Running on the treadmill at the gym, I first noticed it in the big mirror in front of me. While my left arm was behaving normally — nice and relaxed, at waist height — my right arm was just hanging there, oddly.
Yet I wasn’t particularly worried and didn’t think to connect it with my increasingly spidery handwriting or the falls I’d had while running in the woods.
It was a teaching colleague who persuaded me to go to the doctor. Perhaps she recognised the signs.
Kate Swindlehurst, 69, from Cumbria, first started tango classes in 2002 in a remote town
The GP certainly did, although neither prepared me for what I was to hear from the consultant to whom I was referred.
‘I’m 99 per cent sure you have Parkinson’s disease,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you on your own to think about that for a few minutes.’
I remember having a little cry, then going back to work in time for the last lesson of the day, covering for an absent science teacher. I sat in the lab — foreign ground for an English teacher — stunned by the news and trying to make sense of this new world.
Had there been other clues? I was 54. Yes, I’d suffered more wobbles on the dancefloor than usual. I first started tango classes in 2002, in a remote town in north-east Cumbria, the county to which I first came with my then husband (now ex) more than 30 years ago.
Post-diagnosis, I scoured my memory for evidence of a deterioration and remembered a Thursday-night practise in Carlisle’s beautiful 15th-century Tithe Barn, dancing with a regular partner called Raymond.
Two or three times, as we approached a move called the barrida — that lovely moment where the leader sweeps the follower’s foot sideways with his own foot — I wobbled, froze and apologised. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Raymond said. ‘Though I wonder what it is?’
One study suggested that several step patterns in tango mimic the rehabilitation exercises
By the time the symptoms of Parkinson’s become noticeable, you have almost certainly been living with it for years. For most, at the time of diagnosis, the production of a neurotransmitter called dopamine has already decreased by 80 per cent in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, which controls movement and co-ordination.
With medication you may not get worse, at least for a while, but you won’t get better. At least, that’s what we are told.
Often, I wonder if there’s such a clear division between illness and health. For, when I’m dancing, something almost miraculous happens to me.
While my disease has, indeed, progressed in normal life, when I tango, I return almost to pre-Parkinson’s levels of energy and nimbleness.
Somehow, in its ability to persuade the damaged brain to work as if it were undamaged, tango overrides whatever it is that stops me moving. It returns a sense of grace to my limbs; it unfreezes me, giving me not only confidence but courage.
I suppose at the simplest level, it offers a radical alternative to the feelings of failure that come with Parkinson’s. For an hour, during each lesson, I am special, not in spite of the condition but in part because of it — refusing to be held back by its disabling aspects while working at the complexities of this most complex of dances.
How on earth does this happen? In normal life, those with Parkinson’s can rarely be said to move with elegance. It is common both to become ‘stuck’ — unable to move when you wish — and to be unable to be still when you choose, beset by tremors and twitches which rattle on despite your best efforts to stop them. You stop and start unpredictably, spend moments teetering on the brink of motion before suddenly lunging forward.
As my disease progresses — I am 69 now — I suffer more from bradykinesia, or slow movement. When I’m getting to my feet from a table, walking from A to B or eating a plate of food, my progress is often exasperatingly slow, both for myself and those around me.
And yet while I’m dancing, I can move more easily. I feel newly coordinated. At first, my partner may well find himself with an armful of twitch and jitter, or an upper body as hard and unresponsive as a girder. But when these initial tics fade and I manage to stop thinking about it altogether, I just… dance.
The pressure of expectation, the music, the way I am held — all require me not just to make the moves but to prepare for them, shifting the weight, engaging the muscles, re-awakening those sluggish feet.
It is not just physical. To step on to the floor into a close embrace with another person, you have to believe in yourself, your capability and your worth as a partner. It’s a big ask for any dancer.
Conditions such as Parkinson’s chip away at self-esteem. There is nothing attractive about its characteristics and it is difficult not to become preoccupied with what you can’t do.
Simple tasks (fastening buttons, putting on socks, getting change out of a purse) become tiresomely challenging, walking downstairs an exercise in mind over precarious matter.
In tango, surrounded by other, more beautiful, more experienced, younger performers, a dancer with Parkinson’s must find the courage to hold her head high. (For the most part, I refuse to be defined by the disease and dance with the able-bodied just as I always have.)
In fact, I spent years struggling with posture. The straight spine is fundamental to tango, but instead I tended towards textbook signs of Parkinson’s: a stoop, a poked-out head, a middle fold, a slumping chest. There were times when extreme fatigue made it feel impossible for me to hold myself upright, and I’m sure there were psychological issues, too, especially when I was feeling especially low or clumsy. Standing tall, head up, chest open, was the last thing I felt like doing.
But if you are serious about tango, you have no choice. While some support is derived from the partner, it is not acceptable to hang on to him, to pull on him or expect him to hold you up.
This means you have to get your core working for you, using muscles that may have given up expecting calls to action from the malfunctioning brain. If I hold back, nothing works. Settling for half won’t do.
Perversely, I have discovered that I like the harder moves. Being challenged on a continual basis is vital for my motor rehabilitation. Take one move in particular, the pivot. This is an integral part of the ocho — the figure-of-eight that the woman completes in two steps across the front of, or around, the man, while keeping her upper body turned towards him.
We practised this technique often in tango classes, but I felt my stomach muscles contract with anxiety each time.
My body became a lumbering weight, a sackful of turnips that slipped and lurched inside my skin, pulling me off-centre, gluing me to the ground.
For months, I managed without the pivot entirely when I could get away with it, substituting small steps for that ball-of-the-foot spin that looks so beautiful and easy when executed by an expert.
But it was precisely this sense of a step too far that took me towards a breakthrough. I would not let it beat me. I wanted it to be hard, and I took huge pleasure in the impossible demands of the dance. It felt like an electrical charge, waking up nerve endings, switching on responses, pushing through the lumpen heaviness of my condition.
I refused to give up my heels, too. There is a school of thought which recommends that Parkinson’s dancers should avoid them — but isn’t that like recommending paper aeroplanes for pilots?
Yes, I passed on my highest black-and-silver beauties. But, while I wobbled at times on the dancefloor, I was rarely troubled by real instability or fear of falling in the same way that I was out in the wider world.
I am not the only person to recognise the transformational power of dance on Parkinson’s sufferers.
More than a dozen studies have shown its benefits, some on the very part of the brain that is otherwise damaged. One suggested that several step patterns in tango mimic the rehabilitation exercises designed to target gait difficulties and the ‘freezing’ problem; the music and the moves themselves serving as external ‘cues’ to replace the missing internal ones.
The degree of difficulty is crucial: tango is a ‘multi-tasking activity’ that demands ‘dynamic balance and involves turning, initiation of movement and moving at a variety of speeds’.
Another study recommends that dance should become part of a ‘comprehensive management plan’ for people with Parkinson’s. I used to think tango would never be available on prescription, but who knows? Perhaps one day it will be.
What I’ve discovered, above all, is that tango is holistic. The world of medical professionals seems to operate piecemeal, my symptoms becoming separate entities. I took my tremor and fatigue to the neurologist; my depression and insomnia to the GP; my digestive issues to the nurse. And yet, tango treats all of me simultaneously.
Motor difficulties and muscular tension are addressed by the music, by the demands of the rhythm and by the lead of my partner. Struggles with balance are eased as I work at core strength and maintaining my own upright axis. Close contact with another human being —contact that feels safe, respectful and equal — is a powerful counter to alienation and gloom.
I still have bleak weeks. Sometimes I am near-overwhelmed by exhaustion and confronted by a black hole of depression that yawns in front of me.
To get to the point where several hours of tango will replace fatigue with energy, despair with optimism, I have first to get past the fatigue and despair sufficiently just to arrive at the dance. Sometimes the getting past seems too difficult.
But it remains the bedrock of my treatment, a fundamental part of my well-being and the mainstay of my social life.
There will come a time when I can no longer do it — and then I may DJ instead — but for now, I know that stepping on to the dancefloor is an opportunity for transformation. Each time I do it, as the music takes hold, the process of renewal begins.
- The Tango Effect: Parkinson’s And The Healing Power Of Dance, by Kate Swindlehurst, will be published on April 2 by Unbound at £14.99. To pre-order a copy for £11.99 (a 20 per cent discount, p&p free) go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until May 31, 2020.