Love,it Avery. I know your parents from church.  My wife grew up in Charleston, WV and we spent lots of time there visiting her parents and vacationing. The state is beautiful and you might consider traveling the wider state to connect.

"A dancer dies twice", the legendary choreographer Martha Graham said, "once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful."

This is a documentary about first deaths and last dances, about what happens when an instrument as finely tuned as a dancer's body begins to change.

From the music which prompts a twitch of muscle memory to the comedown which follows a burst of performance adrenaline, we hear stories of the last dances and what comes next from Gabriella Schmidt, Isabel Mortimer from Dancers' Career Development, and former principal ballerinas Natasha Oughtred and Wendy Whelan.

We eavesdrop on the training of young dancers at the Royal Ballet School as they shape muscle and bone into elegant lines, diving into the visceral excitement of pounding pointe shoes and powerful leaping bodies. And we visit Sage Dance Company and the Company of Elders as they work with dancers who move with grace and beauty in defiance of their changing bodies.

From the first anxious glance in the mirror to the last touch - how does the language of our bodies change as we age?

Produced by Eleanor McDowall
First broadcast 4th April on BBC Radio 4

A Dancer Dies Twice

In this essay, I head to West Virginia, the home of my father's family for nearly 200 years, to find out why they left, and what's left of the places they lived. This audio essay is modeled after Scott Carrier's first radio piece, "The Hitchhiker." 

Original music by Alec Spergel.

Gone, West Virginia

Avery Keatley

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