Performance Research Volume 24 Issue 3

On Ageing (& Beyond)

Issue editors: Richard Gough & Nanako Nakajima

ISSN: 1352-8165 (2019) 24:3

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

pp. 1 - 8

Going Transchron : From the sublime of age to juvenescence

Elinor Fuchs

pp. 9 - 12

Nanako Nakajima in Conversation with Yvonne Rainer

Nanako Nakajima

pp. 13 - 23

Physical and Mental Demands Experienced by Ageing Dancers : Strategies and values

Pil Hansen, Sarah J. Kenny

pp. 24 - 31

Performing Archeology : Meredith Monk’s Education of the Girlchild Revisited and Memory’s Storehouse, a solo by Lenora Champagne

Lenora Champagne

pp. 32 - 39

They Are All at Least Seventy : An exploration of female resistance to the decline narrative in theatre and live art

Beth Watton

pp. 40 - 48

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

pp. 49 - 54

This is (Not) the Ageing Body in Dance : Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee and the robotisation of the ageing body in Japan

Nanako Nakajima

pp. 55 - 65

Embodying Senescence : Performing agedness in the space of virtuality

Marcus Cheng Chye Tan

pp. 66 - 73

Shaming Age : The unspoken truth of dance in Egypt

Nora Amin

pp. 74 - 80

‘Do You Think Combat Pilots Have Haemorrhoids?’ : Challenging masculine heroism through ageing feminine corporeality

Idit Suslik

pp. 81 - 88

Detonating Desire : Mining the unexplored potential of ageing in Split Britches’ Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)

Benjamin Gillespie

pp. 89 - 98

This Was The End : The pseudoscopic effect

Mallory Catlett

pp. 99 - 107

BED

David Slater

pp. 108 - 114

Moving Memory Dance Theatre Company : Gestures of Defiance

Jayne Thompson

pp. 115 - 121

Somewhere between Remembering and Forgetting : Working across generations on The Middle

Michael Pinchbeck, Michael Mangan

pp. 122 - 131

Riots, Cherry Blossoms and Wheelchairs : The performance politics of Saitama Gold Theater

Rosalind Fielding

pp. 132 - 138

Judith Malina’s Voracious Body, Mind and Spirit : Two years of raging against decline in the Actors Home

Cindy Rosenthal

pp. 139 - 143

Ageing, Temporality and Performance : Joan Rivers’ body of work

Roberta Mock

pp. 144 - 152

Notes on Contributors

pp. 153 - 154