It’s slightly after 10 a.m. on a Friday, and a white-haired man beyond middle-age is in the midst of a workout. He’s stretching muscles, toes, joints and ligaments at a barre, the kind for dance, not drinks.
Ed, as the instructor calls him, wears a long-sleeved black T-shirt, tights and slip-on shoes. He’s in a sterile room, lit by fluorescents and moving to classical music played out by an accompanist. Ed is in ballet class, advanced ballet, because, like his classmates, he’s found a passion.
The Atlanta Ballet Dance Centre, or ABCD as it’s called, welcomes all kinds of students without dance backgrounds or with limited experience to its introductory ballet classes. The Centre offers adult classes (age 16 and up) in various genres at multiple levels and skill sets, from beginner to advanced. You can take ballet, world dance, hip-hop, modern, pointe, jazz, tap, and even yoga and Pilates. (Details: www.atlantaballet.com or 404.873.5811, Ext. 310.)
In her advanced ballet class, instructor Carol Szkutek asks if her students “feel that incredible stretch” between barre combinations, then fluidly marks a combination in her sneakers. Her students range in age from their 20s to late 60s and vary in skill. Nearly half are men. “They are all centered,” Szkutek (pronounced CUE-tek) says, indicating with her fingers the dancers’ upright torsos, vertically correct through each combination they perform.
“1, 2, 3-2, 2, 3-3, 2, 3…,” Szkutek booms as they dance. She knows them, their training, technique levels and abilities. Some have been with her for decades. They are lawyers, ex-architects, teachers, restaurant workers, a model. Nancy Lindebaum is among them.
Lindebaum, a special education teacher who owns a tutoring service, found ballet fairly early.
“My love of movement is so intense,” says Lindebaum, almost 60. She has danced through pregnancies, injury and physical therapy. “I celebrate my age in a ballet class.” That’s because, she says, it makes her feel young and beautiful.
Lindebaum did modern dance in the 1970s, and then musical theater. Bachelor’s and master’s degrees followed, and yet ballet persisted in her life. She sees herself as a nontraditional ballet student even though she’s been dancing for more than 50 years. “I didn’t have the physical facility to be great as a dancer,” she notes. For her, “Ballet was the passion, recreation, the exercise.”
And a lifeline. “I want to dance forever,” she says. “I hope.”
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Danielle Deadwyler is an Atlanta-based writer, actor and mother to a dancing machine. Read more of her stories at tinyurl.com/atldanielle.
