A new start after 60: I became a dancer at 68 – and will perform my first solo show at 82

Christine Thynne was nervous about going to her first dance class. But at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe she will be on stage alone, doing all the ‘things I shouldn’t be doing’

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t 82, Christine Thynne is an emerging artist. “Risk! There’s a colossal amount of risk,” Thynne says. She is about to perform her show, These Mechanisms, over three weeks at the Edinburgh fringe. While “emerging” isn’t a word often applied to artists in their 80s, Thynne says the description is appropriate. “I wasn’t there before,” she says. “I wasn’t a solo performer.”

Thynne’s show melds aspects of her life – she trained as a physiotherapist in the 1960s – along with other passions. Among her props are planks, stepladders and water. “Things I shouldn’t be doing,” she says. “Moving scaffolding planks. Changing the shape of stepladders. Carrying water.”

She enjoys sea kayaking, having progressed from being coached to paddling the Lofoten islands in Norway, in her 50s. “Sliding up a wave, going down the other side – it was so exciting,” she says. But when she was browsing the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she lives, and saw a brochure for a class in Dance Base, Scotland’s national centre for dance, she balked.