Bodies of knowledge.

Dance as a profession has unquestionably been the province of youth. English ballet critic Arnold Haskell, reporting on a 1925 Ballets Russes season in Monte Carlo, dwelt on Alicia Markova, "just thirteen, in socks, but learning her very own Stravinsky ballet and dancing Le Lac des Cygnes adagio." Seven years later twenty-eight-year-old George Balanchine created Cotillon for another thirteen-year-old--Tamara Toumanova--who, together with Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska, formed the "baby ballerina" trio that helped retain interest in the Ballets Russes after Diaghilev's death. In England Margot Fonteyn danced her first solo roles with the Vic-Wells (later Royal) Ballet at fifteen; and in the U.S., New York City Ballet's fledgling talents--Tanaquil Le Clercq, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, Darci Kistler--remained a continuous influence on Balanchine's choreography and the direction of American ballet.

Over the intervening decades, the world has changed in almost incomprehensibly vast ways, and a new social awareness of gender and race relations has come to permeate Western cultural life. The assumption that youth is a primary characteristic of a dance career, however, has until recently been a fairly unchallenged notion, despite the presence--always seen as exceptional--of legendary figures like Fonteyn and Martha Graham, who continued to perform well into their sixties and seventies. Even in modern dance, where performers have traditionally been more mature, it has been rare to see older dancers remain in repertory companies beyond their early forties. Merce Cunningham still makes brief onstage appearances as an ironic presiding genius, but his dancers remain a poignantly ageless group whose brio and physical skill act as theatrical counterpoint to his age and his body's limitations.

In the 1990s, dance--particularly ballet--is still identified with youth, implicitly linked to its energy, adolescent body, and physical prowess. Recently, however, there has been a growing awareness that while technical prowess may diminish as the body ages, mature dancers possess a number of skills and, literally, a body of knowledge that their younger counterparts have not fully acquired.

The first notable sign that this was to become an issue that would find huge resonance among both dancers and audiences was the founding in 1991 of Netherlands Dance Theater 3, a chamber company of four or five dancers over forty who had all enjoyed illustrious careers in both ballet and contemporary dance, yet found themselves too old to be part of conventional troupes. "This company is a gesture toward the dancers," Jiri Kylian, artistic director of NDT, remarked shortly after the company's first season. "It tells them that they don't have to give up, that there are ways of physical expression, endless possibilities that can go on until they die."

NDT 3 might well have been Kylian's attempt to keep his favorite alumni occupied--among them his wife, Sabine Kupferberg, and NDT veteran Gerard Lemaitre--but the company almost immediately won recognition as a serious artistic enterprise that allowed star dancers to collaborate with major choreographers. (In its first seasons, NDT 3 showed new works by Kylian, Maguy Marin, Ohad Naharin, Mats Ek, William Forsythe, and Hans van Manen.) No doubt this had everything to do with the talents of such dancers as Kupferberg, Lemaitre, Niklas Ek, and Martine van Hamel, and with the quality of the works conceived for them. But it is also clear that Kylian's idea resonated among dancers and audiences, that the founding of NDT 3 was an artistic echo of new ways of thinking about age in the nineties.

Like race and class, gender and sexual preference, physical impairment and body type, age has come under the stern eye of political correctness, with the concept of ageism provoking discussion of our cultural fixation on youth and its attributes, particularly in the U.S. Here, plastic surgery is an increasingly available way of warding off--or at last masking--the socially unacceptable condition of aging. In the dance community, however, there is increasing acceptance of mature dancers and an awareness that they possess qualities and experience well worth keeping in the theater. Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project attracts capacity crowds who do not seem disappointed to see the former ballet virtuoso attack contemporary works by Erick Hawkins or Mark Morris. When NDT 3 came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1994 with the main company (NDT) and its junior ensemble (NDT 2), the surprise success of the senior group prompted a return visit on its own to the Joyce Theater in 1996.

"There is this terrible unfairness that by the time you are around forty you have to stop," says Kylian. "Having dedicated all your life to dance--because you are a good dancer--you have no time to prepare any other kind of career, and by the time you become a ripe personality you are heading for a difficult age, the midlife crisis maybe, and suddenly the director says to you, `Well, thank you very much.'"

These issues have largely been seen as the plight of individuals, somewhat resolved in ballet companies by consigning older dancers to character and mime roles. Kylian believes that older dancers can fruitfully extend their range rather than see it limited to nondancing roles: "I think it's foolish if we as choreographers are not able to use this fantastic experience. These dancers have worked with some forty or fifty choreographers in their lives, so you can imagine the information that is stocked in their bodies. It is a little history of dance that is inside them, and I think that choreographers can easily page this library, find out things that interest them, and produce wonderful things for dancers between forty--and death."

By the time NDT 3 had given its second New York City season, Dancers Over 40, Inc., a Manhattan-based group, was two years old, had grown from five founding members to more than 500, and was planning its first concert, "Prime Time." Christopher Nelson had been motivated to create the organization in 1994 when he started taking classes again at age forty-eight and realized that there were no opportunities for auditions or professional work for older dancers and no occasion to share memories and knowledge.

"Improved awareness about nutrition and better medical care means that dancers can actually have longer careers," Nelson says, "and at the same time our culture is so youth-oriented that we still assume that we must stop at forty. This organization reflects something that's happening in the world: We're becoming aware that it's ridiculous to squander the valuable resource that older people represent, whether you're a dancer or not. It's very exciting to be a part of that." [See box on the next page.]

It is perhaps no coincidence that an interest in the specific skills of older dancers has grown alongside an increasing focus on technical virtuosity. As in many sports, the level of a young dancer's skills is a great deal higher than it was even a decade ago. And, like gymnasts or skaters, ballet dancers tend to focus at an ever-younger age on technical mastery and to minimize the importance of individual personality to choreography.

"Choreographers are making technically difficult ballets because the young dancers can do them, and that's exciting in itself," says choreographer Christopher d'Amboise. "But what you get when you work with older dancers is the ability to work with levels of subtlety. They know what they are `saying,' how to phrase and articulate the choreographer's utterance. This is a skill that young dancers often don't have because they are--through no fault of their own--more than ever focused on doing the steps."

More and more choreographers are beginning to tap into the talents of older performers to realize ways of extending their own range. While making a work for White Oak recently, Meg Stuart commented that a solo for Baryshnikov meant that she tackled the notion of memory, "like flipping through a book, a journal." Choreographers, particularly in Europe, seem to be mindful of the living history that these dancers represent, and the potential fruits of collaboration. In an age when pessimism about the future of dance is growing, this development is heartening--in both human and artistic terms.

Roslyn Sulcas is a New York City critic for Dance Magazine.