Description
Age itself is a changing and performative variable. The twenty-first century is rejuvenating the biological and physical age, along with the social age, which is culturally bound. Bio-technology has developed to such an extent that it is now possible to create a new post-human who has control over birth and death as well as the process of ageing.
This issue explores creative ideas regarding ageing in the field of performing arts and at the level of discourse that considers ‘ageing’ as being performative. Through reflexive writing and artist pages this issue evidences performance work that embraces age and ageing (made by or with ‘senior’ artists) and speculates on the future of ageing bodies and ageing minds (wisdom, experience, frailty and forgetfulness) within creative endeavour and fragile ecologies: it illuminates alternative, private as well as global temporalities.
On Ageing (& Beyond)
Richard Gough, Nanako Nakajima
Going Transchron : From the sublime of age to juvenescence
Elinor Fuchs
Nanako Nakajima in Conversation with Yvonne Rainer
Nanako Nakajima
Physical and Mental Demands Experienced by Ageing Dancers : Strategies and values
Pil Hansen, Sarah J. Kenny
Performing Archeology : Meredith Monk’s Education of the Girlchild Revisited and Memory’s Storehouse, a solo by Lenora Champagne
Lenora Champagne
They Are All at Least Seventy : An exploration of female resistance to the decline narrative in theatre and live art
Beth Watton
The Dancer from the Dance : Ontologies of the body in Eszter Salamon’s and Christophe Wavelet’s Monuments 0.1 and 0.2
Lily Kelting
This is (Not) the Ageing Body in Dance : Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee and the robotisation of the ageing body in Japan
Nanako Nakajima
Embodying Senescence : Performing agedness in the space of virtuality
Marcus Cheng Chye Tan
Shaming Age : The unspoken truth of dance in Egypt
Nora Amin
‘Do You Think Combat Pilots Have Haemorrhoids?’ : Challenging masculine heroism through ageing feminine corporeality
Idit Suslik
Detonating Desire : Mining the unexplored potential of ageing in Split Britches’ Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
Benjamin Gillespie
This Was The End : The pseudoscopic effect
Mallory Catlett
BED
David Slater
Moving Memory Dance Theatre Company : Gestures of Defiance
Jayne Thompson
Somewhere between Remembering and Forgetting : Working across generations on The Middle
Michael Pinchbeck, Michael Mangan
Riots, Cherry Blossoms and Wheelchairs : The performance politics of Saitama Gold Theater
Rosalind Fielding
Judith Malina’s Voracious Body, Mind and Spirit : Two years of raging against decline in the Actors Home
Cindy Rosenthal
Ageing, Temporality and Performance : Joan Rivers’ body of work
Roberta Mock