I nearly walked out of my first ballet class in twenty years.
I was pressed against the studio wall watching a combination fall apart in my body while everyone else picked it up on the second count. The class was billed as Balletcore and restricted to 21 and over, which in practice meant I was old enough to be most of my classmates’ aunt. My arches have flattened since I last performed as a teenager. I wear a full shoe size larger than I did at 17, which is the year I quit, because classical technique and teenage rebellion do not mix.
What kept me on the floor was something the teacher mentioned in passing. Angela Trimbur, a dancer and choreographer, said that part of her intent in building difficult phrases is to hold off dementia.
That is my reason too. Dementia runs on my father’s side. I watched my paternal grandfather decline, and knowing I carry that predisposition brings a low hum of dread about being helpless later. Class is the one place where the same fact feels like something I can push against instead of wait for.
What choreography asks that a treadmill does not
Dementia is a group of chronic neurological conditions rather than a single disease, and Alzheimer’s is the most common cause. Memory goes. So do language, problem solving, and coordination. Plenty of people take up crossword puzzles as a hedge. I bought leotards.
Ballet appealed to me because it demands three things at once: copying, remembering, and inventing. Trimbur described the load in more detail when I asked her about it later. A dancer learning new choreography has to hold a sequence in mind, track the music, coordinate limbs, recover from mistakes without stopping, and stay aware of the other bodies in the room. “It’s a perfect puzzle for keeping the mind fresh,” she said.
Her broader point was that exercise on its own is not the interesting variable. The people who age well, in her experience, are the ones still learning something. Choreography is not repetition in the fitness sense. Each week you are drawing a new map.
Lisa Mosconi, who directs the Women’s Brain Initiative and Alzheimer’s Prevention Program at Weill Cornell Medicine, puts the same idea in neuroscience terms. “Novel movement is not simply exercise,” she told me. “It’s exercise plus learning.” That pairing appears to be unusually good at protecting the aging brain.
Trimbur thinks most adults get through the day on a small vocabulary of movement, and that dance breaks the habit. It makes you cross your body in an unfamiliar direction, change course without warning, imitate a tree in wind, take on a character, respond to a rhythm you would never have chosen.
Structure you can lean on, novelty you cannot
At 17, the rigidity of ballet was the problem. Now, with school-aged children and parents who are aging, being coached through a fixed sequence is the closest thing to relief I get in a week.
Catalina Jackson-Urueña, who directs the Dancing Through Parkinson’s program at Invertigo Dance Theatre in Los Angeles, points out that ballet is among the most codified forms in dance. Set positions, set alignment, very little ambiguity. Her family has a history of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, which shapes how she dances and what she does for a living. She knows a class will open with pliés and move to tendus, steps she has done her whole life. “There’s comfort there, but it’s also challenging,” she said. The architecture of a class, barre work, then stretching, then center sequences, then jumps, warms the body while giving the mind enough variety to stay awake.
She also makes herself take dancehall and house, precisely because they are not her defaults. The unfamiliar genre is doing cognitive work that her fluent one cannot.
What the evidence looks like so far
David Leventhal helped found Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dance for PD program and now directs it. He sees the same mechanism at work in professionals and in people with a neurodegenerative diagnosis. Dance is “first and foremost a mindful activity,” he said, and among the better ways to knit sensory awareness together with physical execution. New experience forces the brain to adapt, and that adaptation, neuroplasticity, can slow how fast symptoms progress.
A meta-analysis pooling ten studies and close to 1,000 participants found that dance therapy improved global cognitive function, with gains in executive function and language and reductions in depression and other neuropsychiatric symptoms. Leventhal is most interested in the psychosocial half of that finding. Lower depression shows up as something simple and measurable: people want to come back next week.
Mosconi makes a similar point about adherence. Dance taxes memory, attention, executive function, motor coordination, and social cognition at the same time, and it is usually fun, which matters more than people assume. The best intervention for your brain tends to be the one you will still be doing in ten years.
Asked when women should start, Mosconi said now. Her research points to the menopause transition as a window when brain health is especially worth defending, and when women are often ready to change habits anyway. Women also tend to outlive men by five years or more, which means more years of brain to look after.
The room matters as much as the steps
Social contact is one of the better established protections against cognitive decline, and Rachel McCaulsky, who directs Ailey Arts in Education and Community Programs, argues that no other form of exercise delivers it the way group dance does. She brought me to observe an AileyDance for Active Aging class in Midtown Manhattan, where New Yorkers over 50 were learning the third section of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. What she heard when the class launched was not feedback about technique. It was “I feel welcomed here.”
The eight-week workshop fills largely by word of mouth, and demand has outpaced the supply of teaching artists. During a recent residency in Los Angeles, a small contingent of regulars started turning up at senior centers for sessions they had not been invited to. Teaching artists work in pairs, mirror the participants, and coax in anyone hovering at the edge. Everyone in the room is called a dancer. Name tags help. Both practices would improve every dance class I have ever taken.
Brenda Aiken, 71, a retired physician, told me the workshops at Ailey Extension gave her back a sense of purpose. Bodies change, slow down, and sometimes need parts replaced, she said, and the class reminds her that movement is still available to her. “Joy is still accessible, and expression has no age limit.” It has also taught her to stop apologizing for what she calls her two left feet.
Some participants come with care partners. There are adaptations for anyone with balance or mobility limits. I sat through a seated warmup built around balance, strength, and endurance and stood up feeling an inch taller. One dancer said she now takes subway stairs without touching the railing.
Dance is not the whole prescription
Ryan Glatt, a brain health coach at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, was politely unwilling to let me treat ballet as a complete plan. Brains, like diets, do better on variety than on any single item. Dance is one good component. He wants to know what else is in the week: resistance work, other neuromotor training like yoga or table tennis, something aerobic.
So I added a small-group weightlifting class alongside the contemporary classes. I also went looking for rooms where being out of practice is the premise. Rusty Ballet, run by the company Dance Again, draws people in their 20s through their 70s to studio and remote classes. Founder Jess Grippo named it that way on purpose. Grand pliés feel different to me after two childbirths, and I count my breathing more carefully than I used to, but the dancewear is looser and the mood is better than anything I remember from my training years. Our instructor, Arimee Gambill, tells us to let the rond de jambes rip.
Years of early training turned out not to buy me an intermediate spot in New York, which stung and then stopped mattering. I am inspired instead by the restaging of Pina Bausch choreography by her original dancers 50 years on, and by the Timeless Torches, the New York Liberty’s dance squad, whose members range from 40 to 89.
McCaulsky describes group dance as much as a music experience as a movement one, a matter of recalling and repeating a phrase and then laying your own reading over it. That is roughly where I have landed. Getting every step right is not the point. Building the pathway is, and so is the hour of feeling unembarrassed while visibly bad at something.
