I like to think you can see it all over and through me: dance matters and is my matter. It’s my history and my present, my biology and my biography, the calling that continues to transform me in a passion of discovery—one human being finding expression through a joyous, ongoing practice of conscious embodiment. As I move forward in my eighties through this vigorously physical endeavor, I am learning about the creative dynamics of limitation, transcendence, and freedom.
My instructor and dance partner, Darius Mosteika, has been teaching me the American Smooth Style of Ballroom dance for ten years. During this time, I have evolved from a retired professional modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher into an award-winning Competitive Ballroom dancer. We compete as a Pro/Am (professional/amateur) couple at the Open Gold or top level, in the senior-most division, ages eighty +.
How did this start? It was a poetic debut: “What are you going to do when you retire?” “I’m going to resume my career.” “No, no!” I said to my inner voice, “you are no longer interested in your former career. You can’t ‘resume’ a thirty-year-old’s body and you don’t want to choreograph anymore.” From my eleventh-floor apartment, bewildered, I stared out at so much brick and sky—up here one sees the gulls flying from the Hudson to the East River and back; their cries cut through the street noise. “What am I going to do?”
A seventieth-birthday card from Ted and Martha arrived: “You have been given two free introductory lessons at the Fred Astaire Westside Dance Studio, please call to schedule an appointment.” Ballroom dance? No, thanks. Three months later, a phone call: “Would you like to schedule your dance lesson?” A gift must be honored, and I went.
The instructor smiled and bowed slightly, led me into the dance space and drew me respectfully into his arms. One measure of four, another, back-side-forward-together. OK. I can walk in a square. And then—the box step became a circle; the music became a melody; my feet recognized the floor, ground, earth! As an electric current sparkled through it, my spine lengthened, and just at heart’s level, with a rush of delight, my ribcage spiraled open to spread wings that carried me beyond the teacher’s guiding movement, beyond the studio, into sky, vast, home. The answer flew towards me: this is it.
Afterward, early dusk, I stood on Broadway waiting for the bus. A flock of fifteen pigeons (I counted) had gathered on a cornice high above eye level, and then suddenly taking flight, not in a fuss, not in a squabble, like jelling liquid poured upward into a tensile mold, they began a soaring, dipping, gliding dance. Their formations outlined their shared membrane—yes, I thought, akin to our couple’s dance frame. Time is their breath, space their diaphragm, pressing against a sky ribbed with clouds. As I watched the birds rejoice, I knew I had just been given an equally life-enhancing form.
History: from its roots in the eighteenth century, Ballroom dance in the nineteenth had become a presentational convention. The gentleman (father, brother, cousin) showed off at arm’s length, to best advantage, the young woman—an item for sale. The debutante, heiress, baby-machine, was financial potential. Along with the serious social business, young people met and courted, seduced, were seduced, and had a ball! Always watchful, the sidelined older women, essential, too, but tastefully invisible, organized, gossiped, made the matches. Ballroom dance was born a macho, hierarchical, class-defining form and still retains some of those characteristics. There is asymmetry in the technical choices since the leader determines rhythm, direction, and shape, and in narrative, too, as the gender rules of patriarchy play out, albeit tongue-in-cheek. Today as well as a hundred years ago, men are taught to “make the woman look good.” It’s their “job.” Add that she wants to look good! There is constant consent.
What can be lost in the bustle is the crucial counterweight to much sexist nonsense: the purpose of this dancing is to create, develop, and share the luminous emotional beauty not of partnering, but of partnership, inherent in the figures the dancers execute. The gentleman cannot take a single step—not one!—unless the lady agrees, knowingly. She is entirely in control of her own body and by extension, of what the “leader” can actually do. The very dance technique is built on her initial physical self-awareness.
Today, a large Competition can have upward of 20,000 entries, and though my American Smooth’s age group may account for fewer than three hundred of them, we are visible and vibrant. We do what all the competitors do—the eight-year-olds, the teenagers, the seasoned amateurs, the pros—the same dances to the same tempos for the same length of floor-time, with the same vocabulary of steps. No creaky-joint compromises. In the twenty-first century, old(er) women at a Ballroom Competition are dancing the roles once allowed only to the young, and we are paying our own way. Eyelashes extend to eyebrow; besequinned and high-heeled, we are neither sidelined nor sedate.
Sally Hess and Darius Mosteika, American tango, Ohio Star Ball, 2023, photograph by Dance Production House
The judges take notice. They are the adjudicating observers standing with score sheets in hand on three sides of the ballroom floor, according marks to the dancers. They reward variety and skill, overall look and technical detail, as well as sheer performative stamina. Darius is a magnificent six foot three inches tall and our horizontal span is, by my calculation, over four feet, measured from my left elbow to his left hand. We are hard to ignore on the dance floor. I like to think that wrinkles and tummies are easier to miss, simply because they are irrelevant to the driving movement. Ballroom dance is showtime, a rousing pleasure for participants and audience alike.
The Ballroom shapes that a couple dancing in the Smooth Style seeks to accomplish have evolved in a steady stream of invention over the years—they are constantly being opened, modified, and stretched. As dancers of any age increase in ability, they need to be challenged. The waltz, for example, nowadays so old-fashioned as to be seldom performed outside the ballroom setting, was originally considered most improper, dangerous to a lady’s health and, of course, wildly popular! Still, we see it changing as the dance-hold expands, allowing for a greater sweep of body line, a wider arc from toe to hip to head, and in consequence, ever closer in thigh and torso contact. There is indeed a built-in role division: leader and follower, heavier and lighter, but the goal is cooperative; we synchronize and balance to achieve this intricate joining. As the pair orbits the ballroom counter-clockwise, the enabling conversation is diplomatic—revolution emerges from tradition, and satisfaction surges courteously through difficulty. I am in my element!
The basic dance unit for a Competition is the Round, comprised in American Smooth of four dances in a fixed order: the American waltz followed by the American tango, foxtrot, and Viennese waltz, this last reaching the fastest tempo of the group. We will repeat these Rounds in a process of elimination over the course of a day and evening until only six or seven couples remain—the Final. In preparation for a Competition, Darius and I rehearse choreography specific to us, to my developing strengths and our expressive possibilities.
The Competitions are the major performance venues of the Ballroom world. Often called DanceSport Championships, these events draw people with varying perspectives on the activity. For some it is a sport and one enters to win (or to get as close to the Final as possible). For me, it is an art. As my life’s circle nears its closing, Comps have become a precious opportunity for my still open-ended vocation to flower. What was true in childhood is true now: the sense that “I” is a flowing process in which doer and thinker are perpetually intertwining. I am studying (dancing), walking (dancing), you are speaking (I am dancing), my blood, spinal fluid, thoughts, all dancing. From the inner currents surface the enduring questions: Who am I? What is this?
By enduring, I mean that such issues accompany me in the street and on the subway or in full ballgown, waiting to be summoned into the dance space. The answer I use to orient myself amidst the who and the what, comforts me as I repeat it quietly. It comes from the Canadian philosopher Evan Thompson: “consciousness is luminous, knowing, reflexive—that which makes manifest appearances, is able to apprehend them in one way or another and in doing so, is self-appearing and pre-reflectively self-aware.” Put differently, “lights on, eyes wide open.”
I majored in philosophy in college. Plato and Wittgenstein stroll peacefully among the folds of my prefrontal cortex; I miss most of what they say as they amble. But I talk about them, even when the occasion may not be quite proper. So it is that Darius announced to me in the middle of a lesson, “I don’t do philosophy.” He went further: “I don’t do feelings.” “Never mind,” said I quickly, “you do sensations.”
Sensations are preverbal—the body’s mother tongue. Darius’ mother tongue is Lithuanian, and as we dance, his English verbs, pronouns, and prefixes wander around on the dance floor with us in blissful disarray, while his dance vocabulary looms enormous, organized, flexible and splendid. We are playing here in pairs, enjoying the dualities that bind us into a swirling whole. Ballroom dance is all about sensation and relationship. Sensation within relationship. Relationship through sensation. Without prejudice or judgment, without regard to tummies and wrinkles, with no pronouncement “you cannot” but always challenging along an investigation of what “you can,” the shapes that the couple forms in any degree of intimacy are available and offered to participants without regard to age.
In Ballroom dance, the woman is always mistress of her own body; the partnership depends on it. My teacher says, “dance your own weight. You are responsible for yourself, dance to your own height, dance yourself.” The attention on oneself is concentrated and unbroken. We are not equally weighted, but with each dancer on our own balance point, we are in equilibrium; we agree with ourselves and profoundly, with each other. By the numbers, 1 + 1 = 1. Or 100 percent + 100 percent = 100 percent. Darius characterizes the relationship in the “postural embrace” (the preferred expression for the couple’s basic closed position) as a threesome: partnership—trust—surrender. I parse these elements in the following manner: partnership requires integrity; trust requires equality; surrender requires responsibility. When thought, heart, and action join, Darius says, “we breathe one breath.”
OK, it’s difficult. You see ease. It’s fast, you see slow. It’s precise, you see flow. You see spontaneous, it’s rehearsed; you see harmony, it’s opposition; you see open, it’s closed: balance creates security. Of course, an eighty-two-year-old woman will never attain the muscular power of her younger self, nor of her partner. My left hip, replaced, lacks proprioception. My arthritically damaged right knee grinds and locks. But as I learned from my beloved ballet teacher Maggie Black, when you are young you can dance on strength; when you are old(er) you must dance with technique, and it works! In fact, the more refined the technique, the less the work. I am finding that at my present age, I can achieve many of the same shapes I did years ago because my spinal alignment is correct and lively, so the muscular groups can stabilize and enable a more vulnerable general structure. Darius and I enter several Competitions a year, the big ones. We win.
It’s not the case that with age, we slow or stop learning. At the least, the dance couple’s evolution sharpens my focus and enlarges my capacity—physical, cognitive—to absorb information through vigorous exchange. As ability improves with practice, the two-become-one unit no longer moves with powerful effort (which certainly carries its own excitement), but with effortless power. The Senior Division IV dancer that I am aspires to experience the ultimate in Ballroom dance, to cover space grandly, to glide. At last, in the final dance of the Round with the accumulating momentum of the Viennese waltz, we fly.
Sally Hess, photograph by Betti Franceschi
American Smooth presents a formal line and a storyline. We say stately, classic, and smile as an elderly couple (perhaps at a grandchild’s wedding) holding more or less steadily to the spiraled vertical, proceeds more or less gracefully across the dance floor. Betti Franceschi, artist, dance photographer, and author of Ageless Dancers, a newly published book presenting seventy remarkable photo-portraits of professional dancers ages seventy to a hundred-and-two, writes that during a trip to Europe she became aware that “as we advance in years, we Americans, particularly women, neuter ourselves.” In contrast, as she realized at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Barcelona, “the women of the age I am now [she was then sixty-six] danced freely and beautifully – elegant, dignified… and sexy!”
What then has become of the wild waltz? It’s still a physical power display, but now a deeply-waved progression and the most decorous of the Competition choreographies. Across the four Comp dances glow many hues of passion. We have the tango! It’s fantasy Carmen: she’s swaggering, aggressive, ready to hiss, scratch, and kiss her partner; the attitude is attack and contempt. Next, the foxtrot, which changes mood, sultry, slutty, a pole dance or burlesque (thighs spread or slyly angled closed), with a welcome dash of Fred-and-Ginger sophistication. The Viennese waltz ends the quartet with exuberant frothy! I try to unfold character from the movement itself and allow some Sally to shine through the fixed mask. It’s important that older women, without holding back, bring their histories and proud bodies to these roles. The results are hilarious, vulgar, provocative, Tinkerbell-lovely….
Amateur dancers, even with the utmost devotion, do not move like professionals. They haven’t the training or, for the most part (my surmise of course), that peculiar avidity to delve into the body for thirty years plus before achieving mastery (if then) in the chosen form. In my incarnation as an amateur Ballroom dancer, I feel compelled to actualize and share as best I can the life-affirming force that has always driven me to dance and that has propelled me through painful choices, as a young woman and also in my later years. I mull over the advice of a wise healer who explained, “There is a force of life available in all tissues as long as we have breath. This force has three tasks or functions: organization, protection, and healing.” Where is the life force best spent? Add the fourth task, adaptation. This is the skill that helps us age. “We need to free up the energy involved in protection in order to adapt.” It’s visible in the bodies of dancers who have subtly but ravenously exercised and burnished their art throughout long careers. It is cellular; it is beautiful.
Franceschi reveals this potency in her “ageless dancers”—they are ballet stars, Broadway, tap, and modern dance luminaries, all “stage animals,” Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s expression for opera singers. Their bodies are their careers, instruments superbly honed to move us, often to tears. Professional dancers are in Franceschi’s eyes unlike (beautiful) athletes. “There is a further dimension that dancers inhabit: it’s conceptual. Dancers think in shapes.” Franceschi’s previous works “show the dancer’s center and how it is used. …The dancer’s expressive inner line.… The Ageless Dancers photographs are about that line and the technique that survives diminished athleticism – the artist’s voice triumphant.” I deal every day with my own “diminished athleticism.” It does not surprise me nor does it lessen the beauty of the shapes the Ballroom dance partnership creates. This isn’t a triumph over time, but a bow to it.
In his introductory essay to Franceschi’s book, the art critic George Negroponte sets the frame: “Ageless Dancers is dedicated to older, stoic, and proud performers consumed by physical movement. Their ritual is so deeply internalized that the slightest movement by any of them can be skillful; they are fluent in their bodies. While a spiraling body can signify endless possibilities, a dancer refines it to a far more consecrated meaning. What happens inside their bodies is mirrored on the outside, and Franceschi’s elders are blessed with (…) self-assurance, because they are astute diplomats of equilibrium and live within themselves.” Wow.
This self-assured living-within-oneself of the elderly performers, so grippingly manifest in the photos, bespeaks an awareness, maybe the acceptance, of impending death. Six participants died just before publication, one soon after. I think about death often. My time here is so much shorter than for my younger instructor, younger fellow students, or the people who jostle me in the rush hour buses and subways. I know my bones won’t last.
Alone in my living room, I explore further pairings that help me conjure my passing away as if I could dance the action. Inspired by Franceschi’s study of line and life, I want to capture memory and intention in a present image: the past and future of the moving now. Call it a phantom selfie. I trace the Ballroom couple’s rotations by winding figures (♾️) and open spirals from my feet through my pelvis and up my spine, sending curls of movement beyond my fingertips, my apartment windows, out to the city beyond. Smaller inside my small diaphragm, lesser inside my supple inner frame, vast as the universe—I slide into the Milky Way.
In my imagining, the element is light. Luminous dancing is available, I believe, to any body, trained, untrained, old or young, because it is always possible to become a fully conscious human being. Perhaps that is precisely the (professional or amateur) older dancer’s most adventuresome task.
The opening photo of Ageless Dancers is prefaced with the words of a famous elder, Albert Einstein: “What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to the point of visibility.” I’d like to propose we envision the reverse: that as we grow older, our vibration rises. We are invited to witness in ourselves and others not a fitful descent in a raging body, but instead an inner ascent towards release. As dancers we can already feel it in movement unfolding moment to moment, and assent willingly. Rather than being defined solely by a visible (material) form, might we not dance the form we already have into an ageless transparency? If the lighter body is “less perceptible to the senses,” is it because the incandescent energy field is less compacted? If spirit is matter expanded beyond the point of visibility, eventually we’ll resolve into the space from which we came. Perhaps in the final rounds we can tilt beyond a diplomatic balance between win or lose, and glide wholeheartedly into the transcendent.
Movement is life, and life as we know it, ends. A graceful ambition, a grateful practice for my old age: to dance luminously, knowingly, fully self-aware. Our bodies’ rhythms are naturally attuned to the day light and night shade of our planet’s turnings; our bodies’ weight and suspension are sprung naturally to channel the spirals which the dancing couple espouses—a loving coherence offered to a world aching for beauty and freedom.
The announcer calls, “Ladies and gentlemen….” Under the ballroom lights, the dancers lift, ready to move. The lights are always on.
Sally Hess, photograph by Betti Franceschi
Further Reading:
Elizabeth Aldrich, From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance, Northwestern University Press, 1991
Betti Franceschi, Ageless Dancers, Overhead Press, 2023
Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy, Columbia University Press, 2015
Bios
Following a professional career as a modern dancer, choreographer, teacher, and yogini, Sally Hess is now an award-winning competitive ballroom dancer. She writes essays exploring dance, meditation, dreams, and language. 
For most of her career, Betti Franceschi (b. 1934) focused on painting and sculpture. Her Still Point drawings—vertical-hatched, tightly realistic nude close-ups of dancers' centers—published as The Still Point (1987)—won six nominations to the National Trust Show in London and Frankfurt, and were exhibited widely thereafter. Her explosive, almost abstract, zen-calligraphic Signature Drawings (1983–1986) of dancers in motion, have been exhibited in several venues. Turning to photography in 2016, she commenced her Ageless Dancers project, a series of austere, elegant photographic portraits of dancers in the latter years of life. She lives in New York City.
This was so beautifully written, so chock-full of ideas about movement in our lives that were thought through so clearly to their affirming conclusions. You’ve expressed how I feel all the time when moving my body, but have only been able to communicate in a frustratingly inchoate way. I’ll be sharing it with all of those people I want so dearly to understand those feelings. I was especially touched by your observation of the difference between the professional and amateur dancers. I wanted so much to dance as a kid, but my family couldn’t swing it. I feel the lack of that early start all the time, and struggle to adapt my diminishing capabilities (as a seventy-one year old) to the movement I’m capable of today. I’ll never compete, but your article has given me great optimism and in a way, relief, and encouragement about the future.
Thank you!
Absolutely beautiful and inspiring. Marcia Weller