Output details

On Ageing

Fevered Sleep&Fuel

With the aim to circumvent negative images of ageing the project sought to stage ageing as being process and not a static state of depletion. It aimed to question how one defines age, thus wanting to challenge embedded perceptions of “young” and “old”.

I did this by:

• Collaborating as dramaturg with directors and creative team on a performance. The project deployed Gerontology as its underpinning theory to stage ageing as a process of accumulated experience and life course. This dovetailed with the decision to present ageing as “ageless” through having the performers aged 6-14 speak real life testimonies sourced from older people, as if these thoughts and memories were the young perfomers’ own. The juxtaposition sought to create a dramaturgy where “young” and “old” selves begin to mingle, thus suggesting that ageing is also a process of subjective story-telling where we rewrite our past in view of our present.

• Developing, together with the directors, dramaturgical and conceptual staging strategies as well as offering critical refelection on the rehearsals and emerging materials.

• Developing and editing documentation in the form of a booklet in collaboration with director and graphic designers. The documentation disseminates the project and explains the dramaturgy and narrative of the piece. It contains a reflective dialogue between directors and dramaturg about the project’s representation of ageing and the critical response.

The project opens a debate about perceptions and representations of ageing within our culture. Implicitly asking if ageing is “ageless” the project attempts to present ageing as a process that belongs to everybody in society.

While the project is underpinned by scientific research, it uses it as a creative stimulus and through so doing, advocates an approach to research and practice that is not based on a classical transmission model.