#presentation@What age brings to dance
Choreography, dance videos #résonances, multi-screen installation?
Cécile Proust and Jacques Hœpffner
While most dancers disappear from our stages as they grow older, some avoid this fading into oblivion. The persistence of their creativity is at the heart of this project. It challenges Western assumptions that assume dancers over the age of 70 are too old to perform on stage. Our intuition, however, is quite different: does the maturity of these dancers not contribute to the emergence of the exceptional qualities of their movements? It is from this question that Ce que l’âge apporte à la danse (What Age Brings to Dance) is developed, in a series of filmed interviews, #résonances dance videos, and a choreography.
Ce que l’âge apporte à la danse questions our validation practices. If the poetics of only young bodies’ movements is valued, dance is deprived of other form of poetics. Poetic choices are also political choices.
We honor senior dance, its freedom, its resistance, its joy, its audacity, and its hymns to pleasure. With age, the virtuosity of youth does not diminish but becomes internalized. It is this transition, from a vibration on the surface to a vibrant interiority, that we highlight.
This project attempts to shed light on the artistic, perceptual, and kinesthetic imaginations that the interviewed artists employ. What aesthetics and poetics do they defend?
This work is careful not to romanticize or exoticize their stories. Without obscuring the difficulties they may have encountered, or the social and material conditions that made their expression possible, the interviews question the links that may exist between dance style, cultural contexts, and the possibility of continuing to dance at an advanced age.
Through their stories, their filmed dances, and choreography, Ce que l’âge apporte à la danse provides direct and sensitive access to a multitude of dance stories from around the world.
We filmed 50 dancers in Europe, West Africa, Japan and India
27 dances was created specifically for the project by the artists filmed
Aventure continue !
What age brings to dance is accompanied by a scientific committee
Pauline Boivineau, historian / Anne Décoret Ahiha, anthropologist / Barbara Formis, philosopher
Isabelle Ginot, dance researcher / Juliette Rennes, sociologist.