Due to recent medical advancements, the percentage of elderly people in society has increased drastically and ageing has become a global concern. In addition to the growing elderly population, ageing is also becoming an emerging theme in various aspects of society in the twenty-first century. The idea of ageing being the ‘second part of life’ is still young in terms of the history of ideas. In this sense, this concept proposes not only biologically but also ideologically new bodies.
The taboo of ageing still dominates in many cultural contexts, especially European and American cultures, where the unproductive seniors are separated from and ignored by these modernized societies. Under patriarchal systems, the aged female body has rarely been liberated and is instead fundamentally shamed by the accepted definitions. By contrast, in many other cultures, seniors are authoritative, held in honour and respected for their experience and knowledge. But this can also create social and political problems.
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. Biotechnology 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. The manner of calculating age differs from place to place; for example, year calculation was replaced by birthday calculation and the lunisolar calendar was replaced by the Gregorian calendar in the process of modernization in Japan. Then, what makes a body age in our globalized temporalities?
The discourse on ageing is also related to the past. While trauma and post-memory studies have developed to be intergenerational, collective memory loss is observed in the political chaos of the United States and in Japan after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Following the remapping of European countries due to the influx of refugees, Europe has become younger in terms of the statistic median age because of younger immigrants. In fact, the colonial past, characterized by domination over younger countries, is not so far from modern anxiety inscribed in many ageing countries.
Age illuminates the human body as its own medium. Therefore, ageing affects dancers’ bodies in far more profound ways than any other kind of artist. Although not exclusively focused on dance, this issue of Performance Research contains more essays exploring dance and choreographic practices than usual. Recent discussions on the topic include ageing in performance as an initiative by artists in post-modern dance and performance art who explore the new approach of creating art and still continue their artistic activities in light of (their own) performing bodies. Even though these artists are ageing, they continue to pursue art. Thus, how they preserve their ephemeral works in historical collections is a critical matter. In addition, it also reminds us of the ontological question concerning dance performance: When the dancer and the dance are inseparable, where does that dance go when that ageing body no longer does that dance?
This issue expounds creative ideas regarding ageing in the field of performing arts and at the level of discourse that considers ‘ageing’ as being performative. Through scientific research, reflexive writing and artistic projects, 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 and global temporalities.
The issue of Performance Research –‘On Time’ (PR19: 3)Footnote1 – contained what has become a highly influential article authored by Elinor Fuchs, ‘Estragement: Towards an “age theory” theatre criticism’. This essay asked why, after so many years in revisionary theatre and performance studies, and after so many binaries had been questioned and undone, the ‘vast undeconstructed binary of youth and age’ persisted and remained resolute. The essay advanced approaches for a theatre criticism that not only engaged ‘age studies’ but also argued for an incorporation of ageing processes and a defiance of decline. This current issue of Performance Research ‘On Ageing (& Beyond)’ continues and expands those debates in multiple and varied ways.
It is therefore with a sense of indebtedness and gratitude that we open the contents of ‘On Ageing (& Beyond)’ with another provocative, courageous and mischievous text by Elinor Fuchs – ‘From the Sublime of Age to the Juvenescence: Old age according to Pfizer’. This article is developed from a speech first given at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) sixtieth anniversary conference, themed ‘Trans’, in Minneapolis (USA) in November 2016, and the editors and author have wanted to retain an element of oral delivery in the barbed playfulness of the narrative that confronts and questions the ethics and commodification of age and ageism by a major global pharmaceutical company. In her speech, and then subsequently in development of the article, Fuchs wanted to use many images from the marketing campaigns of Pfizer (Get Old and then #FOGO) but permission was not forthcoming.Footnote2 Fuchs begins, tongue in cheek, with God, no less, and reflects on the magisterial images of a white-bearded patriarch. It becomes clear that the sublime of age is gendered; it is male. Fuchs tries to imagine the unimaginable of ageing, and what Simone de Beauvoir categorized as the ‘unrealizable’. From a reverie on the sublime she turns to the ridiculous (or at least incredulous) – the marketing campaigns of Pfizer, poised, perhaps, to launch an anti-ageing drug? This ambition is never mentioned in their campaigns; Pfizer remains intent on promoting youthful imaginings of being old and getting older (Get Old and then #FOGO). Fuchs unpacks and lays bare the wrinkleless and unblemished visions of Pfizer’s campaign – numerous adverts, billboards, promotions and website that state: ‘Get Old – sponsored by Pfizer – is devoted to the discussion of healthy aging and the opportunity to increase your life “expectancy”.’ In the course of a succinct and illuminating text, the mood shifts to a darker realization that Pfizer could not represent age with age (resorting to juvenile ‘juvenescence’ and fit ‘young(er)’ bodies). Through writing, Fuchs discovers that ‘age could not be separated from gender and that gender could not be disentangled from disgust’ – a realization that informs many of the articles that follow.
In New York, co-editor Nanako Nakajima staged a conversation with the performer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, who was a co-founder of the highly influential Judson Dance Theater, formed in 1962.
In 2017 Nakajima had curated (in a traditional theatre in Kyoto – not a museum) an ambitious ‘performative exhibition’ of Rainer’s fifty (plus) year oeuvre offering Japanese audiences’ insight to post-modern dance through archival material and the unusual staging of two key (canonical) Rainer works: Trio A and Chair/Pillow. The staging of these two works, that are themselves fifty years old (young?), was ingeniously realized by involving six highly trained dancers from ballet, contemporary dance, Japanese Noh and Butoh traditions (ranging in ages from 20 to 80, in tenyear steps). Nakajima describes the complexity and reach of the exhibition and how it reflected on dance dramaturgy and ageing. Rainer, who had not seen the exhibition, responds and quizzes Nakajima about technical aspects of the re-staging and choreographic practices. A conversation ensues and questions from the audience are incorporated in a text that deliberately retains the discursive nature of the event. A fascinating and detailed analysis of Trio A is captured and the perspicacity of an artist reflecting on a piece made fifty years earlier is astonishing.
Dance scientists Pil Hansen and Sarah J. Kenny interview three professional ageing dancers to investigate their cognitive capacity, their experience of pain and injury and their physical as well as mental strategies. These semi-structured interviews were conducted in Canada with Claudia Moore, Peggy Baker and Davida Monk (aged from 60 to 70). While the topic of dance-related injury has been the subject of research since the 1970s, we know less about ageing dancers and the impact of injury (and sustained fitness). Two of the interviewees reported less injuries in their later age, and they interpreted pain as a warning sign to be aware of the need to seek medical assistance. They integrated the sense of listening to the body for an advanced understanding of their dancing bodies, as well as the ability to modify choreography for their ageing bodies.
Hansen and Kenny speculate on the experience of these dancers’ comparable lack of age-related cognitive decline and possible benefits from higher cognitive efficacy. The ability to draw on movement experience is important and memorized kinaesthetic skill, categorized as crystallized intelligence, is maintained through the third age, although fluid intelligence declines quickly at the age of 50. Hansen and Kenny conclude that the ability to listen to the body and adjust praxis with kinaesthetic and choreographic skills is essential to meet the physical demands for ageing professional dancers. And through deep curiosity, and continual pursuit of movement, artistry continues to be advanced by these ageing dancers, who maintain their cognitive capacity over and above other individuals.
The issues that Nakajima in conversation with Rainer raises about how dance ages with the dancer and how ageing informs and transforms choreographies, echo in Lenora Champagne’s article ‘Performing Archaeology’. Champagne describes Meredith Monk’s re-staging (in 2011) of her renowned work Education of the Girlchild, made five decades earlier when Monk was only 28 years old. Champagne asks: ‘How does the body of someone more than forty years older render the gestures created by that body as a young person? What traces of age or youth are retained by the viewer?’
Champagne, an artist herself, credits Monk for being a major influence on her own practice. The specific viewer Champagne reflects upon is her own daughter (then aged 13) who Champagne took to see Education of the Girlchild, curious to comprehend what impact such work would have on a younger generation. Acting as a springboard, this reflection on Monk’s work leads to Champagne’s own (Monk-inspired) piece Memory’s Storehouse. This solo production by Champagne restores the chronological line of advancing from young to old (Monk had reversed time). The article contains the performance script of Memory’s Storehouse and addresses issues to do with ageing, memory and grace that resonate throughout this issue.
In ‘They Are All at Least Seventy’ Beth Watton confronts the ‘decline narrative’ head on. Framed by the writing of Margaret Gullette, Elinor Fuchs and Lynne Segal (whose critique of this pervasive ‘narrative’ runs through this issue), Watton explores the ‘re-presentation of older women in theatre and live art’. She does this by analysing the creative methods and strategies adopted to subvert the decline narrative, by four women artists who originate (and are located in) very different cultural, social and political contexts and who work in markedly different performance modes. Watton organizes a thorough analysis of these innovative works through the themes Body, Space and Time, and is mindful that simply adding age to a feminist lens (with regard to race–class–gender) is problematic: (quoting Leni Marshall) ‘because doing so suggests that old age is already a theorized agenda’. An assumption that it is hoped many contributions in this issue of ‘On Ageing (& Beyond)’ question and unpack.
In all three sections – Body, Time, Space – Watton insightfully and confidently orchestrates her arguments around the work of British dramatist Caryl Churchill (specifically the Royal Court production of her 2016 play Escaped Alone), Mexican and Spanish artists Rocío Boliver and Begoña Grande (specifically their Balancing on the Edge/Age) and American performance artist and activist Lois Weaver (focusing on her alter-ego Tammy WhyNot and the piece What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Older and Having Sex).
Issues in relation to the menopause, productivity and theatrical economy are raised; passionate and violent acts of intergenerational performance-installations are analysed; and the fabulous (and notorious) ‘reverse striptease’ of Lois Weaver and her outrageous Tammy are laid bare. And through this engagement with diverse performance work of senior women artists, ethical, intersectional and socio-political concerns are revealed, begging questions for what it means to age in neoliberal times.
Lily Kelting, who was trained to look for physical beauty and virtuosity defined by strength and vigour, apprehends Eszter Salamon’s and Christophe Wavelet’s performance works, Monuments 0.1 and 0.2, where two ageing and legendary dancers from the US post-modern dance scene were featured (Valda Setterfield and Gus Solomons Jr). In her article, Kelting attempts to create a language for what she saw and experienced. While recollecting the Dance On ensemble’s performance in Berlin (in 2016) and reflecting on ageism in the dance profession, Kelting’s powerful description evokes something more in relation to ageing, ephemerality, and the embodied memory-archive.
When the actual Valda Setterfield (in her 80s) mirrored the movements of herself – Valda in her 30s – projected on the wall, the whole situation became ontological. On the other hand, Gus Solomons Jr’s athletic testimonial and his charming puppeteering of John Cage and Merce Cunningham are also framed by the spectre of absence. The incompleteness of description is essential to this piece because ‘that presence and absence rest against each other, that this quiet balance between memory that can be recovered in performance and that which cannot is not only the dramaturgy of the piece but maybe the nature of dance itself’.
While remembering and forgetting what she watched in the live performance, and the filmed documentation, Kelting deals with historical questions of dance and dancer: if dance lives in the body, where does that dance go when that body can no longer do that dance? With these two ageing legends, she recognizes critical and reflexive demonstrations of richness and fragility of the body-archive in this specific project that have greater implications.
The co-editor of this issue, Nanako Nakajima, makes a substantial contribution to the discussions surrounding ageing – as a gradual temporal process; proposing age as a performative and cultural construction; and discussing the conflicts, compromises and creative opportunities between the biologically driven idea of age and the physical, material reality of the ageing body. Nakajima, a dance researcher and dramaturg in Japan (and being Japanese) where, for centuries, through sustained traditional forms of dance-theatre, it has been customary for dancers to dance professionally well into their 70s. She writes from the context of a country that has the highest proportion of elderly citizens in the world, and yet also a culture that enthusiastically embraces both tradition and innovative developments in new technologies and robotics. The robot who upholds the promise to defy age and ageing, to extend life, and alter the conditions of movement, action and performance.
This ambitious article is comprised of two parts. First, it teases out connections between post-modern dance and performance art (and 60s Happenings) and their relationships with documentation, re-enactments and the archive. In the second part she provocatively reflects on Japan’s affection for robots and robotics, how they challenge the human and transgress notions of ageing. Nakajima utilizes Giorgio Agamben’s category of the ‘anthropological machine’ and explores issues of migration, bio-politics and robot revolution. Between these two monumental discourses she focuses on the performance/ installation work of Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee and the resuscitation of this Japanese manga character (Ann Lee) – reborn, resurrected, restaged. Through this analysis Nakajima confronts issues of infantilism, authorship disappearance and (digital) ageing.
Marcus Tan introduces his innovative practice-based research of the interactive installation called Embodying Senescence. With the use of technology, Tan excavates the ‘silvering Singapore’, especially the lives of the invisible underclass elderly in this rich, globalized country in Asia. This project is unique in that technology – in this case, virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays (HMDs) – can stage the aged body of ‘Uncle-E’ (a pseudonym), and the hardship of his daily life and labour, so that participant-spectators can experience what ‘Uncle-E’ perceives.
‘Uncle-E’ lives with his mentally disabled brother in a one-bedroom state rented apartment, and resorts to laborious menial work as cardboard collector, after automation displaced his human expertise twenty years ago. With one of the fastest ageing populations in the world, Singapore’s digitized and knowledge-based economy has sacrificed aged bodies within the biopolitical and biomedical framework. Singapore’s fast-speed reality cannot deal with the slow-paced aged body. In order to inhabit the other’s perspective, therefore, Tan’s project uses virtuality to create modified bodies, permitting a redefinition of experience and challenges for the body in space. As a performative intervention to make the invisible social problem visible, Embodying Senescence places participants in a 360-degree first-person embodied experience of the aged cardboard collector. While this project is aimed at engendering awareness and empathy for the impoverished aged underclass in Singapore, Uncle-E’s slow and uneven gait raised Tan’s awareness of the contrast between how fast things moved around him. In his daily motion, as well as his own body, he sees the present and future, his aged Other that is yet to be. Through merging the virtual and actual bodies, this project excavates a new consciousness of one’s own ageing body and of other bodies inhabiting the contemporary socio-political Singapore lifeworld.
In her article ‘Shaming Age: The unspoken truth of dance in Egypt’, celebrated Egyptian writer and performer Nora Amin beautifully tells the story of how the dancing body is extended through the ageing body to her writing body. Conservative Egypt embracing highly technological developments and with two-thirds of the population below the age of 25, has a paradoxical modernity: young in the heart and ancient in the mind. In this patriarchal system, a female dancer is one who breaks the rules by owning her body and offering it as a professional instrument for her dance: the female dancer is shamed by definition, but remains an object of desire and fascination and infatuation.
The figure of the female oriental dancer represents the ideal space between the patriarchal system and its system of aesthetics, providing the position of ‘infantilized woman’. In 2014, Egypt witnessed, for the first time, women publicly dancing in front of the electoral committees and their dance became a political protest. Through dance, as the ideal performative medium, aged Egyptian women could reclaim their liberation from the fundamentalist shaming system of values. This was the first attempt to link the history of dance, age and shaming with the political sphere of public action.
Nora Amin’s professional career also illuminates the historical trajectory of shaming/ ageing/dancing body in Egyptian society. Amin became a body of female leadership in the public sphere, extending her dancing body to meet her ageing body and unite together in her writing body. Embodying the journey of oppression and radiating the possibility for self-liberation and celebration, the female dancing body is a space where past, present and, it is hoped, future meet and empowers women to love their own historical bodies and dance for themselves.
Whereas Elinor Fuchs focused the reader’s attention on a pharmaceutical company using images of the young to promote health and longevity to the old and ageing (and the always soon-to-be old and ageing), Idit Suslik reverses this optic and mischievously and insightfully destabilizes an image embedded and idealized in Israeli visual culture – the image of the Israeli Combat Pilot as an icon of youth, heroism and national pride. ‘Do You Think Combat Pilots Have Haemorrhoids?’ certainly challenges masculine heroism and does so through exploring ageing feminine corporeality as advanced by Israeli choreographer Galit Liss, through the dance pieces of elderly women who are non-professional dancers.
Suslik describes Liss’s choreographic practice of ‘writing’ the elderly female body and sets this in a broader context of Western theatrical dance pioneered by Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel. However, she amusingly and convincingly expands from the private, personal body to issues of national identity, by confronting the image (the icon) of a fit, vigorous and trained masculine body that has become, over decades, emblematic of ‘protector of the homeland’ – the combat pilot. This image of the athletic and weaponized male reaches back to the very founding of modern Israel and has been sustained through various iterations and visual re-affirmation. Suslik’s essay ‘examines the choreographic and theatrical strategies utilized to simultaneously “voice” the ageing body and re-negotiate the privileged status of the combat male body’.
Suslik offers readers the opportunity to encounter a specific work – Go – choreographed by Liss, together with insight into her artistic practices, methods and approaches. This essay also adds to the cluster of articles in this issue that celebrate and analyse the ‘significance’ of elderly female bodies on stage and their potential to undermine, trouble and deconstruct idealized images that have become acculturated and canonized – in this context as national icon.
In an era where the voices and opinions of the young are forcefully expressed, engaging ever more diverse technologies and social media, the voices of elders can become ignored, unheard or silenced. How can senior voices and life experiences be engaged in innovative and democratic debates and performances to affect social change? Benjamin Gillespie in ‘Detonating Desire’ approaches the Unexploded Ordinances (UXO) of Split Britches with the care and attention of a bomb disposal expert. In apprehending this extraordinary performance of New York-based Split Britches – part of a series of public discourse structures generating radical and discursive hospitality – Gillespie offers a detailed account of the creative processes of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver (both now in their 70s) who have been devising uncompromising work together for more than fifty years.
Unexploded Ordnances is one of Split Britches most ambitious interactive projects to date, re-staging, riffing off and re-casting Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove in disturbing yet delightful leaps of imagination and involving the ‘audience’ in a ‘Situation Room’. Developing their signature creative strategies for democratic debate and public participation (in liberating and empowering performance contexts), Shaw (as General) and Weaver (as Madame President) open discussion through a Council of Elders. Unexploded Ordnances questions and embodies, makes tangible, urgent issues of ageing in contemporary times. Gillespie’s analysis is coruscating and fervent – it takes you to the Situation Room and makes you want to rethink endings.
New York theatre director Mallory Catlett reveals the creative process of her award-winning production, This Was The End, a remix of Uncle Vanya, created over a five year period from 2009 to 2014 with Mabou Mines, Yaddo and the Performing Garage. This article offers a substantial contribution from the perspective of theatre making to creative and alternative approaches towards forgetting and remembering through ageing. In this production, Catlett confronted various problems concerning ageing and memory loss, which also provides remarkable ideas and alternative artistic approaches such as improvisation and in-ear technology. In the process, technology merges into the human cognitive system and supports the ageing actors.
Her re-working of Chekhov becomes a device that makes the process of memory visible. Counterpoint to the improvised un-triggered recollection, the actors also recorded their voices of Chekhov’s play on tape for the sound designer to remix, a body of work that holds memory, but modulates as it is playing. The sound designer’s rhythm of scrubbing, rewinding, pausing and forwarding tapes registered also in the visual images and formed the scenic space. What do we do with our past? This Proustian question plays around Catlett’s This Was The End, even after the production. Her post-production installation explores the material as an archive and a ruin, embracing the solitary aspect of recognition both for the viewers and the characters. What is the role of live theatre when you encounter it as gallery installation? Her insightful process produces the pseudoscopic effect that makes the past seem closer than the present, by hypnotizing the present.
Through the street performance work titled BED, David Slater introduces his artistic approach to the invisibility of the elderly with Entelechy Arts. This collective performance work hijacked the ordinary wandering of people’s lives, by presenting people in their 70s and 80s alone and abandoned in nightclothes in bed. These people who usually suffer from the separation and the segregation by many of their peers, seek attention, recognition and the possibility of compassion, no matter how old and what kinds of backgrounds and abilities they have.
Against the prejudice of young people looking at older bodies with contempt, aggression and shame, and blurring what is real and what is fiction, Entelechy Arts attempted to challenge these habitual responses of people walking past. Through this work they built and sustained a relationship between theatre and the practice of everyday life. BED also toured to other countries including Japan, creating a profound impact and destabilizing conventions of theatre. This article illuminates a community arts practice and raises issues about the efficacy of theatre and the immediacy of true stories, told by ‘real’ old people, troubling the habitual and normal life of the street.
In contrast to the street intervention of the BED, Jayne Thompson focuses on older female performers in public protest. Her article ‘Moving Memory Dance Theatre Company’ reveals another historical aspect of the gendered elderly who had gained less initiative in social and artistic milieu. Thompson and Sian Stevenson at the University of Kent (UK) founded an all-female group of older performers – Moving Memory Dance Theatre Company – in 2010. Their interest in the potential of the untrained female ageing bodies in performance led the company to create a new performance aesthetic featuring older female performers aged 50 and above (including Thompson herself). Their creative practice encouraged movement and creativity through interaction with digital projections, and their work is distinctly rooted in the stories of their members in relation to identity, embodiment and ageing.
Thompson also describes Gestures of Defiance, their site-specific practice. When it was presented in Paris, it appeared as protest on behalf of the older, and often invisible, woman. During the short, pop-up, spectacle on the street, performers transformed from the image of little old Victorian women dressed in stereotypically feminine black bonnets and shawls, into powerful females with boxing boots and gloves, performing haka war dances. Their protest, in the form of artistic transformation of the older female bodies, celebrates the golden age of older people’s dance within both a professional and non-professional capacity.
Two voices and two perspectives interlace in the co-authored essay ‘Somewhere Between Remembering and Forgetting’. Michael Pinchbeck and Michael Mangan are themselves of a different generation and point of progression in their professional careers, but the focus of this essay is a performance project of memory and remembering enacted by Pinchbeck’s father. Tony Pinchbeck was in his mid-70s at the time of acting a version of Hamlet. This essay chronicles an intergenerational project in both the performance and through the writing. It also explores the relationship between a father and son, liminal spaces of theatre and the gaps between remembering and forgetting.
Michael Pinchbeck takes a dramaturgical approach to analysing the process and evolution of his production. Tony (a retired lawyer) struggles to remember the text for Hamlet that he once knew fifty years before, and Michael Mangan, who has written extensively on ageing and theatre, considers what he witnesses from the perspective of the audience. As Mangan asserts, ‘remembering the past … is to perform a creative act in the present’. But to misremember, or to forget, or to become muddled in recall are also modes of performance: modes of being present in the world and performing oneself that increasingly mark one’s progression into old age.
In ‘Riots, Cherry Blossom and Wheelchairs’ Rosalind Fielding offers fascinating insight into the Saitama Gold Theatre in Japan, their productions, processes and politics. Yukio Ninagawa, well known in the West for his visually powerful adaptations of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies that toured extensively, was less known for the sustained work as artistic director of the Saitama Arts Theatre, one programme of which was the ‘old-age company’ known as the Saitama Gold Theatre, a resident troupe comprising actors and non-actors aged from 55 to 80, whose average age was 78 (paralleled and complimented by the Saitama Next Theatre whose average age was 25).
Ninagawa developed experimental and uncompromising work with this large professional ensemble (at odds with any notion of amateur community theatre involving the ‘elderly’).
Resonating with other articles in this issue, Ninagawa embraced the realities of the elder actor performing on stage, not only accepting that lines might be forgotten, (repeated or extemporized), actions mis-performed and sequences mis-timed, but making a virtue of it and enabling a new theatre aesthetic to emerge, with different rhythm and pace, style of delivery and movement in space – a theatre that staged a ‘different kind of reality’ and that harnessed the ‘energy of people with a lot of experience’.Footnote3 The compelling notion of a hyphenated theatre, at the intersection between the real world and performance, is evoked and evidenced by Fielding’s analysis.
Fielding describes the remarkably ambitious and defiant productions of the Saitama Gold Theatre extending to their adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that involved approximately 1,600 performers, the intergenerational work collaborating with Saitama Next Theatre and the politically charged and poignant productions, such as Ravens, We Shall Load Bullets. The visually
powerful iconography of Ninagawa shines throughout – from the stage inhabited by senior performers contained in transparent acrylic (coffin-like) boxes through to the entire ensemble in wheelchairs for the opening of Richard II (directed by Ninagawa from his wheelchair).
Defiance of the ‘peak and decline’ narrative regarding ageing and creativity runs through this issue. Many authors advance examples of senior artists generating radical work through uncompromising thinking and non-declinist attitudes about life and death. The activist, performer and director Judith Malina, who founded The Living Theatre with Julian Beck, remained tireless and irrepressible through to her death aged 88 in 2015. In ‘Judith Malina’s Voracious Body, Mind and Spirit’ Cindy Rosenthal offers a detailed account of Malina’s creative work, raging against decline in her final two years at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of The Actors Fund on the outskirts of New York City. Rosenthal visited Malina frequently and witnessed her sustained attempts to organize performance projects inside the Actors’ Home. However, all efforts were impeded by changes in circumstances, decline in health and the untimely death of some of her most enthusiastic collaborators. The never realized play Triumph of Time is described alongside Malina’s fortitude and courageous ambition.
What shines through this engaging and empathetic chronicle of Malina’s last years and work is the care and compassion generously given by the young members of the surviving The Living Theatre and the larger international community that it spawned. Dylan Thomas implored ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and this essay ends with a scream. Malina, playing Antigone in the Italian experimental theatre company’s production (reprising a role she had played many times in The Living Theatre), entreats the audience to break down the walls and leads a scream of undying life.
This issue ends with an article about a performer who continued to perform controversially right up to her ‘end’ and whose presence continues to resonate long after her passing. In ‘Ageing, Temporality and Performance – Joan Rivers’ body of work’, Roberta Mock enters the complex and compelling world of Joan Rivers’ performing body during her final years of restless and ‘outrageous’ ageing, that defied social norms and punctured taboo subjects with acerbic comedy. The ‘body’ (of work) evoked in Mock’s title is central to her analysis and she begins by quoting Elizabeth Grosz, the Australian philosopher and feminist theorist, who advances acts of inscription (on the body) and notions of the body as a ‘hinge or threshold’. She reaches back to Merleau-Ponty and through him considers the body as a ‘nexus of live meanings’, but, crucially, she implores that we consider Rivers’ body as Rivers’ work – her body of/as work. Rivers was quintessentially a performer (through various persona) and her body was a work in process, performing herself, her body, that aged and changed. Her material was embodied and gave testament to what her body experienced through ageing, and although in many ways she defied growing old, she also spoke (and performed) openly about the calamitous and disabling impacts of ageing (with courageous and caustic humour). Mock writes with humour and urgency and captures something of the caustic and controversial aspect of Rivers in her writing about Rivers, combining description with analysis, outrageousness with rage and defiance, incorrigibility with fascination.
The editors are delighted to include on the covers of this issue, images of The Three Fates by Miwa Yanagi. These three mythic goddesses control human fate with their strings. This twin image of young and old brings us back to the symbolic time of the past, present, and future.
Miwa Yanagi, one of the most celebrated artists in Japan, has created photography and theatre on the issue of ageing. Her photographic series My Grandmothers and her recent theatre piece The Wing of the Sun, present powerful, imaginary figures of old women. In her works, which often combine the twin images of young and old, the process of ageing gives power, freedom, and grace to the female figures. The sublime of the ageing female body is imaginable in this context.
Although this issue relates to the previous PR issue ‘On Time’, ‘On Ageing (& Beyond)’ goes beyond certain cultural and categorical prejudice on the process of ageing: ageing celebrates human life. And these ageing figures, beyond modernist time, become closer to the mythic figures, who are not something to be laughed at.
Notes
1 This issue arose from and responded to the Performance Studies international (PSi) conference of 2013 (‘Now Then: Performance and temporality’) hosted by Stanford University (USA).
2 Links to the advertisements and Pfizer websites are provided in the notes, and the youthful gazes and poses that formed part of the campaigns can be fully encountered through readers’ own web surfing.
3 Ninagawa cited in Saitama Arts Foundation promotional material.