En Pointe and Poignant: Dancers on Aging

“The ground of what an older dancer can do has just begun to be broken,” veteran dancer Jeanne Solan says early in the documentary “Can’t Stop Now,” to be telecast tonight on PBS.

As proof, this 2-year-old hourlong film by Eileen Thalenberg assembles a number of spoken and choreographic testaments on the subject, all highlighting the mission, activities and personnel of Nederlands Dans Theatre 3, a chamber-size company in The Hague for major dancers over 40.

Following Canadian ballet star Karen Kain as she joins the company and learns its repertory, the film charts the shifting balance between physical prowess and spiritual maturity that exists at various stages in every dancer’s career, growing unforgettably poignant when former American Ballet Theatre principal Martine van Hamel speaks about coming to terms with aging.

“It’s a loss,” she says, on the verge of tears. “It’s something you must adjust to. You just live with it.”

Emphasizing “the weight of experience” that older dancers bring to the stage, choreographer Jiri Kylian, founder of the company, focuses on the new possibilities that such dancers offer choreographers. Unfortunately, most of the performance footage here provides insufficient evidence, either by choosing pieces that young dancers might do just as successfully or by cutting away far too soon for the Nederlands 3 dancers to have their effect.

Even so, there are plenty of individual triumphs on view, among them the technical prowess of former Joffrey virtuoso Gary Chryst at the very end of his 40s.

The issues are more complex than “Can’t Stop Now” begins to suggest. For starters, ghettoizing older dancers in one special company only dramatizes how estranged they are from business as usual in the dance world. And nobody mentions other kinds of career transitions for dancers, transitions more relevant than the very, very few dancing jobs that Nederlands 3 will ever provide.

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At the end, we see an image that defines terpsichorean tokenism in capital letters: the premiere of Kylian’s multi-company “Arcimboldo” at the Holland Dance Festival, with huge troops of young dancers in red skirts and all of four Nederlands 3 members in black.

Whatever attention Nederlands 3 and this film direct to the conditions faced by older dancers and the contributions they might make to the art, nobody doubts that those kids in red represent a reality fundamentally unchanged and unchallenged by the inclusion of a few star seniors.

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* “Can’t Stop Now” airs at 8:30 p.m. tonight on the PBS “Great Performances” series on KCET and KVCR.