An Expressive Body:
The Beauty of Dancing in Elder Life

As persons over the age of sixty-five become the predominant demographic in the United States—a trend being mirrored around the globe—private and public sectors in health, family and urban planning, strategic economics, and workforce aspirations are keen to respond to the needs, challenges, and concerns of aging well, physically, mentally, and psychologically. This essay identifies the role and importance of aesthetic dance experiences throughout the lifespan, and in particular, its impact on human beings in older life.
Focusing on the transcendent qualities inherent in experiences of beauty, this writing submits personal accounts of elders dancing, underscored by theoretical edification to amplify the subjective, communal, ethical, and meaning-making power of aesthetic dance experiences for older adults.

Keywords: Elders Dancing; Aging and Dancing; Lifelong Dancing; Bodies and Memory; Expressive Beauty

May 1958. I was three. Seamlessly my mother navigated the Los Angeles rush hour every morning wending her way to my nursery school before work. Saying “good-bye” was never pleasant as I watched her get into the car and drive off. One day a dance teacher visited my little world: Joan Chodorow.  Her married name then was ‘Smallwood’—Joan Smallwood. Once, maybe twice a week she came and gave us little ones a marvelous dancing experience following nap time.

From then on, I looked forward to going to nursery school knowing I’d be dancing! —moving to ideas, music—being in contact with the hidden parts of myself.

Joan’s prompts and soft lyrical voice laid a red carpet for my inner life to find harmony with the exterior world’s coarser lines and angles. We were all enchanted. I’ve been enchanted ever since. I danced my way into a magical place, an in-dwelling place. It was a reverie, —wholly being with my authentic self and discovering a language that allowed me to move through the world without words.

Since then, I have enjoyed not only a rich and fulfilling career as a dance artist and choreographer, but I have also had the privilege of teaching for a spectrum of diverse populations—Head Start and K-12, persons with special needs, university students and older adults—always thrilled to translate the exquisite beauty of dancing.

Teaching and dancing with older adults inspire this essay, in particular, witnessing the generative beauty of expressive dancing in our elder years. As my childhood reveries confirm, the transformative experience ushered by the beauty of expressive dancing has particular impact on our overall wellbeing. Australian dancer Eileen Kramer, age 107 at the time of this writing imparts: “I’m no longer my ordinary self, . . . I’m transformed into something wonderful” (Young, 2024).

As teacher of The Flow®—my Expressive Dance Movement Chair Class initially developed for persons living with Parkinson’s Disease—I’m interested in investigating the feeling of beauty. In a text message (personal communication, February 23, 2023), a 78-year-old student of The Flow® writes:

“I cannot tell you enough how beautiful I feel when taking your classes.

I emerge as another, sprouting with beauty, allowing myself to absorb every note, every chord, every sound. That which you emote I take in with

all-knowing of my beauty, now I am gorgeous. It’s that Tuesday hour that makes me so and beyond. Thank you for filling my heart with it all.”

While much research documents the benefits of movement as exercise for older populations—be it walking, Tai Chi, Yoga, Pilates, bicycling, or rowing—little attention has been brought to the more nuanced impact of aesthetic dance movement performed by older persons. We are aware of how music boosts cognitive function for persons living with Alzheimer’s Disease, for example. What we know less about are the effects on our wellbeing as a result of moving beautifully. Aligning expressive gestures with gorgeous music not only calms the nervous system like Tai Chi, but also raises our spirits by engaging cognitive and imaginative skills by opening a portal to a language of our souls. Our inner lives breathe in the light of day through our bodies. “If it does not lift the psyche [soul],” asserts poetics theorist Gaston Bachelard (1988), “it will not transform it.“ As we dance, so our souls levitate, renewing ways of being alive!

Critical thoughts guiding my writing are:

• The subjective (emotional, psychological)
• Ethical aesthetics (beauty’s generative nature and its effect on well-being)
• Post-experiential resonances (what Irish poet Seamus Heaney calls the “afterlife”)

These ideas regarding beauty have been less attended to according to philosopher George Santayana (1955), “not due to the unimportance of the subject [but] rather to [the] lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it” (45). I will explore them in Parts I, II & III of this essay.

Subjective Experience

When a mover—student, participant—says, “I emerge as another,” I take note. Something extraordinary has happened. I am reminded not only of my own reveries—limbs gently circling over limbs, neck arching skyward or humbly bowing earthward— but that I am also witness to someone else’s transformation. What a marvel and delight to observe others bodying forth aspects of themselves that under any other circumstance rarely see the light of day. Why? Well, one reason is that one’s ego personality typically gets in the way. But oh, the glow! —the contagion!—to be enveloped in beauty’s transformative event! Author Toni Morrison captures this experience in her Pulitzer Award-winning novel, Beloved (1987):

“And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as the ma’ams. [They] shifted shapes and became something other”(31). 

The ‘something other’ is precisely what happens. The dancing initiates a psychological shift, and in the spatiotemporal reality of the moment one retrieves another mode of being. One’s self portrait expands; content is re-integrated; and a fuller, deeper sense of being ensues. Suddenly one is the antelope; one’s antelope self is reconstituted. It might be said that one’s primal being is reclaimed, aspects that have been dis-remembered, unattended to, and long buried.

The beauty of expressive dancing in elder life is its ability to psychologically open one up and gather the disparate parts of one’s self. It gives depth to the content of our lives and, by extension, our ways of living in and with the world. “This beauty,” Bachelard writes, “is within us.” Moreover, “[beauty] revives us”; it is generative. In a passage from The Book of Tea, Japanese artist-scholar Okakura Kakuzo (1983) writes, “[the] magic touch of the beautiful the secret chords of our being are awakened,. . . [Memories] long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance” (78).

8th century poet Hesiod perceives this generative aspect in the Greek goddess of Beauty and Love (1988): As “the modest and beautiful [Aphrodite] stepped, grass began to grow all round beneath her slender feet” (Ln.193-94). Such generativity embodies ethical value. Beauty, naturally, bestows a worldly grace.

Aestheticization of Ethics: Gestures of a Moral Imagination

“I never knew how expressive every part of me can be! Every part of me dances, every finger and down to my toes. I feel rejuvenated, energized, but also very peaceful.”

~ handwritten note from an 80-year-old The Flow® student (personal communication, June 14, 2021)

Beauty’s generativity engenders joy and peace simultaneously; it is beauty’s enchantment. To Walk in Beauty, as the Diné (Navaho) poem encourages (1994), is to embrace the world’s natural beauty alongside one’s own sense of dignity: large, limitless, ever expansive, yet deeply intimate, . . .

  “The mountains, I become part of it . . ./ The evergreen, I become part of it. / The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering waters, / I become part of it. / The dew drops, the pollen, / I become part of it.”

Beautyway Chant

Human nature is concomitant with the world’s nature; in walking, dancing, we grow and expand, no less than the ways of our verdant planet. (Consider the Buddhist ethic, dependent co-arising). “How one walks,” poet Amiri Baraka once remarked, “is as profound as a system of thought.” Indeed, our everyday gestures—in solitude as well as our social practices—speak to a unified moral imagination. How we walk, how we talk, how we are this body, how we use our physiognomies! —all reflect a life expressive of an ethics of beauty.

Expressing beauty cannot help but alter all our ways of being fluid and whole; grounded and elevated; humble and lofty. Attentive to relationality, we bring ourselves to how life shows up, especially to the innermost content embedded in the moment at hand. It is a porous state of being open and generous. This sate of being is what Bachelard terms an ‘aestheticization of ethics,’ that is, being in relationship to the world that at once refines and grounds our composure, and beckons us to meet life forthrightly, head on, with beauty’s virtue each moment at a time. Such responsiveness renders us a gestured life, a life in the round. Infused with beauty’s countenance, our bodies’ move thus with a generosity of spirit. Our bodies are a series of joints, —levers; thus we are made to lift one another, —body and soul.

In human hands, beauty’s generativity finds ethical expression. A Silo episode on Apple TV offers a perfect example of beauty’s relational and ethical power (2024):

“When you talk about [things that matter to you], something ignites in you. And I don’t see that in a lot of people. And whatever that feeling is, —when you feel it I feel it too. And it’s not just here. It’s afterwards” (Silo, Episode 6, “Relic” Apple TV).

When you feel it I feel it too. Here is a clear expression of beauty’s power, —one human being ignited by and bridged to another. Furthermore, the feeling transcends the initial timeframe of its occurrence: “[I]t’s not just here. It’s afterwards.” I will address the experience of ‘afterwards’ later in this essay. The transference of beauty’s qualities is well known; we experience it in art, music, poetry, and of course, dance. We feel it because beauty is within us; beauty shines through us. And it is good.

The Greek word, kalon, is a compound concept for ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness’ combined, and its meaning has a wide reach. Explicit throughout cultural imaginations, beauty carries moral or ethical resonances, bridging our human affairs and affecting our sense of belonging. Still, beauty’s apprehension, admits 19th century essayist Walter Pater, requires a certain temperament (73). For my part, apprehending beauty requires porousness, cultivating our openness to life; it is the condition for that temperament.

An aesthetic temperament embodies responsiveness, a generosity of articulate expression through our gestures by leaning into the feeling. When I glance over the elders in The Flow® class I am moved to tears by their complete immersion in the poetry of their movements.

“Beautiful!” I exclaim. We are each transformed in the alchemy of the moment, dancing with the presence of beauty. And it is good.

I am reminded of the last line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “You must change your life.” The sentiment is echoed in Silo. We are beckoned to err toward the beauties of the world, meaning, a change has got to come from within and from without. Socrates’s “Know thyself” suddenly comes to mind.

Expressive dancing surely is one way.

In Plato’s The Phaedrus (2005)—a dialogue not unlike The Symposium where several minds chime in about the attributes of love—Socrates utters a prayerful plea: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other Gods, [give] me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and inward man be at one” (Ln. 279c). Here Socrates discloses his own desire: to live with beauty, and that wisdom is the most beautiful of all. Know thyself. Know beauty’s goodness; they are one and the same, inside and out. Thought and action fulfilled for the greater good is an integrated, ethical state of being, for self and the world.

The marriage of beauty and ethics is understood not only in Western thought. In a conversation between Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin (1989), Achebe, of the Igbo culture, stresses an essential aesthetic precept:

“Our art is based on morality. Perhaps this sounds old-fashioned to you, but it is not to us. The earth goddess among the Igbo people is the goddess of morality. [So] you see in our aesthetic you cannot run away from morality” (214).

While Achebe speaks to art and artmaking, it is art’s underlying value—aesthetic value—that Achebe equates beauty with ethics. In this regard, the Igbo sense of beauty cannot be separated from a moral imagination. Beauty uplifts the people. Aesthetic experience is given highest import because it contributes to the overall wellbeing of the whole community. Again, we find this integral harmony with the Diné. “Navaho aesthetic,” writes phenomenological psychologist Ronald Schenk, “is lived through every aspect of life. [And] the magical power of beauty is understood in terms of its healing essence, —how [beauty] neutralizes pain, overcomes fear, eliminates illness, [and] restores order, health, and well-being” (232).

And so it was with a 2009 presentation I gave at the Nevada Arts Council’s Oasis Arts Conference in Reno, Nevada. Foregrounding a discussion on somatic knowing—intelligences informed by what I call our body’s technology (techne) such as feeling, intuition, imagination, and the poetically perceptive use of our senses—I created a diagram to illustrate the inseparable relationship of the individual artist to the world-at-large. Art—dancing our way forward—is always relational; it is a duet of ethical proportions. At the level of performance, everyone is considered an essential part of the event; no one is passive, —viewer and performer alike are present for the greater good. And it is to this ethos that I, my teaching, and my practice are rooted, which brings me to my final thought: beauty’s afterlife.

The Afterlife

Throughout my teaching and performance years, certain experiences have prompted me to consider what Irish poet Seamus Heaney calls the “after-life” of aesthetic experiences, that is, its lasting resonance. This afterlife exists beyond the doing, after the poem has been read, after the dance has been performed. The aesthetic moment continues to live in our minds, indeed, in our bodies.

Likewise, expressive dancing engages us in ways that surpass mere exercise. Its broad-band reach envelopes our souls and spirits in an ecstatic play with the life’s gorgeous realms. Expressive dancing yields to the poetry in our limbs and gently transmutes the histories held in our backs, in our arms, —it heightens our minding of how we live day by day. Expressive dancing is the pause from daily mechanical doings to which we subject our bodies and rather brings us into contact with what is possible: poetic being, —relational. We soar on the sound of the whistling hawk; our thoughts arc and bend like a rainbow; and we come to repose like a lotus on a pond. Our bone-wise language transports and helps us to recover worldly meaning if only momentarily. In the process, ah, well! —we become more of ourselves. We are restored, awakened to our sense of belonging in and to this world by other means.

Following an expressive movement workshop that I offered some years ago, an impassioned correspondence came to me from a student stating how, for weeks afterwards, she found herself weeping. “The work we did,” the letter began, “helped me find my own way of dancing. I’ve danced all my life, but I have never felt connected to the movement. Your work made me feel like it was the real me dancing from someplace deeper.” This letter continues to delight me and keeps me in wonderment.

Walking home from my university, I ran into a colleague and former movement student. It was spring. We found ourselves under the bloom of a Sweet Acacia tree when all of a sudden, my colleague burst into poetic gestures, and with outstretched arms began to dance! —becoming an extension of the tree itself! It was a marvel! I couldn’t help but unleash my satchel and join in the dance. Before one could count to ten other passer-byes joined in; we were all dancing and laughing. 

These are just a few of the ways in which the afterlife of aesthetic experiences lives in us. In an instant we are overcome with a feeling, and with a presence of mind our bodies respond: we become the music; we are the poem. With gladness or with melancholy, lived moments are remembered and are lived again. And it is beautiful. The spontaneity of the Acacia Tree dance is, perhaps, the rarest of moments. We were transformed into something other. It is the way of all aesthetic experiences. And when we can share in the dance—ah! well, —we are lifted, body and soul. And it is good.

An expressive body is a responsive body, keenly attuned to the senses: the touch and the feel of things; textures; sounds; the flight of pigeons; life in motion and repose; how a tilt of the head—ours or someone else’s—evokes a flood of emotion. An expressive body is a sensitive body: one who, with a care for particulars, retrieves an insight while threading twine through the eye of a needle; one who knows how much of an angle the wrist must bend when pouring tea from the teapot, discerning by feel the weight of its contents and how gradually the pitch changes as the teacup fills up—glissando. It’s all in the wrist.

An expressive body is always relational. From an inner life where a constellation of relations abides and language conspires with the interconnection between all things, an expressive body, especially a dancing body, speaks to the mete and measure of an aesthetic life. And it is beautiful. And it is good.