Weight-Loss Creates A 65-Year-Old Ballet Student

Having lost 4 stones in weight and become very fit since retirement, I feel keen to encourage other people who might like to do the same. During my career in a demanding sedentary job, there was little time for anything but work, and I became very overweight for a long time. After retiring I was eager to develop new interests, and getting fit and losing weight were a high priority. I did a lot of walking, and when a Sports Centre opened in my local village about 4 years ago, it gave a great boost to my aim, providing lots of helpful activity classes. I was soon going 3 times a week or more to aerobics, Pilates and yoga. This worked off the calories, made me more supple, and prepared the way for when adult ballet classes would appear on the horizon.

I tried to eat sensibly, but was not getting on very well with weight loss on my own, so I had myself referred to a National Health dietician, under whose excellent guidance I lost 2 stones in 2 years. I was still not at the kind of weight I wanted, however, and certainly not the shape, and I was starting to put on a bit of weight again, so I followed up a leaflet put through my door and joined Slimming World.

This organisation meets once a week, weighs everyone and gives advice and support. Its system of diet is very sensible, not forcing people to be forever counting calories, but recommending an emphasis on certain types of foods over others. Some kinds of food can be eaten as much as one wants, but with others one must be more sparing, and some one should try to avoid altogether. As with the dietician's advice, one tries to cut down as much as possible on fats and sugars - and pastry and ready-made dishes are major culprits here. But Slimming World has good psychology and recognises that people need occasional treats; it is also non-judgmental.

Their system seems to work, and it is possible to lose at least a pound or half a pound a week with it. I have lost a further 2½ stone with them, making a total loss off my top weight of around 4 stone, and I have got a proper hourglass shape back. The community of slimmers who attend these classes are of great support, and are very nice people with whom one wants to keep in contact.

My greatest passion at the moment is learning to do ballet. I've loved watching it all my life, ever since I saw the Red Shoes film as a tiny child and then watched Doreen Wells and Anton Dolin dancing on stage in Coppelia. But my mother could not afford to send me to dancing classes. I also believed the commonly held myth that, if you haven't started ballet by the age of 7, it's too late. Then, a couple of years ago, I discovered that Norfolk Dance holds classes for adult beginners.

So, around the same time as I started attending Slimming World, I began to do ballet at the age of 63 and have now been doing it for 2 years. And it is the most generation-mixing activity I've been involved in, for we have students ranging from in their teens and twenties through middle age to my sort of antiquity. And we are all passionate about it, and get on well.

Ballet is difficult, but the problems are perhaps more mental than physical, as it is much more of a struggle than it used to be trying to remember sequences of steps. But one does eventually progress, and while I'm clearly not going to make a career out of dancing at my age, I can still get a lot of satisfaction and sense of achievement from it. From one class a week at first, I've gone on to four or six a week as I've discovered more being put on and as I've gained in experience myself, able to attend classes at a variety of levels.

Ballet term has just ended, so I shan't be able to write about topical ones until nearly a month's time, when I have the good luck of attending a 3-day summer school with one of my normal ballet teachers, Nicky, and the director of the organisation where I started to learn ballet, Norfolk Dance - and he used to dance with the Royal Ballet. Good old Norwich, arranging the sort of opportunity one would normally only associate with London!

As well as doing daily class, we'll be learning some of the repertoire of Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake and The Firebird, and also character-dancing and techniques of mime. Of course I shall write about that. We have been very lucky in that Norfolk Dance has already arranged a number of workshops for us with visiting ballet companies (Northern Ballet Theatre, Rambert Dance and the Richard Alston Dance Company), which have stretched us quite a lot.

This last week I attended the two remaining ballet classes and, first, a tap-dance class - something I have started more recently. I've just had to pick up the moves as I go along, lacking basic training in tap, but it's amazing what you can do by just shuffling around. It's in a group full of adolescents larking about and chattering freely, a world I don't otherwise have much contact with, so it is eye-opening! Yet the class also contains several ladies clearly in their seventies - whom I've seen performing on stage.

These tap classes have their surreal moments. At an earlier one in our village (for adults, this one, not teenagers) I was amazed that several of the participants brought their toddlers along, who stood around within inches of us, in grave danger of being kicked as we danced. I couldn't help calling it 'the toddler-kicking class'. In Tuesday's class with adolescents something I found equally mind-boggling was that several of the teenagers were tap-dancing in bare feet! They didn't appear in the least put off by banging around in bare feet, but it seemed a million miles away from the principle of tap-dancing! One of them was not actually dancing in two bare feet, but in one bare foot and one bandaged foot, having sprained her ankle! She clearly did not want to miss practice before her exams. These are all priceless images which I'm sure I'll never forget.

We did four of our tap routines. It's an enjoyable form of dance, not as strenuous as I expected. The one which I continued to find most fun was a show number which we had previously done with invisible canes (another surreal moment!) but now we had the canes, which we manipulated, twirled, threw into the air, changed hands with and banged on the floor with as much aptitude as we could muster. Michala, the teacher, is very imaginative, and always makes her classes fun for her participants. In one of the new routines we divided into sub-groups and I was given the foot-bandaged teenager to follow, who obligingly saw me through; her mother dances in the same troupe.

My last two ballet classes were with small groups, with five participants in each. Holidays, illness or end-of-term tasks were already taking their toll. Those of us who were left had the benefit of all the more attention from our ever-watchful teacher Jane. As in all classes we start with barre work and move on to work in the centre. Jane found that we had all made progress with barre work and held ourselves more like ballerinas. Ballet is certainly very good for improving your posture, and therefore for supporting your skeleton in later life. A lot of our centre work is based on direction- and weight-changes, and co-ordinating the arm and leg positions appropriately - a lot for the brain to contend with, and I always have great difficulty remembering routines! We did an interesting one with waltz-steps and hops and changes of direction and tried to let ourselves go more to the spirit of the music.

It becomes clear that one of the moves I'll have to practise over the vacation is combining slow, gentle arm movements with swift, sharp foot movements. It's a bit like asking your brain to make one hand pat your head and the other circle your stomach - it comes far from naturally! While your foot flies in and out, it's difficult not to let your arms be jerky as well. So the brain-cells and muscle-memories will need a lot of conditioning there, and I shall also have to work at straightening my back leg when lifted behind - I'm not stretching my muscles enough at the moment. And the notorious pirouettes, of course - always tricky!

The Friday class is more advanced than the Thursday one (I waited till I'd danced for a year before joining it), and I found exercises in different combinations to what I'd met before, but it's very exciting. We ended with a complex routine of turns, arabesques and hops which we had to dance singly, and I found the music went too fast for my brain to keep up with. I was still trying to work out what came next, but I tried my best, and have noted the moves down and must try to practise them in the vacation. I agree with Jane that the simpler class on Thursdays (introduced this year) has helped me grapple more effectively with the more difficult routines on Fridays.

Like the good teacher she is, Jane ended both classes by telling us of the progress we'd made, and after one of them some of us went for a drink at the Rushcutters' Arms in Norwich to celebrate the 30th birthday of a chap in the class. It was a beautiful way to end the term, sitting by the river watching the swans and getting to know each other better away from the dance studio.