This video essay was developed from an intervention during a panel for the Ageless dance, Alkantara Festival in Lisbon. With me on the panel were Participants include Ana Macara, Emma Lewis, Kaite O’Reilly, Nanako Nakajima, and Susanne Foellmer.
I talked about the way that, in the context of the neoliberal monetisation of ageing, some contemporary dance can offer alternative ways of thinking about the processes of growing old. In doing so I talked about aspects of the work of Anna Halprin, Kazuo Ohno, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion and others to think about dance and ageing.
What I wanted to contest are the ways in which some ideas about dance and ageing can normalise the idea that if people make the right consumer choices they can somehow put off the losses of declining old age, and pretend that it isn’t happening. I tried to highlight the inherent contradictions within this and show that some recent experimental dance practices can exploit these in order to imagine different ways of thinking and being.
The quotation from Butler’s book that I found really useful is:
Assembly enacts a provisional and plural form of
coexistence that constitutes a distinct social
alternative to responsibilization. (2015, p. 16)
By ‘responsibilization’ Butler is referring to the neoliberal demand that people take responsibility for themselves as individuals independent from and unaffected by others. The kind of assembly that Butler is discussing here is one on the street or other space to assert a right to express collectively some particular political concerns that repudiate the lonely imperative to submit to the requirement to exercise the freedom of individualism. Being in a theatre audience or onstage performing, I’m suggesting, can also create, for the duration of the performative event, an assembly brought together to share and affirm particular social and political ideas and aspirations. The examples in this video essay are about these kinds of shared aspirations for more livable ways of becoming older.
ramsayburt 