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Bilqis Hijjas introduces a manifesto advocating authenticity, adaptability, and innovation for aging Malaysian dancers.
This is the final part of a series highlighting the continuing contributions and exciting new pathways of the pioneers in Malaysian contemporary dance. This series is completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely those of the writer.
When people ask me why I no longer dance, I either tell them that I am too old, or too fat – sometimes both. No one has ever disputed this. Being old and fat are apparently unassailable reasons for not dancing. While other barriers in dance are crumbling – classical ballet outfits now come in non-White skin tones, for example, and people with disabilities are increasingly visible on professional dance stages – the prejudice against the older body, especially, endures. Or does it?
Western conventions for ageing dancers
In the West, many professional dancers retire around the age of 40, when strength and flexibility begin to diminish, and injuries build up. In classical ballet companies, older dancers usually step back to become ballet masters or mistresses, sometimes turning to choreography. Occasionally, they take to the boards to play the sedately promenading kings and queens required in Swan Lake or Sleep g Beauty; quite literally, they became elder statesmen.
There are always outliers, of course. Margot Fonteyn, of the UK’s Royal Ballet, danced until she was almost 60. The acclaimed Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso danced into her 70s. Quite possibly this was not a good idea for either of them. Since many of the major roles for women in classical ballet are for specifically young women (Aurora in Sleeping Beauty is 16, for instance, and Giselle is a peasant ingenue who has basically never left her village) it is difficult to imagine dancers above the age of 50 in these roles without thinking of mutton dressed as lamb, as my grandmother would have said.
Performers themselves perpetuate prejudice
In 2022, the Norwegian dance scholars Hilde Rustad and Gunn Helene Engelsrud published an article in which they argue that although dance has been proven to be a beneficial practice for older people, improving memory, coordination, balance and resilience, and that community-level dance companies for older people are mushrooming across the globe, there is still an entrenched stigma in the dance world and amongst dance audiences against seeing an aging professional dance body on stage. Their article is titled, appropriately enough, “Everybody Can Dance—Except Aging Professional Dancers!”
This stigma, Rustad and Engelsrud argue, stems from Western concert dance’s firmly-rooted aesthetic preference for young and vital bodies on stage. The stigma is perpetuated and passed down through training, even by teachers who should know better. “Even those of us who study and participate in intergenerational dance,” they write, “have been trained to make aesthetic judgements based on technical virtuosity, which privileges and norms the abilities of youthful bodies rather than the engagement and the experience of aged bodies.”
In her observations of older women participating in community dance companies, Justine Coupland observes how the participants have internalised the idea that their ageing bodies are ‘unwatchable’. Teachers would cover the mirrors during classes, saying “I’m sure we don’t want those open”, and participants would ask photographers, “No wrinkles, please!” One participant commented, “Mixed feelings about the covered mirror. Part of me was glad not to have the pressure of seeing my reflection. But part of me felt it was a shame to assume that none of us would be comfortable with our reflections.” So even though some of the participants realised that their lack of desire to see their own bodies and to offer up their bodies to be seen was socially regressive, Coupland writes that “The teacher and the class seemed to be conspiring in recycling an ideology of ‘unwatchability’.”
Coupland suggests that dancers can fight against this stigma and battle to invent new cultural meanings of old age. But she acknowledges that this is a difficult, tiring and lonesome path. Coupland quotes Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a scholar of ageism, who issued a call to arms in her book Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (1997) but admits, “We have to recognise that the human social sciences have been relatively inactive in critiquing prejudicial orientations to old age,” and that such a fight “requires long-term critical engagement.”
Is the situation changing? And why now?
The situation in the West might be slowly changing, perhaps due more to critical mass than critical engagement. As the enormous post-war baby boomer generation ages, more people are living longer and in healthier bodies than ever before. Some of this huge demographic are also dancers, including the generation of American postmodern and improvisational dancers who made waves in the 1960s and 70s, and who are now in their 80s. Because postmodern dance rejected physical virtuosity, and elevated everyday pedestrian movement over technical dance movement, it stands to reason that postmodern dancers might continue to work into old age.
The change seems to be creeping across the Western world. In 2016, an article in The Guardian stated, “Five years ago France had barely half a dozen professional dancers over 60; now they’re increasingly common.” The article features a professional dancer named Carolyn Carlson, then aged 72, and notes:
These performers don’t believe in a best-before date. They dismiss the notion of dance as the preserve of youthful, technically impressive virtuosos. This is a “very western” view, according to Carlson, who is influenced by Buddhism and eastern spirituality and cites the “national treasures” of live performance in Japan and South Korea.
An example from Asia
Nanako Nakajima, one of the foremost scholars of dance and ageing in Asia, might agree. Her book The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (published by Routledge in 2017, and edited with Gabrielle Brandstetter) contrasts the status of aging professional dancers in the Euro-American zone with those in Japan.
Nakajima’s foremost example from Japan is the butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno, who first became world famous when dancing in his 70s. Ohno continued to make public appearances until the age of 100. Nakajima compares Ohno and other butoh dancers with other traditional Japanese performance forms, in which performers take decades to build the cultural understanding and the gravitas required for major roles.
Butoh – a Japanese contemporary dance form which plumbs the darkness of the human soul, and is fascinated with decrepitude and death – is perhaps exceptionally friendly to old dancers. Aging was something of a shtick for Ohno, in which he could do no wrong. When he started to forget his choreography, critics assumed that he was accessing a deeper bodily awareness, beyond movements and technique. On Nakajima’s last visit, Ohno was bedridden and unable to speak. Ohno’s son informed her that his father’s heart beat differently when he heard his dance music. Nakajima interpreted this to mean that Ohno was dancing even on his death bed.
Nakajima suggests that some of the recent interest in aging is due to the pandemic, which forced all dancers to transition to online spaces, dancing not just in theatres and museums, but in private and virtual spaces. At a 2021 lecture to the symposium “Time Shifts – Age(ing) and Society” in Germany, Nakajima noted that during the pandemic, “The art of dance goes beyond the boundary of the theatrical space of modern construction. When dance leaves beyond the boundary of theater art, dancers can also keep dancing beyond the cultural boundary of age.”
The Malaysian context for dance and ageing
It is tempting to think that we have a crossed a new frontier in erasing barriers to dance. But what is the actual situation now for ageing dancers in Malaysia? How much of this conversation about reclaiming the stage for aging bodies is exclusively a concern for the youth-loving West? And much of the Western stereotype of “Eastern” people as perpetually spiritual and age-respecting holds true?
If Nakajima’s example of butoh dancers in Japan can be taken as a guide, in Malaysia perhaps we follow the Japanese example: exalting our aging dancers as exquisite models of subtlety and embodied wisdom. Certainly, there does exist a model of dancing into old age in many strands of traditional dance practice in Malaysia: in the classical Malay forms of Mak Yong and Main Puteri, for example, and also in Indian classical dance, in which the expressive abhinaya is assumed to mature with older dancers.
The actual situation on the ground is more complicated, because the Malaysian contemporary dance landscape is so diverse, even more varied than our complicated tapestry of ethnicities might suggest. There is the question of training, which is where dancers largely acquire the aesthetic sensibility that guides them through their working lives. As Joseph Gonzales writes in Dancing the Malaysian,
“[Of] the new generation of Malaysian choreographers… Vincent Tan Lian Ho, Lena Ang, Aida Redza, Choo Tee Kuang, Loke Soh Kim, Wong Kit Yaw, Suhaimi Magi, Anthony Meh, Mew Chang Tsing, Aman Yap and myself were all inspired… by the environment of the 1980s, going overseas to seek greater experience and knowledge; we all have a sound foundation in one or more of Malaysia’s traditional performing arts.”
And, the same book informs us, the preceding generation of contemporary dancers spearheaded by Ramli Ibrahim, Marion D’Cruz, Wong Fook Choon and Steven Koh was similar, with dancers seeking training and employment overseas, while coming from (or later turning to) a traditional dance form rooted in Malaysia.
Add to this Malaysia’s status as a postcolonial country. Consider also the ubiquity of the Internet, bringing its Coca-colonisation into our daily lives. Compound this with the continued popularity of Western classical ballet as the standard dance training for the urban middle class in Malaysia, as well as the dominance of Western contemporary dance technique, which is taught in all the major university dance departments in Malaysia. Ultimately, it is impossible to suggest that Malaysia’s now aging dance pioneers might have magically avoided the Western stigma against aging bodies in dance.
Malaysia’s ageing dancers today
In the short series of articles I have written as an Arts Equator Fellow this year, I have made of a rough survey of how certain individuals within the current generation of Malaysian contemporary dance leaders are confronting ageing. There are those who no longer dance, or not much, occasionally giving us brief, tantalising, hints of dance, but generally keep their cards close to their chests: namely Marion D’Cruz, Amy Len, Joseph Gonzales. There are those who still dance, and somehow manage to put younger dancers to shame – I’m thinking of Loke Soh Kim, at the age of 56, performing in Raymond Liew’s Kampung Baru – but who generally think of themselves as choreographers. There are those who wish to still appear vigorous and young while dancing the roles that they performed in their youth, but are struggling with illness and changing bodies, like Aman Yap, in his solo performance last year.
There are fewer examples of those who dance – really dance, extensively, persuasively, honestly, enjoyably – while embracing their ageing body. But there are also a host of reasons why dancers might choose to stop dancing; the stigma against ageing professional dancers on stage is only one. Many dancers might progress into the roles traditionally reserved for older dance practitioners – teacher, choreographer, or artistic director – and find more satisfaction and fulfilment there. Some might feel too frustrated with the physical limitations of their body, or be plagued by injury, and might not enjoy movement. Some no longer have the time, or have switched to different physical practices (I know two local dancers of a certain age who have, quite improbably, taken up serious mountain climbing). Others might consciously prefer to make way for younger dancers.
And there are certain social pressures beyond just the stigma against seeing older bodies on stage. In Malaysia’s rather hierarchically-minded society, it might be difficult for older dancers to take direction from younger choreographers. Within the Malay population, it is quite common for women to stop dancing in public once they marry, which may coincide with them choosing to cover their hair with tudung. And some states, have made it difficult, if not illegal, for certain kinds of performance. Any non-Islamic features of Mak Yong are banned in Kelantan, for example, and women on stages for mixed gender audiences are now discouraged in Terengganu. This might convince ageing performers that it’s just not worth the trouble.
A manifesto for older Malaysian dancers
But for anyone who may have stopped dancing because they felt audiences would no longer tolerate seeing an ageing body on stage (or an overweight one, for that matter), I propose that we now gird our loins for cultural combat. Let us build a culture in which older bodies are welcomed to honestly and convincingly tell stories onstage with dance!
If I wrote a manifesto for older Malaysian dancers, I would propose that we neither pretend that we are young, nor obsess about hiding the things our bodies can no longer do. We must not insist on punishing or disciplining the ageing body into submission, in order to dance a little longer. We should – as indeed we should do at any age! – take careful stock of the body, how it changes from day to day, what it can, should and wants to do, and what these things mean. This may require the corpus of dance to change and adapt. If existing works of dance offer only the roles of virgin sylphs and boyish princes, then new works must be made. And who better to make them than ageing contemporary dance choreographers themselves?
I am reminded of watching Mikhail Baryshnikov performing Heartbeat:mb in Boston in 1998. He knew that the 1600 seats of the Shubert Theatre were filled with audience members eager to see the turns, leaps and technical fireworks of his youth that had made him famous. But at the age of 50, he was free to be himself, to improvise to the very deepest part of himself: the rhythm of his beating heart, which was amplified live into the theatre. We watched him noodling about (as dance critic Joan Acocella once called it), jigging, experimenting, and playing. All of it with a sense of humour, showing us the physical intelligence and the curious mind that had driven his virtuosic body: still intelligent, still curious.
A sense of humour, I think, is vital. Our sense of self may get more brittle as we age, and we become less able to laugh at ourselves, and to accept others laughing at us. Certainly, as older dancers, we do not want to make fools of ourselves, but we also do not want to be fetishized or patronized – “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that so-and-so is still dancing?” We want to normalize it. In my manifesto, I dream of a world in which the media no longer clucks over the age of a dancer on stage, because it has become totally normal to see dancers in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
Similarly, any manifesto for older dancers should not be about mysticizing or romanticizing the experience of aging. I believe it should not perpetuate belief in some kind of essentialist connection between old people and the realm beyond. The Japanese-American butoh dancer Eiko leant heavily on this trope, telling dance critic Wendy Perron, “Because their bodies are not young, older performers carry something that is almost between this realm and the next, that itself is artistic and transcending.” Personally, I reject this. If we are living, we are also dying. Some of us are statistically closer in time to death than others, but from a wider perspective that difference is negligible. It is the hubris of the young to imagine that they are not also close to death, and it is reductive to expect that older people have some kind of special hotline to the Other Side.
Finally, my manifesto would call on us not to pigeonhole older dancers into only making dance about ageing. Older dancers may comment on the same social issues, as any other dancer of any age. Being a particular age may give you a special insight into the preoccupations of that age group, but older people should not be reduced to what society labels as ‘old person things.’ We should be able to turn the conversation to other things, if we choose.
For ageing dance leaders who are also teachers, this means walking a difficult tightrope. On one hand, you must uphold and transmit to your students a certain standard of technical ability and physical complexity. Simultaneously, you need to acknowledge and communicate that not all bodies can be expected to perform the same technicalities, and that technique is really only one of many elements that makes an interesting dance and a watchable dancer. Not an easy challenge. But, as Malaysians – who are accustomed to the unspoken and informal, the messy but workable solutions, the practice of close-one-eye, the circuitous highways – perhaps we have a special cultural ability to walk this tightrope.
The manifesto, in practice
In practice, this need not look so very radical or strange. I recently attended a show in which an older body dances, and dances well, but still, you might say, obeying the laws of physics: Low Ming Yam in Double Punctum, produced by Pentas Projects, and performed in December 2024 at Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre.
This show presents an interesting opportunity to make comparisons. Theatre maker Loh Kok Man first directed Double Punctum 10 years ago, and the show was performed again last month by the original dancers: Low Ming Yam, now aged 62, and JS Wong, aged 46. You can compare their performances across the two editions, 2014 and 2024, as well as comparing the current capacities of a man in his 40s with a man in his 60s (although that they have rather different body types and strengths).
Ming Yam keeps in shape by doing yoga, and perhaps the yoga has done more than just maintain flexibility and strength; it has also taught him how to respect his changing body, and to navigate its transformation with grace. He also teaches a contemporary dance class for older dancers once a week at Kwang Tung Dance Company. This has probably given him greater insight into the limitations and challenges, and also the opportunities, of the older dancing body.
From 2014 to 2025, the most dramatic change in Double Punctum is the costumes. Gone are the crumpled skin-toned pants and bare upper bodies of the first edition. The current version has new outfits by Quito Neng: black velvet sleeveless tops streaked with white, like snow flying across midnight darkness, with long black velvet pants for Ming Yam and short hotpants for JS. JS wears socks, Ming Yam is barefoot. The contrast in their outfits does make JS’s body seem more exposed and Ming Yam’s body seem more obscured (and thus less watchable), but it also draws attention to the sculptural quality of Ming Yam’s arms and the movements of his feet, which is important to the choreography he chooses.
The two dancers rarely dance in synchrony. When they dance at the same time, they often engage in complementary movements that speak to, but do not copy, each other. In a repeated image, JS stands on a stool and stretches one leg in a high extension, while Ming Yam inverts into a strong vertical forearm stand.
The sound design by Ng Chor Guan features extensive text from German avant-garde playwright Peter Handke’s work “Self-Accusation” from 1968. With voice recorded in Ghafir Akbar’s impeccable diction, this text seems more like self-actualization than self-accusation. It expresses the narrator’s emerging awareness of his control over his body: “I moved! I was able to move. I defied the force of gravity. I ran! I learned to bring my body under my control… I became fit for something.”
It is impossible to view the two dancing bodies without being influenced by the text’s very Nietzschean (and very male) will to power. JS’s movement seems to mirror the text; he often uses his hands to direct the movement of his limbs, by lifting a leg by the back of the knee, or turning his head. Like the text, his movement is often sharp, staccato and precise. Ming Yam’s movement is more organic and regular, working from the core rather than the extremities: moving versus making something move.
Neither denying nor fetishizing ageing
The dancers and the director do not duck the issue of the aging body. As Kok Man mentions in the introductory video, “As a director, my age does not affect the performance. But it does for the dancers.” Sometimes this lends itself to moments of humour. As the text intones, “I played”, JS seems engaged in full-body combat, while Ming Yam just stands there and wiggles his fingers.
Later in the show, there is a solo for Ming Yam, which is largely new in this edition. In a vast sheet of white paper, JS has torn out a large circle. Ming Yam stands in the circle within an ultraviolet wash, like a miraculous figure levitating upon a black hole in the ice sheet. Mercifully the spoken text disappears, giving way to a cold static drone. In this solo, Ming Yam moves mostly his upper body, but his feet shift microscopically, slowly nudging him around the stage, as JS carefully slides the paper so that the hole follows him. The solo makes the most of Ming Yam’s expansive wingspan. Straight arms carve the air like the hands of a clock, then faster, with more flow, until his two arms are circling with clasped hands pressed together, stopping with palms pressed hard to the mouth. While it starts as sturdy “two-feet-on-the-floor dancing” (which, as dancer and critic Wendy Perron has noted, is more comfortable for older dancers), Ming Yam gains momentum until he engages the whole body, building to a full fan kick.
Not once does it feel that Ming Yam is forcing his body to do something it doesn’t want to do. While he is careful to maintain his alignment, there is the sense that he is allowing the body to dance, rather than making it dance. In contrast, JS’s solo is sometimes difficult to watch. The Handke text returns, overwhelmingly controlling as it documents how the Self rebels against convention. JS scoots across the white paper as if it is the floor for a competitive gymnastics routine, displaying his virtuosity, showing us the primacy of his control over the body. At the end, the text quiets. JS stops in the far corner and slowly turns away. At the last moment, he uses his hand to turn his face to the darkness, and the effect is quietly devastating.
Double Punctum is not a show about aging. As far as I can tell, the show is about creating strong visual imagery, and how that imagery resonates differently with different people. The age of the performers is neither entirely integral nor totally incidental to the work – it is somewhere in between. The physical capacity and artistic abilities of the dancers are treated as material, as they are with dancers of any age. The marketing acknowledges Ming Yam’s age, but he himself does not dwell on it. In a video promoting the show, he says, “I enjoy dance. I like to move” (note the present tense) and then goes on to talk about Kok Man’s direction, and how much he likes to travel.
Loophole only for the able-bodied?
A skeptic of my manifesto for ageing dancers—and of this example of it in practice—might observe that Ming Yam is in remarkably good physical shape; he’s hardly the average older person. I would argue that no former professional dancer is an average older person. They all have some degree of sensitivity towards their own bodies, honed over decades of practice, that other people will not share, except perhaps former professional athletes and the like. And it is the performance of this sensitivity that I hope to see on stage.
But I take the point that this new culture of ageing dancers is often about watching only the abled-bodied old. As Daniel Immerwahr points out in his recent New Yorker article, the popular series The Golden Girls made older characters visible on TV, but only if the characters were essentially healthy and fully functioning – sometimes even when the actresses themselves were not. When one of the cast started suffering from dementia and forgot her lines, other cast members made fun of her. Susan Jacoby, the show’s creator, called it “a selective form of ageism: they exalt the healthy and scorn the rest.”
First steps, again
There are always more barriers to hurdle. But now perhaps it is time to go back into the studio, and consciously begin again. It starts with the little things. Don’t hide the wrinkles. Don’t cover the mirror. I resolve to start with my own small steps. When someone asks me why I no longer dance, I will not tell them I am too fat or too old.
And I leave you with this video of my father, aged 88, dancing on New Year’s Eve. He was never a professional dancer, but he is dancing here because he still enjoys it. So – shall we dance?
This is the sixth and final part of a series highlighting the continuing contributions and exciting new pathways of the pioneers in Malaysian contemporary dance. The series considers issues of succession, creativity and novelty, as well as practices of archiving, documentation and restaging. This series was completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely those of the writer. Read the previous installment here.
Bilqis Hijjas is the founding editor of Critics Republic. Formerly a producer and organizer in contemporary dance, she believes the main purpose of criticism is to enhance the audience’s appreciation of art.