The Aging Body in Dance

A cross-cultural perspective

Nanako Nakajima, Gabriele Brandstetter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315515311
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Danza

What does it mean to be able to move?

The Aging Body in Dance brings together leading scholars and artists from a range of backgrounds to investigate cultural ideas of movement and beauty, expressiveness and agility.

Contributors focus on Euro-American and Japanese attitudes towards aging and performance, including studies of choreographers, dancers and directors from Yvonne Rainer, Martha Graham, Anna Halprin and Roemeo Castellucci to Kazuo Ohno and Kikuo Tomoeda. They draw a fascinating comparison between youth-oriented Western cultures and dance cultures like Japan's, where aging performers are celebrated as part of the country's living heritage.

The first cross-cultural study of its kind, The Aging Body in Dance offers a vital resource for scholars and practitioners interested in global dance cultures and their differing responses to the world's aging population.

Part I

The aging body in the late twentieth century

American postmodern dance, German dance, and Japanese dance

Chapter 1

The aching body in dance

Yvonne Rainer

In the late 1950s I attended a recital by Ruth St. Denis. It took place in a New York dance studio, maybe Dance Players on Sixth Avenue. She was about the same age as I am now (78 years as of January 2013). Taller than I by a good four or five inches, she was clad in a long sleeveless black gown of a filmy texture. Her hair was white, but it was her arms that drew my attention, for they were not only the sole source of movement but also snowy white in contrast to the blackness of her dress. The flabby undersides of her upper arms created their own autonomous swaying motion. That was my primary recollection: those ivory undulating arms lifted in supplication or some such appeal to a transcendent spirituality.

Around the same time I attended a Farewell to Dance concert of Maria-Theresa, Isadora Duncan’s last surviving foster daughter. In a bare studio she was accompanied by an elderly white-haired man hunched over an upright piano as he played a Beethoven sonata. It may have been the “Tempest” (No. 17 in D Minor). I was impressed that she could still run. Trailing a dark piece of diaphanous fabric in the air, she dropped repeatedly to the floor, only to rise again and run while looking apprehensively over her shoulder as though pursued by a gathering storm. It was poignant but a little sad. This was her fifth annual Farewell, and I suspected it would be her last.

My favorite Martha Graham performance was Cave of the Heart when she was in her sixties, playing the role of Medea. Still riveting, she bourréed ferociously from stage right to left while seeming to gobble the long red entrails of her murdered children, which she pulled from her bodice in a bloody stream. Later she could be embarrassing as she tried to inhabit the roles that she had created for herself in her younger days.

So when is it time to say “farewell to dance”? When and how must we begin to think of ways to avoid becoming objects of pity or caricature as we attempt to engage movement that is ever – and obviously – more difficult? Traditionally the choreographer/dancer performs alongside younger dancers even as she becomes demonstrably older than the members of her consistently youthful company. The young performers leave and are replaced while the choreographer continues to dance. Merce Cunningham made special solos for himself until withdrawing from the stage. Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown both stopped dancing under physical duress at a certain point while continuing to choreograph. When to leave is a highly personal matter, contingent on will, pleasure, and physical fitness, all of which are subject to the decline that inevitably comes with aging.

My own situation has taken a different turn from those mentioned earlier. Never having wanted the complications of maintaining a stable dance company, by the age of 40 I had quit the field entirely to concentrate on making experimental narrative films. By the time I returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the White Oak Dance Project (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan), I found myself face to face with the problematic of aging and dance in the person of Mikhail Baryshnikov, who, through a kind of eminence grise, would be performing alongside the five other much younger dancers in his group. Even though Misha was still at the top of his game with regard to the technical demands of the choreography I was dredging up from my past, both his age and celebrity were issues that I felt I had to foreground in some way as an alternative to putting the audience in the position of having to choose whether to notice or ignore his difference from the others. So, in order to shave his aura or stature down to human scale, so to speak, I inserted moments of sly intervention, such as having someone walk on his heels, forcing him to adjust his shoe, retie his laces, and catch up with the others. It was a way of sending the message that the choreographer was conscious of the situation as a problem to be solved. In one of the performances of the piece I entered the stage and performed some unison movements with the others and then left. It was a cameo, or more precisely, a “fly in the ointment” of the highly professional goings-on, for I was barely able to keep up with them.

For the next few years I stayed out of my dances as a performer, with the exception of standing in for Pat Catterson, who could not attend a performance of RoS Indexical (2007) in Los Angeles in 2009 due to the death of her mother. Fortunately the stage décor consisted of an overstuffed sofa, to which the dancers would repair between extended executions of movement. After a brief introduction in which I explained the state of things to the audience, I did what I could, sporadically entering the action and then retreating to the sofa until my next cue. One reviewer mentioned my “stiffness.” Yes, this body, never very limber, was stiffening up despite my most conscientious, daily efforts at maintenance. I could justify my participation on this occasion as a proxy and had been careful to warn the audience of what they would see: my literally “standing in” for the absent dancer.

My next dancing foray occurred in 2010 when I performed what had become my signature dance, Trio A (originally called The Mind Is a Muscle, Part 1, created in 1966 at age 32). This version of Trio A, subtitled Geriatric with Talking, encapsulated what might be called my philosophy of aging in dance – namely, “Let it all hang out.” If you’re going to make an appearance in front of an audience and you can’t execute the material as robustly or as accurately as you once did, then be honest; tell them what’s going on moment by moment. This is exactly what I decided to do. It was language that would add the necessary consciousness to the performance, hopefully waylaying any tendency on the part of the spectators to pity or condescend. As I threaded my way through the dance, I extemporaneously told them what I was experiencing, without interrupting the flow of movement:

This move is supposed to be a slow rise of the leg, not a battement, but why can’t I get my leg up any higher than this anymore? Oh, just do it and get it over with.

I have to tell you that what you are just now witnessing is a state of extreme stage fright. I haven’t performed for a while, so I hadn’t anticipated what it would be like.

And while trying to rise in a particular way from the floor after a series of rolls:

I can no longer do this in a smooth fashion, like rise up over my turned-out bent left leg. But why isn’t this other method just as good? [as I scramble up] As long as I keep moving and don’t stop.

Not entirely to my surprise, the audience thought it was a hoot and laughed at everything I said. I have no doubt that more than half of them were familiar with Trio A, a fact that I remarked on at the beginning of the performance – “You’ve probably seen it on YouTube” – so they had a double consciousness of what they were viewing: the 1974 film of me doing it at the age of 40 and the then present incarnation at age 75. I am certain the dance was quite recognizable, still bearing the imprints of uninflected flow and refusal to look at the audience (which I persisted in maintaining even as I spoke, thus creating another impetus to the general hilarity). What it lacked were the bodily extensions and sheer physical power of the 1966 version – age 32 – which has been documented only in photos.

How have I recently dealt not only with aging in my choreography but also with aging performers, including myself, a group whose ages range from 40 to 78? First and foremost in my approach to this issue are the titles of my last three dances: Spiraling Down, Assisted Living: Good Sports 2, and Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money? Once posed, the matter of aging is out in the open and can even encompass material that may have nothing to do with it. Most of my movement ideas these days stem from found sources: Laurel and Hardy, Sarah Bernhardt, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Jacques Tati, and Groucho Marx, as well as conventional ballet combinations and everyday actions. I no longer think of choreography in terms of innovative movement. Though I do not demand of my dancers an excess of athletic prowess, my choreography does require a certain amount of virtuosity, such as dancing in unison, recitation of long monologues, the content of which – economics, sexual identity, bad jokes, legal issues, political reports gleaned from the news, and so forth – does not mesh with simultaneously executed steps and, lately, deadpan slapstick and pratfalls. The work requires trained dancers.

In these recent dances I have given myself roles other than that of dancer. Mainly through the reading of texts (authored by others), I variously enact a carnival barker, a historian, a social critic, a political analyst, master of ceremonies, and narrator of my brother’s cognitive decline. My preferred mode of self-presentation is “existence”. I love to exist on stage. I no longer “dance”. The oldest in my group – informally known as the “Raindears” – is 66 and still going strong. She does Trio A forwards and backwards. She teaches the others tap routines. Her face is lined but her body looks as lively as that of the youngest. She warms up for an hour, giving herself an entire Cunningham workout. Her body, like mine, is her enduring reality. The difference is that hers has continued to “dance”.

In conclusion, here is another quote, recalled from Trio A: Geriatric with Talking:

I would like you to think of this version of Trio A not as evidence of deterioration and decline, but as a new form of avant-garde dance. The aging body is a thing unto itself and need not be judged as inadequate or inferior if it can no longer jump through hoops.

In fact, the evolution of the aging body in dance fulfills the earliest aspirations of my 1960s peers and colleagues who tore down the palace gates of high culture to admit a rabble of alternative visions and options. Silence, noise, walking, running, detritus – all undermined prevailing standards of monumentality, beauty, grace, professionalism, and the heroic. It is high time to admit the aging body of the dancer into this by now fully recognized and respected universe. Aging is the ultimate goal and hurdle, one that I myself must confront. So I tell myself,

Yvonne, keep on reading your texts, but continue to dance, aches and all. Farewell to mewling “I no longer dance.” Dance, girl, dance, and to all who observe me, I challenge you, “Pity me not.”

Granted, I shall need a little empathy from my friends.

Chapter 2

Yvonne Rainer’s Convalescent Dance

On valuing ordinary, everyday, and unidealized bodily states in the context of the aging body in dance

Ramsay Burt

This chapter discusses Yvonne Rainer’s 1967 piece Convalescent Dance in the context of the aging body in dance. A perhaps unforeseen side effect of the aesthetic revolution brought about in the 1960s by members of Judson Dance Theater has been an expansion of the performance options for older dancers. When I was teaching in New York in 1999 I was lucky enough to see Yvonne Rainer return to Judson Memorial Church to perform Trio A Pressured, a new programme of works based on her best-known piece, Trio A. Rainer was then 65 years old. Steve Paxton, who danced with her in this, was 60. In 2008, Trisha Brown presented an exhibition of her drawings at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis titled So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, during which she performed some of her hybrid drawing dances. At the time she was 72. Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer – all of whom were associated with Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s – have all gone on dancing into their sixties or seventies. My aim in this chapter is to explain how the aesthetic revolution of minimalism in dance, which these dancers largely initiated, has resulted in changes to ideas about dance and aging. Dancing Trio A in 1999 at Judson Memorial Church, Rainer was a gaunt, slightly frail figure, having survived breast cancer in the 1990s. Back in 1967, while recovering from major surgery, she had danced Trio A as Convalescent Dance during a dance concert arranged as a protest against the Vietnam War. I shall argue that Convalescent Dance exemplifies the revolution in ideas about aesthetics and the performer-audience relationship that has contributed to opening up new options for theatre dance that enable us today to look differently at older dancers.

These new options are ones that Steve Paxton has been exploring. Interviewed in 1995 when he was 55, he commented,

The things that are difficult now are not the things that were difficult then [when he was younger]. All in all, I’m quite surprised to still be dancing. I thought you stopped at 35 if you had any integrity. Possibly that’s true, I don’t know! But anyway, I’m 20 years on, past that, and it’s been a really interesting 20 years because I feel like I’m still discovering systems in the body that I hadn’t noticed before, and new ideas to pursue.¹

When he says ‘discovering systems in the body’, he is referring to his researches into somatic knowledge about movement that has found its most recent expression in his DVD Material for the Spine but has underpinned his performances and teaching since at least the early 1970s, when contact improvisation as a practice first developed. Paxton has frequently explained, however, that he first became aware of these somatic aspects of movement while performing minimalist choreography in the 1960s.

When Steve Paxton talks about ‘the body’ and discovering systems in it, he is using a kind of phraseology that emerged in the 1960s during discussions about minimalism and dance, principally in Yvonne Rainer’s writings. In a lengthy statement in the program for the first full performance, in April 1968, of the completed The Mind Is a Muscle, of which Trio A is the first part, Rainer writes, ‘If my rage at the impoverishment of ideas, narcissism, and disguised sexual exhi...