• By: MaryArmentrout

Posted on February 29, 2012

so, last night quite a few of us gathered to discuss dance and ageing at Dance Discourse Project #12 – Shifting ground: examining the complex terrain at the intersection of dance and aging. I was heartened to have so many people (of so many different ages!) in the room, and also buoyed by the liveliness of the conversations during the break out sessions. In my intro to the evening I had rather emphatically stated that I felt a shift WAS occurring, and more aged bodies are finding their way on stage these days, and I felt the panelists’ very fine presentations examined different aspects of this experience. In the break out groups I really felt the sense of “hope”and excitement about the shift that Lucia August spoke about at the end, and also felt like the clarity we achieved about some of the (harsh) economic realities of continuing to dance were really useful.
As the hubbub of the actual event subsides in my memory, I am left with residues from one of the most powerful experiences I have had in this regard, that was fueling my thoughts on the subject throughout this whole process. When I was young and just out of college, (ok, 1985) I happened to be living in Berlin and got, by chance, to see Kazuo Ohno perform “Remembering La Argentina.” This was of course a life-altering experience – he was so magnificent! and so much of the power of what he was doing was coming from the multi-layered performance he was able to give because he was so aged and the thing he was trying to portray was age and memory and loss and how the body can conjure lost worlds. That dance can be about such deep and vast topics doesn’t surprise me and didn’t surprise me then, I know it to be the nature of dance as a deep and powerful art form to be able to convey such meanings with elegance and ease. However, the part I find a little surprising, in re-examining this experience in the light of this ddp, is that my reaction to seeing this great work of art was a sense of relief – oh, I am too young to be a great dance artist yet, I’ll have to wait another 30 years at least before I will be any good on stage – these were my thoughts! And looking back now, all I can say, is how lucky I was to run into such an experience so early on – it colored my world, and definitely for the better! and what would I think about this whole topic if I hadn’t gotten to see that performance, which remains one of the top three performances I have ever seen. And what about all the people who didn’t get to see such a thing, do they succumb to the pressures of the youth-driven fake glossy airbrushed world because they just don’t have anything else to hold onto? How can we make sure treasures like this can continue to come into being and nourish us? maybe that shift I spoke about earlier will help…

– Mary Armentrout

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