July 8, 2019
The morning of my 40th birthday I swing my legs over the side of my bed and stand up, gingerly.
Time for my what-hurts-today scan, the daily ritual of a dancer who has been bouncing up and down in flimsy footwear for nearly three decades, and who doesn’t know when to quit.
Hips? Stable. Knees? Er, not so good; there’s very little cartilage left. Feet? Well, they’re pretty numb by now anyway…
I danced (Irish style) as a kid. I dance (Irish, Highland, Ottawa Valley stepdance) as an adult. And being an adult dancer, thankfully, is now less strange a habit than it used to be.
When I was a teen, polishing up my steps for a competition, my teacher would lament that I hadn’t started lessons earlier than 11. Eleven-year-olds aren’t mouldable enough to become world champions; adults, even less so. Back then we didn’t see them around much. Why dance if you weren’t going to win big, or join a corps de ballet?
But I danced because I loved moving my body to music, getting lost in a rhythm, expressing myself in a way that, for me, was way more fun than sports or boring exercise.
These days, I still get funny looks when I tell people how much time I spend dancing, how I co-direct a performance group in my spare time, how I spend several days of the week, after my day job, teaching the steps I love so much.
But I’m not alone. Adult dance classes are on the rise — many for beginners, too. I’m not the only weirdo who leaps around in leggings after work.
“After that first class — I don’t know, there was some magic there,” said Erin Ewing, who started seven years ago at the age of 31. Ballet is a highly technical and exacting style of dance, but Ewing has worked her way up to the advanced level at The School of Dance in New Edinburgh, even practising in pointe shoes.
Ewing’s classmate, Kathleen Byrne, has been dancing for 42 of her 63 years, and enjoys the combination of an intellectual and physical challenge — one that perhaps runs deeper for adults than for kids.
“We get to have that feeling of expressing ourselves. I also sometimes wonder if children realize how many years they’re going to be doing this. Like, I know that I’m going to be doing this for a long time. So I think in terms of years and so I don’t get discouraged,” she said.
Their teacher, Merrilee Hodgins, admires those students who are committed to lifelong learning.
“I mean, there are days where you want to tear your hair out because you think you’re having a bad day. But if you stand back and look at what you’re achieving, right, it’s a very satisfying activity,” said Hodgins, the school’s director.
The School of Dance has added adult classes over the years to meet demand.
It’s the same story at Flava Factory in Hintonburg, where instructor Vanessa Lovell says enrolment in all their urban dance classes is up.
“I’ve had some people tell me that there was a stigma about dance when they were younger, and they just stopped caring about that supposed stigma and just want to live in their truth, which is, they want to express themselves through dance.”
One of those dancers is 47-old Corina Clouthier, who stumbled upon hip hop two years ago.
Clouthier says she loves the sway and the bounce of it. “That freedom of not worrying about what you look like, what people are saying. That’s the advantage of an adult doing something new,” she said.
Simmi Dixit, 38, danced in early adulthood but took a break recently for a pregnancy. “The only thing that’s different now is that I really treasure the one hour I have here, and I feel like I channel everything that I don’t get to express during my day into that one hour, so I really value the time,” she said.
I can relate. Day job brain fog? Dance will cure that. Mad at your partner? You can forget about it for a while as you try to match your feet to the beat. My joints may be slowly mounting a protest after 30 years of dance, but it’s hard to know when to stop. The body is meant to move.
“By the time you leave [class], you’re just like, loose,” Dixit says. “You’re smiling, you’re kind of dancing out to your bicycle or down the sidewalk when you leave. It’s just nice to give your spirit a little kick-start.”
And that spirit can be any age at all.
Caitlin Crockard is the producer of All In A Day on CBC Radio Ottawa. Outside of office hours, she performs, practises and teaches dance three to four days a week. You can reach her by email at caitlin.crockard@cbc.ca.