Why do dancers die twice?

With bodies honed to perfection, dancers' careers can be unexpectedly brief. As the Radio 4 documentary A Dancer Dies Twice finds out about their final dances, we ask why and whether their professional lives should be so brief.

“It can be really daunting, like reaching an abyss,” says former professional dancer and choreographer Isabel Mortimer. “The dancer can be thinking to themselves, ‘I have no idea who I am, or what I am and I’ve left my family’ - if you’ve left a company you’ve typically left a whole family that’s carrying on.”

On average, a dancer’s performance career tends to end around the age of 35. They’ve often been shaping muscle and bone into elegant lines since shortly after they first learned to walk, moulding their bodies to achieve the perfect balance of powerful athleticism and artistic grace.

After a performance career filled with adrenaline - rapid heartbeats and post-pirouette gasps for air - the physical effects of stopping dancing can be equally intense. “You’re used to a rhythm of building up to a show, doing shows and then having a period of downtime and then building up again and I found that shockingly difficult not to have,” Isabel remarks. “It felt like flatlining.”

She has since used her experience to embark on a new career supporting dancers in the process of transition after their performance careers end. Isabel works as the director of coaching at Dancers’ Career Development. Founded in 1973, it was the first organisation in the world designed to help support dancers in this process, and still remains one of a relatively small number of spaces offering this support to post-performance career dancers.

“Typically, a dancer’s career transition can be incredibly lonely, isolating, often because you might be leaving a world where everyone’s continuing,” Isabel explains. “It can feel - because that’s all you’ve done - that you don’t know who you are outside of a dance studio, you don’t know what you’re good at, you don’t know what you’re interested in… it can be a very frightening place.”

The difficulty of dealing with this may be amplified by a vast expectation gap in the art form around retirement age. A recent study in dancers’ career transitions from the US-based aDvANCE Project found that many active dancers believe they will dance for almost 10 years longer than is likely. It found that currently active dancers expect to continue their performing careers until well into their 40s. However, dancers whose active careers are now actually stopped dancing professionally in their early to mid-30s.

Natasha Oughtred, a former principal ballerina with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, was 31 when she stopped dancing. “I posted a letter through the letterbox on Putney High Street. This was the critical moment in my career where I resigned, I stood with this letter in my hand and all these people walking past me, obviously having no idea what this one moment in my life meant, and I dropped the letter in the letterbox and I thought, ‘Well that’s it. It’s done’.”

“I’d prepared myself mentally but the actual reality of having suddenly done it… I think it took me a good six months to come to terms with it, you know, to a degree and then to navigate out of it. No one tells you at the beginning.”

“There will be moments where it catches you unawares”, notes Natasha. “My little girl, who’s 15 months now, she managed to get onto my phone, and put on [Prokofiev's] Romeo and Juliet balcony pas de deux music, which I think probably is a piece of music that in the last few years I wouldn’t choose to listen to just because it brings back so many emotions of having performed the role. It was suddenly playing and it became apparent to me the amount of memories I had. I knew all these counts and all the steps and all the memories of different performances and partners. I felt like my mind was going on overdrive. I thought, ‘Gosh… I miss that!’”

“Many, many dancers talk about that,” says Isabel, “about not being able to listen to pieces of music and when they do listen to that music the multitude of emotions and thoughts that it brings back - back to the smell of the greasepaint, the costumes they were wearing, how that felt, what they felt like physically when they were doing it - even if they haven’t danced it for many years. Muscle memory is very, very powerful.”

Dancers retirement comes for a multitude of reasons: physical injuries, a slowing down of the body, the decision to have children or just a desire to try something new in their 20s or 30s after the intense dedication given since early childhood.

For those who want to continue, perhaps the changing body shouldn’t be a barrier to a far longer performance career. “Traditionally I think there was a view held that dancers past a certain age could no longer achieve the physical perfection, or near perfection, of the classical shapes of the ballet vocabulary and should therefore stop dancing while the public remembered them at their prime rather than seeing the physical body degenerate”, suggests Jane Hackett the former director of the English National Ballet School and now artistic programmer and producer for creative learning at Sadler’s Wells. “We all know that after 21 your body’s going downhill and yet your artistry is growing and your knowledge as a person is growing. I would question that thought that you have to stop because I think artists have a lot of other things to offer.”

Sadler’s Wells has had its own resident company of older performers since 1989 - Company of Elders - who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as a festival for works by mature dancers, the Elixir Festival, which has been running for the past few years. “I’m so pleased that we’re challenging these myths about age,” says Jane. “I can remember a time, some years ago now I’m glad to say, one of our national companies had a new director come in and take over and the first thing that he did was to retire every principal and soloist dancer who was over the age of 35 and a couple below that. It was a shocking loss of talent, of people at the height of their career with much more still to give and it actually left the company, I think, weaker because of losing those older artists. Legally it wouldn’t be allowed to happen now, and I hope that aesthetically people would be too wise to do that, but it’s just an example of how myths about age can take us in the wrong direction.”

Listen to A Dancer Dies Twice online now.