Durban - The world’s most rigorous dance form is growing in leaps and bounds among older women in South Africa.
Dance teachers say mothers and grandmothers are donning their tights and dance shoes and taking up classical or contemporary adult ballet classes.
While some schools offer joint classes for moms and their little ones, it is not uncommon for women in their thirties, forties and even fifties to take up ballet and outleap their younger counterparts.
Glenwood teacher Des van der Spuy, who owns Dance Direction International, says some of her pupils only stopped taking classes in their fifties.
Van der Spuy has been teaching for the past 43 years and says she has danced since the age of 5.
She says her pupils were mainly women who danced when they were young, then stopped for a long time and had children until they realised that their passion for ballet still needed to be nurtured.
“They are coming back and actually enjoying the benefits of ballet again. We also do allow their little kids to join in because we feel that they need to be nurtured from young to be able to enjoy and appreciate the arts. The moms have their own barre and the kids have their little barre and they just copy what their moms do and love it,” said Van der Spuy.
She said her adult pupils were an assortment of ages.
Van der Spuy said: “Ballet benefits you in thousands of different ways; and apart from training, movement, cardiovascular, strength and stretching, it also balances your body because you are using your muscles correctly, on either side of your body.”
She encouraged those who dreamt of doing ballet but felt they didn’t look like dancers to give it a try because body shape and size didn’t matter unless you wanted to be a professional dancer.
“You are not there to be judged, you are there to enjoy it. You enjoy the movement, the whole aspect of being able to exercise, to feel the music and flow with it. Everyone works to their own capability, there’s no judgement at all,” she said,
Van der Spuy said every year Dance Direction International held a show in which all the students participated and they absolutely loved it.
Apart from ballet she also teaches modern dancing, hip hop and acrobatics.
“Ballet stimulates co-ordination and everyone can be taught to dance. The biggest barrier is the person’s own insecurity and not believing in themselves. They’ve always been told they have two left feet and they believe it,” said Van der Spuy.
Dance teacher Michele Pope believes there isn’t a resurgence of interest in adult ballet, because it has always been popular. She said in most cases the women had danced when they were young, and now that they had more time or needed to de-stress, they were turning to activities like adult ballet.
The Michele Pope Studio of Dance has been in existence for 31 years and offers classical ballet classes to adults in Pinetown and Hillcrest.
Pope said the benefits of ballet far outweighed any other activity like going to the gym, which was often a nerve-racking experience for moms.
“They’ve had babies, they feel self-conscious and dance (class) is generally a small group, so you don’t have a lot of people looking at you. When you are dancing you are so focused on yourself you don’t have time to look around. You are basically trying to balance on one leg and trying to do an extension of a leg, so your focus is very centralised.”
Pope said often women had dreamt of doing ballet when they were children but never had the opportunity until they were adults.
She said ballet improved the core 10 times more than Pilates and co-ordination, balance and posture were also improved.
She said older women were not put on pointe, a part of ballet where the body is balanced on the extreme tip of the toes, because it wasn't good for their bone density.
Pope said in South Africa ‒ unlike other countries ‒ ballet was not popular among adult men because of the stigma attached to it.
Pope started ballet and several other dance styles when she was 5 and fell in love with it immediately.
She dreamt of becoming a professional dancer, but when she was ready to do so, her dance teacher was in an accident and asked her to run her studio for six months.
“I fell in love with dancing and never looked back,” said Pope.
She believes ballet not only strengthens the body and improves bone density, but also teaches dancers life skills like perseverance.
The Independent on Saturday