dancing and sporting with both able-bodied and physically challenged friends. Injuries, degenerative diseases, age, all demand and deserve our considered attention; our physical abilities are to be enjoyed in the moment, and less in the memories of what we once did.

With Matthew Soyster in performance...

My thirties deepened my focus on dancing and outdoor sports as befit my condition. Injuries and setbacks were managed with the knowledge that I had recovered with new found knowledge about myself before, and re-training was part of ageing and staying physically active.

Kayaking is like being partnered by water with a boat for legs...

I retired from performing as a dancer in my late forties, and acknowledged all the benefits I had gained from spending my life, to that point, focused on both how my body moved, as well as how to help others assess their physical abilities from the most basic actions to the most elite demands. For myself, minor injuries from once normal activities became more commonplace, and recovery took days or weeks longer than in the past.

During my fifties, I tried to balance movement instruction by modeling details and physical skills with actively addressing how rapidly my body changed without the demands of daily workouts, rehearsals and performances. It actually felt good to have the greater proportion of my weeks spent in more sedentary pursuits, and a less structured regimen of physical activity. I was also happy to no longer be pursuing a singular career, but exploring how to use my lifelong experience with movement and independence as building blocks for new projects and life choices about work.

2018 in India fulfilling a Fulbright Senior Teaching fellowship...

Now in my sixties, I am happy knowing that being physically active is both a choice and a privilege. I have learned to be efficient, and to notice changes in my physiology both dramatic and gradual. Adjunct to this self-awareness is how it heightens an empathetic approach to teaching and coaching dance, or other physical activities at all levels and stages in life. I may not be the perfect teacher for everyone, but I am confident that I am a good teacher for a large proportion of people who might want to join in one of my classes. 

2024 - teaching modern class. Photo: John Lyons

Testing good ideas... takes time!

 Okay. It's been a minute since I've been able to clear time to write a post here. I blame myself for having interesting ideas and then realizing that making them happen takes up time I don't always have available. In my last post, I mentioned the idea of filming myself teaching class exercises for my Adult Beginner Ballet students, so they could review what we had done in class during the week. I have to admit that attending one class a week on a new endeavor can seem like too little time to learn and retain information! And I appreciate that there is interest in adding a second class each week, but that is for another discussion. 

cropped screenshot of video set to film me demonstrating barre.

I do like the idea of begining adult dancers being able to review and practice what we do in class. This is not unlike professional dancers today being able to review video footage of their rehearsals each day, especially when they are learning or developing new choreography. 

However, my own sense of efficiency meant planning out the least intrusive method of filming class, and respecting that my students would not necessarily want to see themselves taking class. After class, I edited the footage into 8 short clips, to provide the clearest explanations and include the music played by our accompanist, should dancers wish to practice on their own. Yet even as I was editing this first attempt at recording class, I kept thinking of better ways to edit certain things (zooming in and cropping the frame, including some of the explanations beyond just giving the exercises, whether or not to have a video/still image available while the music plays, etc.) So in the interest of timeliness, I allowed myself to try and improve the next exercise, and left the earlier ones as I had done.

There is so much good (and more carefully planned) instructional video available online, that I would not dare to presume a general viewership for this little endeavor. But I will check with the dancers in class, if they took a look, AND if they have suggestions, OR if this was helpful in any way. For the time being, I am only sharing access to watch the videos if you have taken the class. As I mentioned before, the progression of each class is often dictated by the dancers in the class, and I don't want to be building a prescribed syllabus that may not work for the particular types of learners, and experience of the dancers in class. 

However, since I cannot provide more than one class a week for the Adult Beginner Ballet dancers (a few are able to take classes with other teachers, but others only take mine), I would like for them to have the chance to reinforce their learning. Even just mentally reviewing material on a daily basis has been proven to improve assimilation of new movement skills.

Recently, I have been playing with a language app on my phone to see how much German I remember, and it sends me an email reminder each day to do a short lesson. Mostly I can do a short lesson in about 5 minutes, so it is obviously not a serious commitment on my part. But German is a language that I used to spend about an hour a day following a language program, when I had no knowledge at all. 

I appreciate all that technology and communications infrastructures affords most of us these days, in terms of access to learning different skills. However, as a teacher from an earlier generation, I am trying to embrace how I might incorporate and add to the positive experience of the dancers who come to my classes. I am a self-taught cameraman/video-editor/online-content-generator, and I make lots of blunders! This self-taught thing though, means that I spend a lot of time just trying to figure out how to do things, as well as evaluating if what I am doing is effectively in line with my goals.

The Taylor Center for Dance Education has built a large and varied program of movement learning, from 3-D assisted body-mechanics analyses to yoga to ballet to modern to many other approaches. If you have not already danced in our new spaces at,

307 W 38th Street, 9th floor, in NYC, I hope you will come by and see what we are offering.

Until soon...

Dancer driven teaching...

 When I began taking dance classes as a child, my ballet classes were very much focused on learning the set sequences required by the syllabus. In turn these sequences would be performed infront of an external "examiner" for assessment of our execution and understanding. Well... maybe not so much understanding when the young dancers are pre-teenagers. This model still exists, but I think for adult dancers at a similar stage of learning dance (i.e. children's beginner ballet) there are so many more resources for how I approach teaching classes. 

Leading a class at Peridance in 2018 or 2019.

I recently asked my adult beginner ballet students if they thought it would be helpful to have some kind of documentation to review between their single weekly class. The consensus was that they would like to have an online video where they might be able to follow along and practice movements and sequences on their own at home. Initially, I thought this was a pretty good idea, and maybe I could make the time to film myself demonstating a series of exercises.

Then reality set in. Time is not something I find to be readily available in my week. Just keeping up with the content writing for this blog has become a challenge to carve out, and I am trying to post just once a week at this point. Another reality was that as I watch the enthusiasm of the adult dancers in class, I cater and adjust my exercises to suit the needs of the dancers on the day of the class. And I enjoy being able to create exercises to suit where the dancers' actions tell me what each progressive drill or sequence should be. 

Film instruction for dance was not a part of my awareness as a child. In truth, I imagine that it was on account of celebrities like Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton John making home exercise videos which came out in the early 80's, that "how to dance" learning by video became a thing. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, and suddenly we were teaching by video feed in real time. Most everyone has a smart phone with camera capabilities, and also the ability to play back or stream online content.  Yet the learning that can take place when both instructor and dancers are in the same space, is many times more effective than virtual learning. And yet I still find benefit in how well learning to dance can be enriched through virtual vido learning. But maybe there is also a place to include video learning, or at least video practice.

In the next few weeks I hope to experiment with video-taping myself demonstrating exercises during our sessions, which I will then make available to the sudents in class. At the very least, dancers would be able to practice on their own while accessing a record and guide of what they had done in class at any point in the week. This might also help in choosing the best progression of class goals based on how the dancers are developing and retaining material each week.

I do love watching online dance instruction videos, but they always strike me as requiring that the dancer observing, needs considerable knowledge about their own abilities, to truly benefit and progress.

How we learned isn't always how we teach...

 From my perspective, learning to dance is a very individual thing, and not all teachers are good matches for different learners. Last night at dinner, a friend asked me, "Why don't dancers flock to try the newest teacher or class they come across?" In her world of visual arts, painters and sculptors always seemed interested in seeing and trying the latest thing!

I imagine that both dancers and visual artists learn their craft by doing and practice . However, unlike painters and sculptors, dancers must learn to em-body their artistic expression. And most beginner dancers need to take at least 3 to 4 classes with a teacher to know if that teacher's methodology works for them, and what they hope to achieve. Each class is both a time and monetary investment, and there are so many factors that play into where and with whom to experiment, when exploring new studios and teachers.

Adjunct to the evolution of "sports medicine", learning physical movement has been observed to take place in four primary modalities: mimicry, mental visualization, physical manipulation, and experimentation. This is not to say that any of us learn exclusively one way, but we might lean in a certain direction, and use a combination of different modalities to make sense of how we learn to both control and "listen" to our bodies. 

Teaching a creative movement workshop in 2002
City Center, Young People's Dance Series. Photo: Martha Holmes

I was still a teenager when I found myself taking classes in dance education and teacher training for ballet curricula. Ironically, I was taking courses in dance pedagogy because I was still a minor living in the UK, and the reactive laws against "child labor" meant that as an immigrant, I needed to remain enrolled in educational courses, even though I had completed my advanced pre-professional training as a dancer. 

A decade later, I would be training to teach and guide recreational kayaking to weekend warriors who likely had no experience with outdoor sports, much less on the moving surface of water. In both the cases of dance and of kayaking, I was personally quite accomplished. However, teaching was about helping dancers and clients realize their greatest potential, which meant honing my skills of observation and listening. For me there has never been a single solution to teaching a physical skill. And knowing in my own body what a movement skill feels like is only a measure for empathy with individuals struggling to grasp the concepts of "Tendu. Fondu. Pirouette." or "Catch. Power. Recover."

Practising whitewater drills in Colorado 2005.

Admittedly, I was a pretty quick learner when it came to physical skills both with respect to my own body and in interacting with the physical elements of the outdoors. And the methods that were used to teach me all the skills on which I have built careers in dance and kayaking, are only starting points from which I have developed my approach and methods for teaching movement disciplines.

I am pretty quick to identify challenges that a class or an individual might be struggling with, and one solution will typically not work for everyone. Time and age have given me confidence to not rely on just what I was taught, but to use everything I have learned to find new solutions as needed, whether I am teaching the most enthusiastic beginner or the most self-assured professional.

Over the next few months, professional dance projects are pre-empting my teaching open Taylor Technique classes on the weekends, however, I am maintaining my Adult Beginner Ballet classes on Tuesday evenings at Taylor Dance West, 307 W 38th Street, 9th floor, NYC.

If this location is convenient for you, you will also notice that we are now the Taylor Center for Dance Education, sometimes shortened to Taylor Dance Center.