The body is a song at every age: Israeli Rina Schenfeld at 87

‘The body is not a muscle, it is a song. And the more you sing with the body, especially as we age, the better it knows how to sing.” Rina Schenfeld offers this philosophy not as a poetic metaphor but as a lived truth. In a culture that measures a dancer’s worth by the height of a leap or the torque of a turn, she has long operated on a different frequency.

This January, she will premiere a new work, marking her birthday, her recent EMI Prize for lifetime achievement, and a homage to Martha Graham, her legendary mentor. Retirement is not on her horizon; the stage is still a place of exploration and discovery.

Does a dancer over the age of 40 really need to get off the stage? I ask her, quoting a common belief. “What? Why should she get off the stage?” Her confusion and defiance are palpable. It becomes clear that Schenfeld’s philosophy is inseparable from her body, her history, and her imagination.

For her, the body is not a machine that depreciates with use; it is a living archive, holding memory, emotion, and accumulated experience. The physical range may shift, but the emotional precision sharpens with time.

Her contributions have been recognized with the Landau Prize, three David’s Harp awards, and the EMET Prize, often described as Israel’s Nobel, and recently with the EMI life achievement award.

Yet Schenfeld’s ambition was never about titles or accolades. Dance, she says, “chose” her. Recalling Graham’s words, she explains, “You didn’t choose dance, dance chose you.”

This sense of destiny persists. “I don’t create the dances, the dances come to me,” she explains. “People ask me, ‘What is your passion for dance?’ I say, ‘Dance has a passion for me.’”

“I am not saying one shouldn’t learn everything I learned, and one needs great teachers, and I had great teachers whose blood flows in my blood,” she says. “But it is the role of the person themselves to continue to search and to continue to aspire for freedom.”

Decades her career, that search has evolved. Schenfeld has embraced what she calls a “softness” that comes with age.

“If I can’t jump, I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing,” she says. “Dance isn’t just jumping high; dance is expressing and connecting the soul and the spirit to the body.”

The lines she draws today are less polished, less about virtuosity, more about resonance – human, personal, and deeply alive. She describes her current movement as “less technical, less show… more simple, human, personal, even rough.”

“Dance has magic powers, hidden and healing powers,” she says. “Just as the tribe danced in its time to bring down rain and win the war, today we dance as a ritual and prayer for better days.”

There is a spiritual, almost shamanistic quality to her perspective. Movement carries meaning beyond the visible; dance becomes an offering, a meditation, a bridge between inner and outer worlds.

“It is a battle every morning, she admits. “Sometimes it is difficult to go to the studio and start transitioning from this world to the world of dance… especially on days like these...” she adds, reflecting on the difficult times we are all experiencing in Israel.

Despite this struggle, she persists, guided by the Chance Operation method developed by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Rather than forcing inspiration, she lets it arrive.

“Instead of biting my fingernails thinking about the next dance, I let chance decide for me,” she says. It is a discipline of surrender, a recognition that the art will arrive if she simply shows up.

“I didn’t know that I was actually writing poems that were written for dance,” she says. “I read the poems and I dance. It is like a monologue.” Even now, she continues to surprise herself: “It happened to me just now. It’s not me; it comes.”

She reflects on the unique advantages of aging. “At a certain age, the brain also changes, for worse and for better. For the better in the sense that we become more like children, like a child, in curiosity, in the immediacy of reactions… This internal development is very important for dance.”

At 87, she retains a vivid, tactile engagement with the world – the sky, the sea, the flowers, the clouds – all feeding her movement.

Freedom, curiosity, and play are central. “I look at children… they are constantly dancing, and they are constantly playing. And I am like a playing child; for me, dance is play.”

Her reflections on the body, creativity, and aging culminate in an attitude of acceptance and presence. She refuses nostalgia or moralizing: “Whatever will be, will be,” she smiles. “Que sera, sera.”

Rina Schenfeld’s life is at once an archive and a laboratory. She preserves the memory of decades of Israeli and international dance while continuing to experiment, evolve, and respond to the world around her. She embodies discipline and curiosity, tradition and innovation, rigor and play. She demonstrates that aging is not a sentence but a lens through which the richness of experience can be transformed into art.

Her story is an invitation: to honor the past, to remain curious, and to embrace the possibilities and limits of the body. In her new work, she dances the short poems she has written over the years, letting words and movement intertwine, demonstrating that at 87, her body, and her imagination, continue to find new ways to sing.