Ballet at 70: When I started dancing in my 60s, I wasn't prepared for what it would do to me.

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It might have become a hobby—a once-or-twice-a-week, “just for fun” activity that I eventually would have replaced with a ceramics class or relearning my long-forgotten college French. Enough of that, I might have come to feel about ballet after another year or two, the same way I came to feel about other things I’d loved: darkroom photography, voice lessons, poker, swimming laps, songwriting.

Or I might have actively grown tired of it, of its repetition, the plié-tendu-jeté-rond de jambe-fondu-frappé-adage and little warm-up jumps into petit allegro of it all—every day so much the same. Or of my glacial progress (inevitable, given that I’d started at the ag