Sixty-plus and swinging

To dance is indeed to be out of ourselves; more focus and new friendships

When a friend requested me to join a dance by the sixty-plus group for the platinum jubilee celebrations of our community’s association, I was hesitant due to paucity of time.

After some persuasion, I agreed and the nine of us, six ladies and three men, began practice under the able guidance of a dance coach.

I am not a born dancer like the one in the famous song Thank you for the music by the Swedish pop group ABBA. I took to ballroom dancing in my late teens, thanks to the parties and discotheques of good old Bangalore.

We never went to any dance schools, nor did we have television or YouTube to watch dance videos. We just danced to the beat of the music, swaying our hips, moving our feet and swinging our arms along to the rhythm. It was like dreaming with your feet.

From wild dancing, creating our own steps, we slowly graduated to more graceful, cultivated and stylised forms of ballroom dancing such as Waltzing and Jiving.

With work, marriage and children, it was a different dance -- a dance to the tunes of bosses, spouses and even the kids! Our busy lives left us little time for partying or late-night discotheques. An occasional wedding, a social or family event fulfilled a crucial need to shake a leg or two.

So, this latest dance opportunity for our community’s milestone event for which I was a reluctant participant, turned out to be a fun and rewarding experience after so many years.

It entailed twice-a-week practice for four weeks demanding our time, commitment and focus. The steps were not complicated but since most of us were in our 60s, some septuagenarians and one octogenarian, it was no cakewalk. Besides, we had to rehearse two dances, one to the tune of a famous Konkani song, the other an evergreen English number.

We took our time to perfect our dance steps while our trainer watched silently and amusedly at our frequent slipups. Being younger than most of us, she rarely lost her cool, demonstrating monumental patience with her older learners. Eventually, we mastered the dance, much to her delight.

By attending the practice sessions, we learned not just two dances but something more. We learnt coordination, balance, flexibility, team work; it helped improve our focus, memory and spatial awareness, and if we stumbled, to make it part of the dance! Last but not least we forged new friendships with our fellow dancers.

Our final performance on stage in a hall bursting with people may have lacked the energy and moves we displayed in our late teens and twenties but the shouts and thundering applause from the audience was enough encouragement for us to keep dancing.

As the famous American dancer Agnes De Mille said, “to dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.”