Dancers Always Die Twice

“A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.” — Martha Graham

As a dancer deep into middle age, I feel this pain keenly. My gray hair whispers my age and my body, thicker in the middle than before, echolocates the world with clicks and pops, navigating space with a little less ease as each decade passes. I know there will be a point when I will no longer be able to perform — and this day have may already happened.

I last performed in front of an audience in 2014, with my forever dancing friends. Newly back in Austin, I gathered my old dance company back together to rehearse and perform one of my favorite humorous dance theatre pieces — Danceopoly. It’s “the game of a dancer’s life” and although the underlying message of unrelenting artist poverty and toiling in obscurity is dark, the piece is played for laughs like a cheesy game show. Of course the game is rigged and each throw of the enormous fuzzy dice is manipulated to ensure that the choreographer loses all of their money producing a concert. We even have “hoops” for the choreographer to jump through while trying to secure extra funding. No really…it’s actually funny.