The Square Tango for thirty years: Curating successful aging at tea dances

A focus on “high” art and creativity not only misses the ways that individuals and groups engage with art to engender specific impacts on their everyday lives (DeNora, Herbert), but also how engagement in artistic practices changes over the lifespan in resonance with physical and cognitive changes and concerns. In this talk, I move cognitive dance research from the stage to the ballroom by considering the recreational practice of sequence dancing, a social dance form in which dancers follow pre-set synchronous patterns of steps and movement through space. Sequence dancing is practiced mainly by participants aged 75 and above, many of whom have transitioned from more physically demanding and riskier forms of ballroom dancing, and takes place at regularly scheduled tea dance events hosted primarily by deejays or dance leaders of similar age. Focusing primarily on Modern Sequence Dancing (MSD) dance sessions among old-old (75+) and oldest-old (85+) dancers, and applying a cognitive ecological perspective to their systematic practice of “serious leisure” (Stebbins), I examine how environmental and contextual aspects of these events and the curation of dance programmes by leaders and participants mitigate not only physical but also crucially embodied cognitive load. In doing so, they tap into embodied learning and memory in ways that offer an unexpectedly nuanced range of benefits that scaffold successful aging (Rowe & Kahn).