Dance and You

1. When should I start taking ballet?

The answer to that depends on how old you are. Children must wait
until their bones are strong enough to stand the strain that dancing will
put on them. Opinions differ as to exactly when that happens, and it
depends a great deal on the individual, but it seems to be somewhere
between ages six and nine. Younger children will often profit from special
dance classes, in which the emphasis is on rhythm, spatial sense, musical
sense, and placement.

If you are older than that, the answer is, right away. The sooner
you start, the better. If you start in your teens, you may be able to
dance professionally, or you may not. Igor Youskevitch didn't start until
he was 22, and he became a star; but he was Igor Youskevitch. By that age,
most people can look forward to ballet only as a recreation. (But it is a
*wonderful* recreation!)

2. When should I start taking modern dance?

Opinions vary; some say, Right away; others say, After you've had
a year or two of ballet to lay a foundation. A great deal depends on the
individual. Ballet teaches a vocabulary of movement which has largely been
rejected by modern dance; and some people find that ballet inhibits the
kind of movement favored in modern dance. But ballet is unparallelled for
strengthening your body and for teaching you to think of it as an instru-
ment of dance. For many people, the ideal may be to take ballet and modern
concurrently, if that's feasible.

3. I'm in my early twenties; it it too late for me to start a
professional career in ballet?

It's not impossible--it has been done before--but the odds are
against it. Leigh Witchel offers more details:

The average age of a woman starting ballet is between eight and eleven,
of a man, often in his teens. Later is not unheard of; Melissa Hayden
began at 15, Igor Youskevitch at 22. A word of warning, however: As
you grow older, developing flexibility is infinitely more difficult.
If you do not have a natural facility, you will be fighting an uphill
battle the whole way and may find the pain too great to be worth it.
Also, for a woman, developing the ankle strength and articulation of
the feet necessary for pointe work takes around five years, which adds
another handicap. Moreover, at the onset of training, you can really
only take so many classes a week without risking injury. So the roads
of an amateur and professional do not diverge until at least a little
way into training. At that point, take a good look at what you are
doing, your progress in relation to others, and how happy it is making
you. Are you ready to play a game of catch-up that may be sisyphean?
It may be worth the struggle.

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