Dancers Still Kick Up Their Heels--Just Not So High

The woman who so masterfully conducts the tape player is ill, perhaps for a while. This happens, so you make do.

And there have been some adaptations in the choreography, too--on account of Mollie Portner’s right arm, which she can’t raise very far, and because of Janet Steinberg’s foot, which she can’t jump on anymore, and Lee Cooley’s bum knee. Plus Lee’s got sciatica, which pinches a nerve and hurts like hell.

And everybody’s got arthritis.

So what are you going to do, moan and groan ?

Well, sometimes. But because this is the Emeritus Dance Company, where professional experience is treasured, and failing that, enthusiasm makes up for a lot, you are going to dance.

Unless, of course, you have an artistic difference with another dancer, or somebody else is being a little, um, domineering, or it’s too hot, or too cold, or maybe you’re just tired, if that’s OK with you!

“We’re just a bunch of old ladies kicking up our heels. . .albeit not so high anymore,” says Lee, 74. “No, wait! Don’t use the world old . Eva will kill me. We’re not supposed to say old. “

“Oh, come on,” says Harriet Kroll, 70, a professional ballerina in her younger days. “What’s the big deal? Old. So what?”

Indeed. I say that if I were in my 70s and could move like the Emeritus dancers or better yet, enjoyed it half as much, I’d want the world to know. They dance with gusto, abandon and joy--and many costume changes. Professionalism counts.

Sold! Lee, who was dancing with the Porter Ballet at the Met when she was 15 years old, comes over to suggest that I give her upper thighs the touch test. They are indeed remarkably hard. Dancing keeps her fit.

Still, Rosabelle Shafran quotes a 96-year-old friend of a friend, age unknown.

“Age is a number, and mine is unlisted,” she says.

The baby of this group is Junko Kimoto, 64; the founders are Eva Garnet, 78, and her lifelong friend, Sue Nadel, 79.

Sue and Eva met in 1933 when both were dancing with the Ziegfeld Follies. Their credits, including Broadway and film, could take up this entire column. Suffice to say that they’ve never stopped dancing and aren’t counting on hanging it up anytime soon.

“It’s in the thinking,” says Sue, who also teaches preschoolers to get down and feel the beat. “Some of us hang on.”

Eva’s written a book, “Movement Is Life,” which sums up her philosophy cold. Outside of the Emeritus Dance Co., Eva teaches older women how to belly-dance. She married for the second time six years ago, at the age of 72.

The Emeritus troupe--whose membership core stands at seven, with about four others who come and go--doesn’t have any performances scheduled now, although when I caught up with them the other morning they’d just come off of three almost back-to-back.

They estimate that since they formed in 1988, they’ve had about 50 gigs--not including the command performance for me at their weekly rehearsal in Laguna Hills’ Leisure World. They’d been practicing for an hour before I arrived, to get it just right.

As they line up outside to make their entrance for their opening number, “Women on the Move”--the very same they performed at a fund-raiser for U.S. Senate candidates Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein last month--Eva barks out a last minute command.

“Get rid of your gum!” she says.

“Well then don’t chew!”

Then in they all march, carrying Boxer and Feinstein signs which later double as batons. It’s part cheerleading, part Rockettes and modern dance. When they shout “Vote! Vote! Vote!” and then Eva lets go with, “Give me a W! Give me an O! Give me a M-E-N!,” why, this reviewer feels an invigorating shiver down her spine.

It’s like watching suffragettes, stripped of the corsets and buns, performing at half-time on a football field. You just gotta cheer.

And, naturally, there is more. “American Hoe Down,” is set to Aaron Copeland’s music from “Rodeo.” “Aches and Pains” is a spoof performed by Eva, Sue, and Lee that has them entering the room wrapped in bandages that they later peel off like a striptease.

In “Matchmaking” they are dancing, and acting, at a 19th-Century Jewish wedding, complete with Eva and Sue as the mothers-in-law sizing each other up.

They could go on, and they do. By the end of “Sabra,” which requires the dancers to wear weighty felt skirts over their pants, many in the group are breathing very hard.

“Take a break,” I suggest. “Sit down.”

But Harriet, who acts as the company’s narrator because she doesn’t have time for the dancing these days--”A rehearsal can never be too long for Eva”--tells me that the show must go on.

Yet I insist. I’ve got the idea. And I like it very much.

“This has been my sustaining therapy,” says Janet, 78, finally sitting down. “I have had a lot of crises in my life, and this has pulled me through. I was just telling Mollie yesterday, ‘Thank God for the dancing. I am able to lose myself here.’ ”

Lee adds that she is in pain “24 hours a day. I can’t walk, but I can dance.”

Sue talks of the something that is transcendental about dance. Eva calls all of this, “a labor of love.”

“This is not a labor of love!” Sue comes back. “This is our language for communicating!”

“Well then, how come I don’t understand you a lot?” Harriet asks.

Lee says that she’s never been in a group that has bickered more. And Eva sort of blanches at that.

No, the Emeritus Dance Company is not just a group of dancing friends.

They’re like a family, where each member insists upon her own room. But when it counts, they show up and they turn out, in sync with each other on stage and off.

The Emeritus dancers love each other a lot.