The Age Issue

From a recent NYT article: Two years ago trumpeter Henry Nowak was fired from the American Ballet Theater Orchestra.  Nowak had been with the orchestra for 28 years; he was 74 years old.  Last Thursday he filed an age discrimination suit with the US District Court in Manhattan.  The complaint cites an unnamed conductor asking an orchestra member for tips on how to convince old orchestra members to retire, and said of them, according to the NYT article, “It’s time to go.”  Commission lawyer Judy Keenan claims that the commission has evidence of other similar cases in ABT Orchestra history (part of the reason, evidently, that this case was one of relatively few ageism complaints brought to suit over the past year; apparently only 50 out of 16, 548 complaints were accepted between October 2005 and September 2006). 

Nowak’s case puts a strange spin on the age issues already at play in the dance community.  It’s a given that the majority of dancers will reach an age at which they can no longer perform at a professional level; the intense physicality of dance is straining, regardless of whether it results in debilitating injury.  In a way the reality that all professional dancers must eventually stop dancing at the high levels contributes to the stigma around dance, its seeming specialness compared to other performance arts.  Dance careers expire in a way that careers in acting and music don’t; they are always stipulated by states of physicality.  In theory an actor has the option to progress from young actor to adult lead to mature character actor.  Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way for actors.  But in dance maturation is not even an option.  After a certain age, bodies can no longer perform the way they need to in order to make any sort of living by dancing only.

At this career point a paradox arises.  In order to have succeeded at professional dance most dancers will have eschewed other training, advanced education, hobbies.  Like any competitive and difficult art or sport, dance doesn’t allow time for the indulgence of many other interests.  When dancers find themselves unable to keep working they face a difficult period of transition into a second career (CTFD was created to help dancers through this transition). 

So it’s interesting that the ABT Orchestra would be implicated in even one case of age discrimination.  Orchestras are unlike dance companies in that their members can (in theory) perform well through middle-age.  Still, ABT orchestra is so near dance.  And though age is a detriment in the profession, one would assume that it’s a sympathetic one, both inescapable and irrelevant to skill or strength or deservedness.  It’s easy to imagine that youth is revered in the community but difficult to imagine that older age is, in contrast, disrespected or disregarded.  It rather seems an unfortunate, universal inevitability.