Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
On Ageing
• PaR (DVD and portfolio)
A theatre piece for adults performed by children, exploring time, change and ageing.
300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content
This PaR outcome is published in the form of a performance with related documentation. The collaborative research process involved cross-disciplinary artists, medical professionals, social scientists and academic gerontologists. The principal research partnership was with the University of Southampton Centre for Research on Ageing.
In social gerontology, ageing is partly a function of perception: there is a critical relationship between the viewer and the viewed through which ageing becomes tangible. As an apparatus of looking and being looked at, performance offers new ways of thinking about ageing, which are simultaneously intellectual, embodied and experienced, and conducted in a temporal form. Through performance, ageing can be articulated as an embodied, experiential aspect of living (not a precursor to dying), and as an expression of inter-personal and inter-generational relationships.
The following research findings were articulated through the performance:
>Ageing is manifest through various processes of accumulation: the accumulation of genetic damage that leads to an ageing body; the accumulation of memories that are indicative of a “life lived”; the accumulation of objects and ephemera in material culture.
>Ageing is characterised by diversity (e.g. kidney function in a group of 80 year olds is likely to be more diverse than kidney function in a group of 8 year olds). The performance drew on research interviews with people of all ages and social groups.
>Ageing characterises all aspects of the life course. This also informed the decision to deploy text gathered from people of all ages, and the crucial distinction between ageing and ‘being an old person’ was articulated through the presence of children.
Ageing is a way of narrativising multiple processes of change across all aspects of being as explored in the non-linear dramaturgy of the performance.
On Ageing was first performed at the Young Vic Theatre, London in September 2010.
