And Then We Danced

by Henry Alford

  3.

  Here in the carpeted and brightly lit classroom of the senior center, time is playing tricks on us all. Our teacher, Karen Ritscher, dressed today in a flowing, floral smock over black leggings, is sixty-one but looks twenty years younger. The flashiest moves on the floor are being done not by one of the dancers in her sixties or seventies, but by a ruddy gentleman in his eighties who is doing knee lunges with his arms akimbo like some heavily decorated officer from the land of Gilbert and Sullivan. Meanwhile, I’m the youngest dancer but, because I danced too hard the day before, am moving as if in illustration of the term “load-bearing.”

  Just as I’m starting to appreciate the time warp of it all—a state enhanced by the fact that we’re dancing to Elvis Presley singing “Viva Las Vegas,” a song recorded when I was one year old—reality rears its head.

  Karen, gently rotating her shoulders and hips in elliptical undulations, proposes to the twelve of us, “Imagine that instead of blood you have sparkling water in your veins.”

  The eyes of one of the male dancers—a bespectacled, hale man in a flannel shirt and jeans—widen, and he asks Karen, “Would I be permitted to use the bathroom?”

  Muriel, a tiny, birdlike woman in her seventies who’s dancing right next me, looks at me and says, “That’s a valid question.”

  * * *

  I’d read about the class on the 5Rhythms website: on Friday afternoons from one o’clock to two-thirty, dancers were invited to join instructor Peter Fodera for a class taught to seniors with early to mid-stage Alzheimer’s.

  The potential neurological benefits of listening to music are fairly widely known, thanks to various scientific studies and to documentaries like Alive Inside, which follows a social worker named Dan Cohen as he administers music therapy to Alzheimer’s patients.

  The benefits of dancing, however, have been less heralded. They received dramatic support in 2003 when the New England Journal of Medicine published a twenty-one-year-long study of people over the age of seventy-five. Led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, and funded by the National Institute on Aging, the study looked at whether certain cognitive activities (e.g., reading, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards) and certain physical activities (e.g., bicycling, swimming, dancing) offered protection against dementia.

  Surprisingly, the results suggested that, while reading reduced the risk of dementia by 35 percent and doing crossword puzzles at least four times a week reduced it by 47 percent, the only one of the physical activities studied to offer protection was dancing, which, if done frequently, reduced the risk by 76 percent.

  Alas, the study didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question—why is dancing at 76 percent while bicycling and swimming are at 0 percent? Activities that require a lot of rapid-fire decision-making help create the multiplicity of neural pathways that will help you at age ninety to remember the name of the actress who played opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun or those bugs that plague the gardener in June. Surely, swimming and biking require a lot of split-second decision-making, so why does dancing score so much higher?

  It’s possible that it has something to do with dancing’s integrative nature. Dancing can utilize several brain functions at once—emotional, logical, kinesthetic, musical—the combined forces of which may be especially potent.

  In 2017, a six-month-long study published by researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana made a similar discovery. Subjects in their sixties and seventies were asked to meet three times a week for an hour either to do a lot of brisk walking, stretching, or country dancing with choreography. While all the subjects showed some deterioration of their brains’ white matter, only the dancers emerged with denser white matter in their fornix, a part of the brain connected to processing speed and memory.

  So, if we’re hoping to be neurally spectacular ninety-year-olds, maybe we should learn to simultaneously chew gum, jump rope, and cry to Beethoven’s Fifth?

  It’s easier to take up dancing.

  * * *

  The first portion of our Friday afternoon dance parties saw us sitting around a makeshift conference table and chatting for ten or fifteen minutes. These bull sessions were led by Sandy, a sharp, energetic sixty-something liaison from the senior center who kept tabs on various members of the group, about twelve of whom would show up on any given Friday. Many of the seniors came to the class with a minder such as an aide, a sister, a spouse; I tended to be the only 5Rhythms dancer present, other than the three instructors, who took turns teaching.

  For those who’ve not yet hung out with a group of our nation’s 5.5 million Alzheimer’s patients (one half of our nursing home residents), I would describe the experience thusly: it’s a lot like spending time with teenagers. A typical Friday might start off as follows: while Sandy tries to engage us all in a conversation about, say, the subway, two of the seniors sitting at the conference table will be holding a private conversation about the coffee machine; two are dreamily staring out the window; one is getting up to retrieve something from her coat; and one thinks that we’re talking about Subway, the factory outlet store of the sandwich industry.

  As with teenagers, it’s not difficult to get the group to rally around an opinion or to wax enthusiastic about a topic like, say, the color of Amanda’s coat, or the restorative qualities of a well-cooked brisket. What’s difficult is maintaining this enthusiasm. These folks’ moods shift and dissipate like the weather in Ireland.

  The conference-table conversations were a good way to glean information about the group—I learned early on that at least four of my fellow dancers had grown up in the Bronx; two were former lawyers, and one a former judge. One told me she had given up her therapy practice only a week ago: “I couldn’t remember what their problems were,” she told me.

  One of the stars of the conversation portion of the session was a twinkly eyed, philosophical man, Bennett (I’ve changed the names of all the dancers in this section). At the first class, Bennett told me he was ninety-two, but by the second class he had demoted himself to ninety. I said to him, “I thought you were ninety-two. Last week you said you were ninety-two.”

  “I am,” he admitted. “But ninety-two sounds vainglorious.”

  Bennett was always a good go-to when Sandy wanted to get a response from someone in the group. Once, for instance, while talking about courtship and marriage, Sandy handed the conversational baton to Bennett, who nimbly chimed in, “I’ve been married since 1944.”

  Sandy asked, “Is she the love of your life?”

  “No, she’s the essence of my life. There’s a difference.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A love might be unrequited. Or it might be episodic. Essence is everyday.”

  I loved listening to Bennett. “The body is an interesting accumulation of events,” he told me one day. At another class he opined, “We all walk around telling our stories, but with a piece missing that governs us. That piece is in our heart.”

  * * *

  I tried not to be an elder-gawker. It was tempting, particularly during the bull sessions, to stare or diagnose or strap on a proverbial pith helmet. But I didn’t want to get into that mindset. In the absence of any direction or specific guidelines from the 5Rhythms folks regarding what I was meant to do in the class other than move my body to music, I’d read a little about Alzheimer’s before showing up the first time. The average life expectancy after diagnosis is eight to ten years. Short-term memory is lost in the early stage of the disease, and long-term memory in the moderate stage. Common moderate-stage symptoms include irritability, wandering, and an emotional incontinence that can lead to crying jags, unpremeditated aggression, and a resistance to caregiving.

  In my first visits to the group, I saw very few of these moderate-stage symptoms. This would change.

  * * *

  But we came here to dance, no? So let’s get up from the table and saunter over to the circle of chairs.

  First we’re going to sit a
nd do some relaxation exercises to some gentle music like Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee. Then we’ll put some slightly more lively music on—hello, Mr. Presley, hello, shaggy Southern Californian brothers answering to Brian and Dennis—and start lifting our arms and legs into the air. Then we’ll stand and dance—sometimes partnered, but mostly solo—in the fifteen-foot circle described by the chairs. Then we’ll sit again, and play a follow-the-leader game in which someone initiates a gesture in time to the music and everyone duplicates it. Then we’ll do a final relaxation exercise, possibly to classical music, or to something slow, like Nat King Cole singing “Smile.”

  With the exception of contact improv, this Stein Center dancing was probably the most intimate kind of dancing I’ve done. Our movements were confined to the fifteen-foot lagoon in the middle of the chairs; we were dancing during the day in a classroom, and engaging in a lot of eye contact; we’d all made some polite conversation and gotten to know each other a bit before busting out our moves. It would have been hard to hide.

  Asked to reintroduce myself during the conversation portion of the third class, I told the group, “Hi, I’m Henry. You may remember my dazzling dance moves from the last two weeks.” Sandy smiled and said, “You’re already one of us.”

  The following week, Sandy greeted me with “Our dancer is back!” She looked around the table and continued, “You all remember Henry, whose comments about his dancing made us laugh. That’s why we liked him—he laughed at himself. And the thing is, he’s not a bad dancer.”

  Another interesting thing happened that day. The best male dancer in the group was the energetic, ruggedly handsome Tony G. Tony G. was also the person in the group with the most advanced Alzheimer’s, sometimes requiring the ministrations of his wife, who sat on the sidelines of the dance floor with the other minders. He had nice, square shoulders and was given to wearing flannel shirts; he looked like the kind of grandfather who’d school you on fly-fishing and bourbon.

  At one point that day, he started dancing toward me, throwing both his arms in front of himself vigorously as if batting smoke. Staring at me, he puffed out his cheeks—anger? mock anger?—and implored me, “Don’t take my women away!”

  It seemed too early to drop the gay bomb on him, so I opted instead to act as I’d seen Sandy and the three instructors act when faced with such outbursts: look at the dancer in the eyes and calmly inform him that, no, darling, we don’t put the teakettle on the cat.

  So I outstretched my hands and then shrugged my shoulders, sheepishly owning up to my powerlessness in the face of my devastating man-musk.

  * * *

  Two themes started to emerge. The first was my initial reluctance to initiate partnering. Though I was happy to let someone else grab my hand or to be included in any group-wide exercise that involved touching, I was initially reluctant, despite all my other dancing, to take anyone’s hand or to encourage someone to get out of her chair if she was being a wallflower. It felt invasive to me, given all the mild dementia in the room. I was, for the more impaired members of the group, a total stranger each time I showed up. I didn’t want to scare the horses.

  But then I started to feel guilty about not taking more initiative. I’d decided early on that my role at these sessions was (a) to have fun and (b) to make an ass of myself so as to encourage anyone shy to come out of his or her shell. I’d also decided that I shouldn’t do any dance steps that the seniors wouldn’t be able to muster themselves, as that might seem show-offy.

  But as for initiating partnering: I wanted to be that person, but I was having trouble removing him from the packing crate. One thing that helped here was reading in Dance Magazine’s “Why I Dance” column about David Dorfman, the choreographer who is chairman of Connecticut College’s dance department. His mother had MS. “I danced, at times frantically, to encourage her to take a step,” Dorfman wrote. “Once after seeing me dance, she walked a few relatively pain-free paces before her body remembered she couldn’t.”

  My failure was overcome in the fifth class. We were all seated, listening to some jazzy Tommy Dorsey while playing the pass-the-gesture game. The leadership had been passed to a gentleman who started gently punching the air, first with his right fist, then with his left.

  Suddenly, the wiry and roiling Tony G., seated next to the air-puncher, jumped up and started dancing all alone in the circle. There were a few titters from the group—We’re supposed to be in our chairs now, you could hear people thinking—when Tony G. abruptly turned toward me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the circle. We did about twenty seconds of shaking and shimmying at each other, at which point he grabbed my hands and lifted them up in the air as we both proceeded to twirl 360 degrees, as if jitterbugging.

  There’s a moment in any new dance endeavor when you finally let go. At first you’re looking for the big, dry stones in the riverbed that will take your body weight and allow you to skitter to the other side; once you know where the rocks are, and are returning back to the riverbank, you can stop worrying about how icy cold that water is.

  The second that Tony G. grabbed me and pulled me into the circle, I fully expected to feel the group’s eyes bore into me and cause me to stumble. Tony G.’s confidence and verve and good looks—did I mention that he looks like someone who’d play Tony Goldwyn’s father?—dissolved all that. He was driving the car, and it was a beauty.

  At one point, Tony G. and I, hands held, started very gently rocking back and forth, and I could see relaxation pass over him like clouds on a TV weather map. Our mutual shoulders were lowered.

  No wonder the Shakers had cribs in which to rock the elderly.

  * * *

  The other theme that emerged was the cultural dissonance to be found at the intersection of the earthy, occasionally wiseacre old-timers and the airy-fairy 5Rhythms folks.

  One of the seniors, for instance, was a bit of a lech. One afternoon when Karen instructed us to “Let everything loose,” the lech started unbuckling his belt. “Noooooo!” the group chorused in a slightly tired way that suggested they’d seen this action many a time.

  At the end of another class, one of the seniors in the group asked a 5Rhythms guest—a jolly, zaftig, forty-something dance instructor from London interested in dance therapy—“Were we what you thought we were going to be?”

  The guest smiled brightly and said, “You far exceeded it.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you’re livelier, more passionate, more interesting, warmer, funnier, kinder . . .”

  One of the men interrupted her with “. . . Dirtier?”

  The guest blinked her eyes and said, “Well, I don’t know about that.” Tight smile. Giggles from onlookers.

  Indeed, the seniors brought a lot of earthy realism to the table. In the first class held after New Year’s of 2015, an instructor named Jason Goodman starting waxing cosmic about man’s steadfastness in the face of time. He told the group, “Think of all the New Year’s that you guys have lived through. [Bennett], you’re just as handsome and smart and witty as you always were.”

  “Well,” Bennett pointed out, “I changed my underwear.”

  Another time, Peter, the 5Rhythms instructor who’d started the Friday afternoon dancing at the senior center four years prior, instructed us, “Focus on your breath.” Our movements slowed slightly as we all tried to home in on the passage of air in our lungs, imagining the fern-like tendrils of oxygen curling and uncurling in our inner sanctums. Meanwhile, Bennett counseled us, “If you’re not breathing, lie down on the floor.”

  But my favorite interaction at the intersection of the two cultures occurred when Karen asked Leonard one day if he wanted to join in the pass-the-gesture game. Leonard was a tall, gaunt, Abraham Lincoln–ish man who, in the ten classes I’d seen him in, had not only never danced, but had spent most of the time staring sullenly at the floor. As with the other gentleman in the class who rarely participated, you got the sense that Leonard had been brought there at the insistence of an opti
mistic family member or doctor in the hope that social interaction might induce some alteration to his perma-funk. That Leonard’s resting face was that of a scowl only underlined his remove from the outer world—while all the senior dancers seemed to be receiving radio waves from a station that the rest of humanity couldn’t, Leonard also received these radio waves, but they only made him angry.

  So, called upon by Karen, Leonard outstretched his arms in front of him and proceeded to swirl them in a gentle, octopoidal tangle that was so graceful and lovely and unexpected that several of us gasped.

  After we’d watched this gorgeous swirl for a bit, Karen quietly urged him, “[Leonard], when you’re ready, pass it along.”

  Leonard swiveled his head toward Karen and, while still smoothly gliding his arms in front of him and maintaining his gaze at her, slowly extended the middle finger of his right hand.

  The woman sitting next to me let out a little moan; a few others tittered nervously. But Leonard kept his finger extended until he’d finished his contribution.

  * * *

  About five months into my visits, one of the men greeted me one day by arching his eyebrows and saying, “You weren’t here last week!”

  “You’re right,” I told him. “I promise I wasn’t dancing with another senior center.”

  “Faithful is good, faithful is good.”

  The more I danced with the group, the more the emotional stakes were raised—because the more I was witness to dementia’s inexorable march. One afternoon eight months in, we were all sitting at the conference table talking about snack foods. Bennett mentioned his mother, Florence. Sandy said, “Florence is your wife!”

  “But also my mother.”

  “Two Florences? That seems like an awful lot.”

  “My mother was also Florence.”

  “No, if they were both named Florence, we would have heard about this by now.”

  Bennett looked down at the table, slightly embarrassed.

  “You’re right. My mother was Theresa.”