The ballet dancers growing older gracefully

“I started dancing at three, but it was only when I reached 12 that they found I had curvature of the spine,” says Wendy Whelan, one of America’s greatest ballerinas. “The orthopaedist lined me up, then put me in traction, casts and in a brace. Until I was finished growing I was in a brace.”

Whelan retired from New York City Ballet last year at the age of 47 when she has been travelling the world, seeking out choreographers and dancers she likes, and creating the sort of new work she wants to do. Not bad for a kid with scoliosis.

Whelan is in London to perform at the Royal Opera House. For her latest project, Whelan/Watson: Other Stories, she sought out the Royal Ballet’s Edward Watson, perhaps our finest British-born dancer, and a man who has always been an adventure game.

At 39, Watson is also (at the risk of being rude) getting on as a ballet star. But older dancers are having their moment – see 52-year-old Alessandra Ferri in Wayne McGregor’s recent Woolf Works or 50-year-old Sylvie Guillem’s swansong tour – so the Observer Magazine decided to match the two dancers up with photographer Nadav Kander, to show what half a lifetime in dance does to the human body.

The worst of Whelan’s teenage years came one summer when, for five months, she had to wear a 15lb body cast. “Each month I had three weeks in the cast – I slept in it, I went to school in it – and then they would cut it off, before putting me in traction for a week. That happened four different times that summer. But as soon as they took the cast off, and before the traction, I was doing grand jetés down the corridor of the hospital. And because I had been living with 15 extra pounds on my body I felt I was flying. I was like a bird.”

Scoliosis wasn’t the only difficulty Whelan faced as a young dancer. When she joined New York City Ballet in 1984, its great choreographer George Balanchine had recently died, but many of the staff remained committed to his vision, one in which it wasn’t enough that the dancers were great athletes – they also had to be conventionally pretty.

“One of the things I felt uncomfortable with was my face,” she tells me. It’s late as we speak in the canteen of the Royal Opera House, where she has been rehearsing with Watson and the choreographer Javier de Frutos. La Traviata is on the main stage so men in dinner jackets are circling the vending machine, looking as if they will sacrifice all for a Snickers.

“With Balanchine, he liked a pretty face. I never wore make-up and the teachers were always saying: ‘Come on, put some blusher on.’ And I’d be like: ‘Why? I’m just going to be sweating and it’ll run off. I’m an athlete.’ And then, slowly, I found I had an interesting look, I had this profile. And some choreographers liked that. And then they knocked down the wall I had put up with that idea.”

Those choreographers were the celebrated Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky, but also William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor and Benjamin Millepied. Her ability to work with choreographers complemented the remarkable machine she has turned her body into and led her to have one of the broadest repertoires in dance. The New York Times ballet critic, Roslyn Sulcas, wrote of her: “She is not made in the ballerina mold of the past, all delicate curves and hyper-feminine prettiness. She is a far more unusual creature: a modern ballerina and a determined player in a world still dominated by male creators and directors.”

Now, having left City Ballet, Whelan is discovering new ways to express herself. She started by hanging up her pointe shoes, but only because she wanted to change the way she moved: “And I’ve loved it. You know, it’s like taking your bra off. You don’t feel so bound.”

Edward Watson, like Whelan, took a while to find the right collaborators. At three, he had followed his sister into ballet. While she gave it up, he prospered, all the way through the Royal Ballet School. With his contortionist body, vulnerability, pale skin and fierce red hair, he didn’t suit the classical white ballets; it took the visceral, addled heroes of Kenneth MacMillan and new, abstract choreographers to turn him into a star. He became a principal, joining the top echelon of dancers, when he was 28.

“That’s quite late on,” he tells me between his rehearsals. “I was worried from about 23 on, and then I stopped worrying just before I was made a principal. I thought: ‘Well if this is my place, then I have always done some amazing roles and am still doing amazing roles and the fact I am not a principal isn’t that important to me any more.’ Perhaps being a bit more relaxed made me dance better.” He pauses. “Of course, when I was made a principal it was then really important.”

Watson has become one of the Royal Ballet’s most-loved dancers, and famously appeared on its posters above the claim he was, pound for pound, more powerful than a rhino. An ethereal art has been made earthy by his portrayals, whether he is the white rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a murderous/suicidal Prince Rudolf in Mayerling. He could lead a junta given the awards that now hang from his neck and chest. In the past month alone he was writing on Twitter: “It’s all in Russian, but I think I just won the Benois de la Danse [a prestigious international ballet competition].” Then the Queen gave him an MBE.

I asked him how he felt being asked to play an insect – which had led to one of his biggest prizes. “Well, I didn’t go into it, thinking: ‘Yes, this is it, I am going to cover myself in crap and roll on the floor and I’m going to win an Olivier,’ he says of Arthur Pita’s version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. “It wasn’t like that. It was: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ It made me think very differently though; it made me think: ‘How do I make the story work?’”

Other Stories, which Whelan and Watson have been rehearsing on both sides of the Atlantic, include the work of five choreographers, of which three are women – Danièle Desnoyers, Annie-B Parson and Arlene Phillips. “I wanted this project to be a series of work with one dancer, and for years I thought of Edward,” says Whelan. “I wanted to dance with someone mature and experienced. I want to spend time with this.”

In one of the early rehearsals I sit and watch as these two veterans are taught to tango for a piece by Pita. Surprisingly, this is new to them, and Watson is incredibly lovely around Whelan, leading with care, and cheeky when the opportunity arises, making her laugh. One of the teachers says something, and Watson calls out: “Did you hear her, Wendy? She said ‘beautiful’. That’s because you are here.”

Later, I tell him he is very gentlemanly around ballerinas. “Get more out of them that way,” he replies. Who are the most grumpy partners? “Angry 18-year-olds or older ladies whose bodies hurt.” Wendy? “She’s not… but I am.”

Whelan points out that the struggle they faced in their early 20s may have had something to do with performing the work of dead choreographers – when both respond best to creating new pieces. “My whole future is with living new work,” she says. “I want to work with a living being.”

Whelan says that Watson isn’t anywhere near needing to hang up his shoes, but he says later he is only a couple of years away. “Retirement is there, it is going to happen. This is going to sound morbid and I don’t know if I should say it, but it’s a bit like dying. You know you’re going to die, everybody does, but you don’t stop what you are doing because of that. You don’t slow down because you know you are going to have to retire. You get on with it, you keep taking the vitamins, you go to Pilates, you do what you have to do to survive in this thing that we do. But I want to choose when I stop; I don’t want someone to come up and say: ‘You’re looking a bit fat and old, I think it’s time.’ I am hoping I’ll know.”

He’s enjoying himself, though. “I had a little surgery on my toe joint just before Christmas and I feel about 10 years younger.” And he is loving what is happening in dance, as choreographers are picking up dancers as they emerge from classical ballet. “They are making work for these experienced, well, women in particular. There is something that happens to the dancers when they resign themselves to not being in a classical ballet company forever. There’s an appeal in carrying on beyond what people may or may not think you should be doing. That’s interesting for people to work with. Looking at Alex Ferri, looking at Wendy, looking at Sylvie – they’ve all had amazing classical careers that didn’t say everything about them. Physically and artistically they still have a hell of a lot to say.”

Whelan says it another way: “After you finish a ballet career, what do you do?” she asks. “There is a typical highway: you teach, choreograph, coach or direct a company. Very few continue dancing. Mostly because of their bodies, I assume. But you gotta make ends meet. My priority is to continue making art. But I’m freelance, and at nearly 50 I am trying to find my way in this world of dance.”

And her body? “My doctor says: ‘I don’t worry about your busted hip, but I don’t know how you are doing what you are doing because of your spine.’ He says: ‘You have a lot of curvature and the degeneration is very strong, arthritis…’”

It’s getting late; all the opera singers have disappeared as the finale of Traviata is underway on the main stage. Whelan is getting ready to head back to wherever home is in this foreign city. “Nine hours straight rehearsals at the Royal Ballet,” she laughs. “That’s what my retirement looks like.” Having sat through several rehearsals, I think it looks incredible.