Agency and autonomy: how are senior professional dancers forging a presence within an ageist dance culture?

The questions of what the right age is to continue or stop dancing are being challenged by senior professional dancers in the context of pervaded ageism within Western dance culture. In today’s youth-obsessed Western society, age prejudice (Butler 1969) flourishes. This stance is replicated within Western dance culture—in classical ballet and, to a lesser degree, within contemporary dance. The ingrained aesthetic for young, virtuosic, and physically agile bodies remains paramount (Angyal 2023; Schwaiger 2012; Kelly 2012; Wainwright and Turner 2003; Wulff 1998; Gordon 1983). “The way it looks is what matters” (Siegel 228)—leaving little leeway for older dancers to be accepted to continue, or opportunities to perform. The antithesis is the ageing dancer, who may be in their late thirties, chronologically young, but possessing embodied knowledge and artistry honed through decades of training yet has little value to mainstream culture. Indeed, the Western dance sector persists with this prejudice or “subculture” (Aalten 2005, 7) that is unlike any sedentary profession, in that the processes of training, bodily aesthetics, value, identity, longevity and agency are heavily contested when it comes to ageing. As a result, retirement for dancers occurs decades earlier than those in sedentary life, as sociologists Steven Wainwright and Bryan S. Turner assert dance is a “cruel business” (2006, 247). While, in society the age of retirement is being extended beyond +65, community dance has captured a positive mindset promoting movement for the elderly, endorsing the uplifting benefits for their health and wellbeing. Ironically the reverse is experienced by dancers over the age of 40 who consider performing not only a career but a calling (Roncaglia 2008, 51). Despite this dilemma, some dancers have begun rejecting these biased “dance-by-date” attitudes (Edward and Newell 2013, 15) as my research (2020, 2025) has demonstrated, they are pushing audiences and themselves to acknowledge that a dancer’s life is a continuous one and that growing older should not mean terminating a career.