I’ve always thought the best I could hope for was to grow old gracefully. This story is about those who refuse to grow old at all!
Photographed by Yakovlev in November 2011, at the age of 93, Tao Porchon-Lynch is a dancer and a yoga teacher. Since she began dancing competitively at the age of 87, Porchon-Lynch has won more than 600 prizes, and at 96 is still teaching yoga. An average day includes three hours of yoga classes in the morning, followed by two hours of dancing in the afternoon – her partners are 70 years younger than her. “I don’t believe in age. I believe in strength of energy,” she tells those who suggest she calms down. In a 2014 TED talk, she described her response to a six-year-old girl who asked her what she was going to do when she retired. “I’m not going to retire … I’m going to dance my way to the next planet.”
