Stop Whining

A New Year's resolution

Photo from Visceral Encore, the performance project for dancers over 35 that I participated in earlier this year. The music for this particular section? “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Photo courtesy KT Miller/Visceral Dance.

Do you know Ms. Kim Hale? Ms. Kim Hale — the honorific is right there in her handle — is a professional dancer who, at 56, has thrown over a seemingly fine and happy career teaching in Los Angeles to move to New York and pursue a long-deferred dream of landing a gig in a Broadway show. She has 654,000 followers on Instagram, where I found her, and more than 800,000 on TikTok, where I do not go but where I assume her content is similar: a prolific stream of videos shot in her classes at Steps, on the streets of Times Square, at voice lessons, taping an acting reel. Clad in sleek unitards or sensible turtlenecks, with a cropped coif of silver hair, she preaches the gospel of positive aging to her followers with a 1,000-watt smile and second-balcony-level energy. And her quest is bearing fruit. She’s been featured on Good Morning America and in People, and she did get to dance on Broadway earlier this year, albeit only for one night, as a special guest in the chorus of Chicago.

I am fascinated by her. She is earnest and direct and clear about her goals, a living, breathing, jazz hands avatar of the motto “Dreams have no deadlines.” Her journey runs oddly parallel to mine (skin cancer was a catalyzing factor in her life change). I harbor all sorts of dirty secret fantasies about chucking it all to dance again. We are the same age. She should be an aspirational model. I want her to get everything she wants. And yet.

Earlier this winter the American Dance Festival, the home of American modern dance, which I attended in 1990, when I was 22, announced a weekend-long January workshop open to all alums. Come to New York and dance with us, urged the messaging, which regularly materialized on social media. Reconnect with your ADF experience! I was so intrigued. Maybe, I thought, I could do this? It would be a stretch, sure. But I like to think I’m at peace with being the oldest dancer in the room, and I am overdue for a trip to NY. The summer I spent at ADF was the last time I seriously danced — and for a while now I've been trying to figure out why. Perhaps this held the key! It wasn’t even that expensive.

I went so far as to call them up, and talked with a very kind person who explained the scope and skill level of the program, and — when I said that I was 56 — looked into the registry and said something encouraging to the effect of, well the oldest person currently signed up is 35 but we are here to support everyone in their journey. I hung up the phone to think it over. “It would be great content,” I said to Paul — and in that moment I knew I was fucked.

If you poke around on Substack you’ll see that “dance” doesn’t exactly trend. There are some good fitness and body culture newsletters (I like

Anna Maltby

and

Mikala Jamison

), and a whole lot of terrible “wellness” content, but dance? Not so much. Of my own top five most read newsletters last year, only two even loosely fall into this category.

This is not surprising. Substack, as so many have opined, is a space for writers and writing about dance is often as effective as, famously, dancing about architecture. Today’s dancers don’t write, they’re all on video, over on Tiktok and Reels — and of course they are, video being a far more effective format for communicating about a prototypically wordless art form. Beyond the endless “day in the life” videos of professional dancers and flexibility porn of comp dance kids doing needle splits, there quite a lot of older dancers over there — not just Hale. It’s a nice little niche. But I am a writer. My interest in dance — beyond actually dancing — is to explore its practice through writing, the deployment of language to creative and hopefully transformative ends. What I don’t want to do is gin up experiences for the sake of creating content.

Why? Because, as this former BookTok influencer wrote the other day, comparing social media to a woodchipper: "It will take anything you feed it and grind it into tiny hunks. You can feed it wood and it will spray out wood chips. But you can also accidentally give it your fingers and your arm and your whole self and it won’t stop grinding. It will smash you to a pulp and keep turning.”

That I was able to even momentarily frame my pursuit of something so precious using the language of content creation was alarming. Something needed to change.

I didn’t go to the ADF workshop. It’s happening right now, and from the videos online it looks lovely and supportive and full of talented young people, and would in all likelihood have left me feeling sad even as I congratulated myself for being brave. I could have mined that sadness for insight, crafted another little essay about aging and acceptance, sought kudos from the internet for putting myself out there, but there’s enough sadness in the world and after two years of sharing intimate information about my health and body online I’m becoming less comfortable being vulnerable on main.

My New Year’s resolution is to “stop whining,” by which I mean, personally, stop simmering in past resentments and regrets and get on with things. What that means in the context of this newsletter is, I think, less interrogation of the self. The looming cataclysm of the second Trump administration and its billionaire idiocracy makes me want to armor up; my own failings and foibles are boring me right now.

What’s not boring me, though, is this question of how dancers age and how that is defined culturally, how it is celebrated and how it’s scorned. More broadly, I want to understand how people might thrive not just physically but creatively after a rupture like cancer, and how to write about this evolution honestly, without the toxic brightsiding that so often accompanies such efforts.

I started this post off with Ms. Kim Hale because I find her online persona so interesting. I want so very little to do with her whole showbiz vibe, but deep down I have to respect her earnest belief in herself. According to

Henry Oliver

’s Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life, which I recently picked up, an unshakeable, deeply uncool earnestness is a hallmark of the successful late bloomer. Hale has that in spades, as did Oliver’s subjects, a mixed bag that includes Katharine Graham, Malcom X, and Julia Child. Staying true to my own earnest belief that looking beyond the particulars of my own experience to answer this question is a valuable pursuit — that the lack of good writing about dance, movement, and aging in this forum should be an opportunity not a prohibition — is the 2025 challenge. No whining.

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For the curious, here are the top five best-performing Range of Motion pieces of 2024. One “some personal news” announcement, two nuggets of GenX indie-rock memoir, one meditation on dance and the fraught concept of useful work (frankly surprised to see this here), and one post that engages with dance but which I suspect was widely read more for the spicy take on divorce memoirs tacked onto the end. Enjoy!