With Roger Federer’s retirement from tennis, dance has lost one of its greatest living performers. You don’t follow tennis? It’s hard to believe. Except for the visible sweat and the audible grunts that accompany the action on the court—how could they be forbidden?—the sport and the art treat physical discipline in remarkably similar ways.
In Federer and his colleagues, many people see the same fluid grace and meticulous muscular control they admire in dancers. Plus the same patience and boundless determination. Plus the same unimaginable stamina.
Years ago, I went to a performance of Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin that was meant to develop over 12 hours. However, the cast didn’t have a chance to rehearse it straight through, so in the end the show lasted for 14 hours. Among other things, it included a jogger who kept appearing and disappearing, crisscrossing the stage tirelessly, and an ensemble of strutting ostriches. But nobody danced through the night.
Yet tennis players go on for hours, with 90-second breaks between games, each of which requires sustained bursts of concentrated, focused effort. The longest match on record timed out at 11 hours and five minutes and stretched over three days.
Yes, it was a competition, not a performance. But don’t you think dancers compete too? The rivalry among the ‘baby ballerinas’ in the 1930s was once well known; whipping through their fouettés at the end of daily class, Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska regularly crowded Tamara Toumanova from both sides as she spun between them.
With awards firmly installed in ballet, competitors today push their technique to extremes in order to win the wider recognition a prize might bring. Beyond ballet, pairing celebrities and choreographers to compete on Strictly Come Dancing has built a huge television audience for ballroom and Latin dance styles. Hip hop battles rage internationally, goading the participants, as one dancer recently put it, “to stand face to face with your opponent and show them that your movement can beat them.”
And all the while, each body must take the strain year in and year out, and every player and performer must endure the endless struggle to remain in perfect working condition. No one would call Federer an interpretive artist. He has never tried to express anything but his dazzling talent for tennis, and his body provided the best tool, the only tool he had, to reach his goals.
Now, at 41, he says his knees have done him in. According to legend, Suzanne Farrell’s knees featured in George Balanchine’s prayers. Dance, tennis, it makes no difference. If you’re fascinated by movement, you may have discovered the two aren’t mutually exclusive.