Location: Zoom Room A
ASL Interpretation will be provided
Sponsored by the University of British Columbia, Department of Theatre and Film
Panel Description: This curated panel explores diverse theatrical performances of age and aging in different geographical and temporal contexts that push against the supposed “shores” (or boundaries) of Theatre and Performance Studies, thereby exposing an undertheorized, intersectional identity category central to live performance. We are concerned with how both theatre and performance have the power to counter ageism as well as stigmas surrounding sexuality, gender, older bodies, memory loss, and dementia, exposing unique performance aesthetics, dramaturgical structures, intergenerational communities, cross-age casting, and embodied difference. How can we “shore up” age a salient marker of socially constructed differences in our research by showing how intergenerational performers engage in complex performances both on and offstage? How might we challenge linear representations of aging in the field of Theatre and Performance Studies? How might we highlight the complex performance of sexuality and gender alongside aging subjectivity and the older body? This panel approaches these questions by exploring three performances that foreground themes of aging, memory, and sexuality/gender: Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experience of Dementia (RTC), a collaborative theatre project with persons with dementia; Lois Weaver’s performance as her alter-ego “Tammy WhyNot” in What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex; and the performance of vulnerability and countering ageism in All the Sex I’ve Ever Had by Mammalian Diving Reflex. These papers reflect the growing field of age studies and different perspectives that might enliven studies of age in Theatre and Performance Studies in diverse ways.
Abstracts and Participant Bios
Paper Title: “Weaving Acts of Care: Staging Age and Sexuality in the Performance Work of Lois Weaver”
Name: Benjamin Gillespie, PhD
Description: Lois Weaver (73) has been a leading contemporary theatre-maker, performer, director, and teacher for the last forty years. As co-founder of Split Britches, she has continuously challenged traditional gender roles, confronted patriarchal values, and defied heterosexual imperatives, most notably through the contrast of butch/femme lesbian roleplay on stage. Now in her seventies, Weaver pushes the perceived boundaries of being an elder artist by advocating for older communities and engaging with her own sexual identity as an aging femme woman as part of her public performance practices. Using her alter-ego Tammy WhyNot (based on country singer Tammy Wynette), Weaver engages in difficult topics with audiences and collaborators that might otherwise feel too uncomfortable to engage with, such as senior sexuality and cultural ageism. Tammy has “accompanied” Weaver since 1977 as a method of participatory research in older communities. This paper details Weaver’s engagement with older communities as well as her ability to confront ageist stereotypes through radical acts of queer performance, most explicitly in her performance What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex (2015). I will explore how Weaver engages intimately with her audiences by performing public acts of care, employing Tammy WhyNot to aid in supplanting her own anxieties about getting older and her own shifting sexual identity as a woman in her seventies while also doing so for her collaborators. Through her performance as Tammy, she disrupts ageist tropes about the supposed burden of older, queer populations by making them a part of the creative process and the performance itself, thus enacting a performance of care that retro-activates the desires of her older participants to engage in debate and discussion about diverse experiences of sexuality and aging—subjects which might otherwise remain taboo and undiscussed in public forums.
Bio: Benjamin Gillespie is Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College where he specializes in gender and media studies, performance and theatre studies, and professional communication. He completed his PhD in Theatre & Performance Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2022. His dissertation was awarded the 2022 Paul Monette-Roger Horwitz Dissertation Prize from CLAGS: Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. His research explores the intersection of aging, gender, and sexual identity in modern and contemporary theatre and drama. He is currently editing a critical anthology of the New York-based, feminist theatre company Split Britches’ later works based on his dissertation research and an edited collection on age and performance entitled Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging with Cindy Rosenthal. He co-edited the special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on “Age and Performance: Expanding Intersectionality” with Julia Henderson and Nuria Casado-Gual published in 2021. He is Associate Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. His articles and reviews have appeared in Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, PAJ, Theatre Research in Canada, and Canadian Theatre Review, along with a number of edited anthologies.
Paper Title: “Dramaturgies of Assistance and Care: Using performance to counter the stigma of dementia”
Name: Julia Henderson, PhD
Description: Raising the Curtain (RTC) was a five-year partnership that used community-based, arts-engaged, participatory research to explore the question: “In what ways does the collaborative involvement of older adults with lived experience of dementia in community-engaged arts foster engagement and social inclusion?” This paper focuses on the author’s postdoctoral research with RTC which involved interviews and focus groups with the project’s hired Artist Facilitators (AFs) for the purpose of describing the processes, strategies, and techniques of the project’s collaborative creation approach. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed emergent themes that described 10 project values, each with supporting practices. This paper focusses in one value: “Performance has unique value in counter [dementia-related] stigma .” It outlines practices that supported performers living with dementia to participate in live performances (both face-to-face and digital) for public audiences. Practices included: “Disrupting theatrical conventions,” “Choosing presence over memory,” “Ensuring comfort,” “Thoughtfully choosing form/style,” “Emphasizing authenticity,” “Using and showing relational supports,” “Comfort with slowness and silence,” and “Foregrounding peer collaborator voices.” These findings offer new perspectives on how collaborative creation, and especially performance, can disrupt stigmatizing representations of age-related memory loss, and promote inclusion of persons living with dementia.
Bio: Julia Henderson is an Assistant Professor in Department of Occupational Science and
Occupational Therapy with a background as an OT and a professional actor. Her research focusses on redressing ageism in North American culture. She uses qualitative and mostly arts- based methods, especially theatre, to work with older adults on projects that range from collaborative creative engagement with people with lived experience of dementia, to older adult activism, to developing creative accessibility strategies for older adult performers. Julia is also Vice Chair of the North American Network in Aging Studies, a member of UBC’s Edwin S.H. Leong Health Aging Program, and Creative Accessibilities Facilitator with Western Gold Theatre, a professional senior theatre company in Vancouver, BC. Her research is published in TRiC, ATDS, CTR, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Age Culture Humanities, and Thornton Wilder Journal. In 2021, she co-edited the special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on “Age and Performance: expanding Intersectionality.”
Paper Title: “En/Countering Ageism Together: All the Sex I’ve Ever Had by Mammalian Diving Reflex”
Name: Heunjung Lee, PhD Candidate
Description: This paper discusses how the performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had (shortened as AtS) by the Toronto-based Canadian theatre group Mammalian Diving Reflex reveals and counters ageism and the stigma around sexuality of older adults by analysing its relational aesthetics and dramaturgy among older community performers, younger creative team members, and the audience. Mammalian Diving Reflex has produced various city editions all around the world from 2010 to present; they staged AtS-International Edition (2014) in Toronto and AtS-Quebec will be performed in 2023. Analyzing one of the city-editions, AtS-Gwangmyeong (2021) in South Korea, a live performance to which the author had access, this paper argues that AtS demonstrates the performative power of aged citizens on stage to document, remember, and combat the ageist perspectives that are deeply rooted in many cultures, including Canada. Mammalian Diving Reflex has defined their community-based works as “relational aesthetics” (Whyte 2013), generating new relationships and making a “social acupuncture” (O’Donnell 2008) in society. This paper investigates how AtS creates new encounters and relationships between people of different ages and backgrounds through a relational and accessible dramaturgy. This paper also suggests a new term to reframe non-professional older performers as experts of age/ing, drawing on the notion of “experts of everyday” which describes non-professional performers in Reality Theatre. Through this new term, this paper illuminates the generosity, vulnerability, and power of the older performers who (en)counter ageist perceptions and assumptions against old age by sharing their unique experience and view of ageing, sex, and life.
Bio: Heunjung Lee is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta, and she also teaches drama courses in the department. Her doctoral research investigates the cultural constructions that demarcate normal aging and minds in contrast to the abnormal aging and minds. Bridging Age Studies, Disability Studies, and Performance Studies, she explores the potential of performance practices and theories in intervening on the ableist and ageist preconceptions regarding older adults living with dementia.
