‘Older dancers don’t mimic young ones: we’re too distinctive’

By Frances Byrnes

One hot afternoon in June, older people collapse — one by one and in clusters — onto a green bank. 

Third Bite Dance, South Yorkshire’s older dancer company is in Weston Park and it’s our second day of rehearsals. Third Bite is Sheffield’s contribution to a growing national movement of dance performance made with older people. One by one and in clusters, we peel up and then away, back to the University Drama Studio’s rehearsal space, where we’re devising a project called The Fallen. Eleven of us will perform it at Yorkshire Dance’s Ageless Festival in Leeds, on Friday 12 July. 

The dance company grew out of falling. It’s headed by the artistic director Lucy Haighton, who hails from Sheffield. She is also a lead dance artist for Dance to Health, a national charity that helps people at risk of falling to build strength and balance through creative dance sessions — with evidenced success. Haighton has run the classes in Stocksbridge, Firvale and Hunter’s Bar.  

Until she started teaching Dance to Health in 2017, Haighton (then in her twenties) had mostly taught children to dance. Working with older people was transformative. “Lessons weren’t just about dancing but people — people being seen and heard and about connection, sharing experiences, joy,” she tells me. Her life became richer then, she felt “more rooted and grounded, having these older women in my life”.  

At each Dance to Health class, there are also dance support volunteers, older people who are used to exercise. A small group of these early volunteers encouraged Haighton to start a contemporary dance class for the over 50s. In late 2019, she did and the class that would inspire Third Bite Dance began in a church hall in Crosspool. 

The dance class is open to anybody over 50 who wants to dance. Some attendees may not want to perform in Third Bite but some of us are happy to or are encouraged to risk it. There’s no audition for the company but members must be willing “to play”, says the group’s Chair and one of its co-founders, Clare McManus.

Play is what Steve Holmes says he rediscovered through dance. During the pandemic, the dance group met three times a week on Zoom and in 2021, they made a socially distanced dance film called This is How Gorgeous it Feels. Dancing outside, spinning on the decking of his garden in Fulwood, Holmes felt a moment of lightness for the first time in a long time. He felt childlike. “I had difficult mental health issues and dance has helped me through,” he says. “It forces you to be in the moment.”

There are only six days for us to devise the work we’ll show in Leeds and we are a motley crew. We range from 57 to 77 years old. We don’t wear snazzy gear; it is not Pineapple Studios with us. As well as raring to move, our bodies need regular breaks, chairs, compression garments and have metal joints. They have been altered by everything that’s happened to them, inside and out. And all our styles are different — our training includes Bharatanatyam and Zumba, football and mime, disco and Tai Chi. Nearly half of us are new to the group and to improvising. 

Why The Fallen? How will we captivate an audience with that subject? When I heard the project title, I wondered at it; it sounds like being old, even dead. Brainstorming the word ‘fall’ in the group, though, throws up many other associations: head over heels, down steps, from grace, off bikes, in love. We all do it. If we look back at our life, however young we are, our falls will tell a story.

Of course, when we’re older we do lose our balance more and one idea for The Fallen has been percolating for years. McManus (who travels in from Worksop), is looking forward to playing with (“disrupting”) a Dance to Health sequence called backward chaining that trains participants to move safely down to the floor in eight clear moves and to rise from it again in reverse, with the help of a chair and a mat. It imprints our way out of a fall. She likes the idea of us doing it like a synchronised swim.

You don’t often see older people on the floor unless we have fallen, points out McManus. So being down there intentionally is disruptive. It does look like we’ll be spending time on the ground in this project: whereas classical and popular dance is all up and out, contemporary embraces gravity, uses the floor, the pull of the earth.  

On our first day of rehearsals, we’re given class by Emilyn Claid, a 74-year-old performance artist whose solo show we saw at The Riley Theatre in Leeds the week before. Claid has presence and is lithe, upright and strong, all in black with a grey buzzcut. On stage they looked good in a vest. They have written a book about falling. They’re also a psychotherapist. When they arrive from London, they ask us to lie down on the floor and to give all our weight to it, then guide us to breathe deeply so that we stop resisting and tensing against its hardness and instead sink into it. Claid’s words for this exercise are yield, push, reach: yield into the floor, then push and reach our way along it. I’m loving that. Then they suggest we get on all fours and be dogs.

This is my first time devising like this and it is unnerving. I went to dancing class (ballet, tap, stage, modern) at Constance Grant’s on Psalter Lane from the age of three to 17. Music is what makes me move, I love to disappear into it. And I love being given steps to do and to forget myself. Making things up isn’t what I’ve done before. Nor barking.

I’m not the only apprehensive newcomer. “I don’t find touch easy,” Mick Loughran tells me. He was a Consultant Mental Health Nurse in Forensics, attending to fragile people, some with abusive childhoods. In that unit, he says,  “you never touch.” This is not out of coldness but to make a safe space: “You can hold someone without touching them.” He explains that he used other body language at work — eye contact, openness, positive focus — and left touch to his private life.

So I wonder how he feels when Claid tells us to take a partner and hug them: one partner putting their arms round the other’s neck, the other round their partner’s waist, before they take all the other person’s weight and slowly lower them down to the ground. It feels intense, handing all my weight over to another dancer, Jane Barrett (a former peer support worker) while I wind onto the floor. So many memories come, of holding onto and also of failing to catch my falling mother (she had dementia and fear of falling made her scream). So much is stored in our bodies.  

Unable (due to a fall!) to hold Barrett reliably in return, I watch Claid partner her; watch these ‘older people’ hug each other tight then Barrett being lowered, all her limbs falling away, until she slides along the ground. She and I, fellow Sheffielders newly met, had just been connecting about our lives, about children, and watching her being held now really affects me. I nearly cry. 

It is emotional, to see so much power and expression in bodies that have, in the outside world, become as if invisible. I can’t imagine what this dance will turn out to be but I can already see beauty in what we’re doing. 

Barrett has had to be encouraged into the company (“Will I have to perform?”). She has no formal training, apart from acrobatics, ballet and tap at the Miners Welfare but, from the age of 11, she danced “anywhere” — the Top Rank, Limit, Leadmill, Burton St, City Hall.  She joined Dance to Health in Pitsmoor then Firvale after a diagnosis of osteoarthritis. “What! Are you mad?!” she would respond to Haighton’s exercise directions there. 

I can hear birdsong down the phone when I call her after our first week. She spends lots of time at her allotment, growing things. Within the allotment is a shrine to her son, Kieran, who died four years ago. “He could dance,” she says, “He loved to dress up as a child.” Kieran was a musician and singer. “He could perform! Amazing to see him hold an audience…” If he could, she will.

Barrett has been enthralled by work on our cores in class, where we’ve learned the contraction work of Martha Graham, a pioneer in American modern dance. We pull in our pelvic muscles to arc our spines (most of us from a chair, an innovation by our teacher, Haighton, that Graham didn’t conceive of!). The movement feels strong, yearning. And she loves improvising: it’s “organic, spontaneous!” says Barrett. “The bits that are different about us resonate. Any monkey can do the moves but your own slant is the really interesting thing.”

We must make something new. Older dancers don’t mimic young ones. We can’t be trained into being identical like showgirls and boys or ballet dancers: after all these years, we’re too distinctive — full of embodied memories, emotion, knowledge. We’re a whole new set of textures.

Not to mention having been put to so much use — as Steve Holmes puts it, “use and over-use.” His movement experience as a Dance to Health volunteer was four decades of football and of running 20 miles a week. Steve pitches forward, charges ahead, raring to go in the studio. He admits to doing himself more injuries at dancing than on the pitch and has to concentrate when going down to the floor and getting up again. 

“What bones need attention today?” asks Haighton. We have a round of ‘where we are at’: my recovering broken wrist, another dancer’s osteoporosis so severe a hug has cracked a rib during an earlier class, a lung condition’s breathlessness. It helps us to be safe, to know our risks. But none of us seem hooked on our limits. The man I’m guessing has the most metal joints amongst us, Mick Loughran, is also a mountaineer. 

He arrives early each morning from Wharncliffe and warms up before rehearsal with Qigong brocades, or sequences. His movement quality comes from 17 years of Tai Chi. He never stops practising. The circular movement is martial but looks like slow dancing; you unbalance your opponent by using their force, not your own. 

Our choreographer, Haighton, sets us inventive tasks. Her age — she is 34 years old — means she is always curious about our experiences and she’s attentive.

She gives us an exercise anyone can try: to invent positions, still images, in answer to her questions:

“Falling is …?”

“When I fall I…?”

“When I fell I… ?”

“When I fell, I lost the race I’d been winning,” Holmes (the runner) says. He and I both strike running through the air poses, him going flat out; I reach upwards with “When I fell I lost myself.”  

Down on the floor, Liz Hall, a sculptor, leans back as if mid-way through a fall, legs and arms star shaped; is she falling ill or falling in love? All this material will be played with and it’s the kernel of The Fallen’s opening. 

Loughran, lying under his chair says, “When I fall, my dog Lyra comes to check that I’m alright. She gives me lots of dog kisses.” 

“Falling is … developmental!” calls Nidhi Nanda (she’s a scientist, optimistic). She leaps on a chair like a rocket, citing Zumba and Salsa as her only dance training. Loughran gives her a piggy back off her chair and it’s funny.

At first, we help each other back up, sympathetically. However, Neila Irwin (the Bharatanatyam student) resists a hand up from her pose on the floor.  

A resistance to being helped up off the floor, to appearing needy, is clearly integral to the group and its name: Third Bite. “Patronise us and we’ll bite!” smiles McManus. To Haighton, bite is “an active word… a word that says we’re here and we’re taking up space.”

I love people when they’re dancing. Watching, I think our individual gestures, our falls and our recovery, courage, might touch an audience and ring out. Then we all learn Irwin’s solo and do it together, ten Kali poses of strength and self-protection, with imaginary swords and shields.

“I forgot how much it gave to my life,” Irwin says, of dance.

“It gives me an overall feeling of joy, losing myself in it and connecting to myself, out of my head and into my body.”  Third Bite’s dancer-treasurer is Alison Lally, a former DWP finance and HR officer who spent many years commuting from Handsworth to the Treasury, before retiring and reviving a teenage love of dance. She says for her dance is like “coming home.” 

The group fundraises to keep classes affordable (carers pay half price). It’s important that teachers and choreographers are paid current Arts Council rates. Earlier this year, Haighton and Third Bite’s committee bid successfully for a coveted National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England.  The money, just under £27,000, enables the creation and ongoing development of The Fallen, meaning additional artists and musicians can be brought in to work with the group.

There is also funding for our director, Haighton, to observe other UK dance artists who make work with older people, including one who focuses on dance performance for people with memory loss.  One of the members of Third Bite has had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s; how can we create a dance for her memory loss, not about it, when she returns to us (recent bereavements have kept her away from The Fallen’s rehearsals)?  And there are community dance and care venues in South Yorkshire and beyond who are expecting Third Bite to visit.  The ACE funding lasts until Spring 2025 meaning that The Fallen can keep developing until then. That is, we have hardly begun.

It's already challenged and captivated me; how the word ‘fall’ can be played with, with curiosity, invention and resistance.  And how a group of us older people, with our different bodies and ways, can come together and, each of us distinctive on our own, create a world for the stage.  A world that’s not in freefall but surprising and humane. 

50 + contemporary classes welcome everyone to their classes at the University Drama Studios, off Glossop Road: you can sign up for their newsletter here.

Yorkshire Dance’s Ageless Festival runs on 12 July and 13 July in Leeds. Third Bite will perform ‘The Fallen’ at 4.45pm on the 12 July at Leeds City College Theatre as part of a triple bill of Northern older dance companies.