common ground(s): Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo. Photo © Maarten Vanden Abeele

review, article

‘What about 50 Over 50?’
Elixir Festival at Sadler’s Wells

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15 min

common ground(s): Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo. Photo © Maarten Vanden Abeele

Liza Weber • Dom Czapski

14 May 2024

Two (relative) youngsters share their experiences of a festival for (relative) oldsters

We meet in the foyer of Sadler’s Wells, where three screens are showing dance films on loop, headphones dangling. ‘I don’t like to talk about age,’ shrugs veteran Bausch performer Malou Airaudo in Sarah Vaughan-Jones’ film ‘No Space for Age’ (2022), ‘There is no space for that on stage.’ Afterwards in a pub, Liza wonders how exactly we’re going to talk about age in our article. Dom doesn’t know. Can we say elderly people? Not old, surely. We agree on older dancers.

I never think that I am an older performer (who likes to think themselves as old, or older? older than what? than who? than myself?)…. so maybe this is why I cannot answer this question.
—Louise Lecavalier

Elixir Festival was launched in 2014 by Sadler’s Wells as a festival for older dancers. As its website claims, the festival aims to ‘challenge perceptions around dance and ageing’. Having only recently turned forty, Dom will admit that he selfishly found little incentive to have his perceptions changed in this area. He hadn’t yet experienced that kind of tectonic shift of priorities, the low-level fatigue and mild panic of turning forty; he hadn’t yet partaken even slightly in the Great Slowing Down. Liza, in her early thirties, will confess that she, perhaps also somewhat selfishly, found more of an incentive to have her perceptions changed, what with being an oral historian and having recently become a Befriender with the charity Age UK.

According to Age UK’s apocalyptic prognosis for ageing, ‘Of all the performing arts, dance is the one that has emerged as the most therapeutic when it comes to staving off the mental and physical ravages of old age’. Sadler’s Wells copy for the festival is, in comparison, considerably more life-affirming, framing the process of growing and maturing in an age-positive light. Admittedly, from the festival line-up, the only thing that’s laid to waste is the theory that a career in dance stops at 30. There’s hope for us yet, Dom! There certainly is, Liza.

Wednesday 10 April

Act 3

LW: In the foyer of Sadler’s Wells, six men over 60 wearing white loungewear – bathrobes, socks, and Adidas sliders – disrobe to dance intimate duets on a bare mattress. The mattress seems to offer no comfort, though, nor a platform for companionship, as they each writhe around in mental anguish while their partners look coolly on. There is something that has laid latent at last finding expression here, in what is presumably ‘Act 3’ of the dancer’s lives. An act, no less, that does not appear to offer any denouement, in this durational and ‘on loop’ performance by Christopher Matthews. Queer desire, the choreographer has it, is continuously being played out.

I tried to make a work that didn’t show older bodies as just enjoying dancing and being a light subject matter, but instead tried to show the complexity, vulnerability, and sensuality of someone in their 60’s, 70’s and 80s. Why can’t we see older bodies being authentically vulnerable and sensual? But again, this is not the dance world’s fault, this is something in society. Older sexuality is usually displayed as the butt of the joke and not truth. Normalise seeing queer older bodies as they are beautiful, lived, and sensual.
—Christopher Matthews

‘No Space for Age’: Malou Airaudo and Germaine Acogny on the background to their work common ground(s)

common ground(s)

LW: As the title suggests, two doyennes of the dance world – ‘mother of contemporary African dance’ Germaine Acogny and long-time Pina Bausch collaborator Malou Airaudo – have come together to agree about something (presumably they do not see eye to eye on other things). Witnessing their silhouettes on stage, their movements could not be more different. Acogny is earth, where Airaudo is water – a sense only reinforced by the constellations of rocks on stage, and the oar-like staff that they row respectively. And yet what they share is a gift for alchemy, in the widest possible sense of the word. For they have discovered in dance one of life’s elixirs: the sheer joy of living whatever your age, as they sing ‘Whatever Will Be, Will Be, Que sera, sera’. And it is this timeless wisdom that endows them with the simple, but no less profound, ability to give the audience their full faces, their full infectious smiles. In the otherwise deadpan-faced landscape of contemporary dance, we would do well to learn from them – our sisters, mothers, and grandmothers. Even if we cannot meet on common ground(s) where the dance itself is concerned.

Louise Lecavailer, Minutes Around Late Afternoon. Photo © Gigi Gianella

Minutes around Late Afternoon

LW: Wearing what looks like a black hooded boxing robe, Louise Lecavalier takes to the stage with pursed lips and pluck, which is lit in the shape of a boxing ring. Then, rising to the balls of her feet, she pummels the floor for the next twenty minutes in what can only be described as an onslaught of energy. Never have I seen so much get-up-and-go, let alone in a 66-year-old. With jabs here, and rear hooks there, Lecavalier tirelessly traverses the ring to the boom, boom, boom of Berlin’s Berghain. There’s no denying that she’s come to fight for her life. Only, at Sadler’s Wells there’s no competitor in sight. Lecavalier wins the night hands down.

I started with what was called ‘Expression Corporelle’, with no teacher, creating dance with friends. I liked dance then for its simple pleasure of expression and fun. Then I saw professional dancers and was impressed by the techniques, making their bodies so complex and beautiful, like aliens… allowing them to express something almost divine and animal-like at the same time. Dance was, for me, then a group experience for some 5 years. I enjoyed learning anything related to technique. Took all the classes. But I didn’t fit in perfectly.
—Louise Lecavalier

Chris Akrill and Valentina Formenti in Ben Duke’s White Hare. Photo © Gigi Giannella

White Hare

LW: It’s the future. And it’s, inevitably, apocalyptic. ‘We’ll get her a tortoise,’ the mother says, sporting a strawberry costume for a jumper, ‘because they don’t die, do they? They’ve been around since the dinosaurs.’ Cue tortoise on the projector screen, in painfully slow pursuit of an unreachable strawberry. Such is the magic realism of Ben Duke’s new work White Hare for Sadler’s Wells – a work in which dancers Chris Akrill and Valentina Formenti lull their grief (for a lost daughter and tortoise both) with waltz-like duets. As they whirl around the stage, though, time moves counterclockwise as opposed to clockwise, in this dance about ‘moving backwards’ as much as forwards as we approach the end of life. The ‘end’ is characteristically bathetic, if not anticlimactic, with Akrill awkwardly withdrawing into the wings on all fours, leaving but a tortoise gnawing on a strawberry. Or did I miss something? I imagine much of Duke’s work went over the auditorium, as it did my head. As the saying goes, ‘It’s like giving a donkey strawberries.’

Friday 12 April

In a Cage of Light

LW: That’s life, dancer Charlotta Öfverholm calls from high up on a trapeze in the proscenium arch. (That’s life), echoes double bass player Lauri Antila from lower stage right. Such is the up and down and over and out dynamic of In a Cage of Light – a work about being in, as much as out of, the spotlight of the stage as one inescapably ages. As Öfverholm and dancer Jordi Cortes find themselves interchangeably flat on their face, breaking the fourth wall, and picking themselves up to get back in the race, the humour darkens, and the dancing slackens. So much so that in between the appearance of a kitchen-knife-wielding masochist, clad head to toe in black, and a scene where Jordi Cortes, brandishing a bow, plays Öfverholm’s body like the strings to his double bass, I am left wondering whether the lights should have gone down on this cage a long time ago. With all their velvet and vivaciousness, the performers nevertheless manage to keep the spotlight quivering. Most notably, in a daring duet where Öfverholm precariously stands on the precipices of Cortes’ body parts, splayed out on the floor – like a mast to a deck. Certainly, Öfverholm comes out as the captain of this ship, which has not yet apparently sailed.

I really have to agree with everything that I’ll do on stage. I hardly feel nervous but really happy and grateful. I feel completely as one… I also believe that if you feel old, you become old.
—Charlotta Öfverholm

MOTHER

LW: There must be decades between them, this young man (Harry Wilson) and older woman (Charlotte Broom) who, the title suggests, must be his mother – though their intimacy seems at once platonic and romantic, as they coil around one another, hands interlocking, never letting go. Then parting, they pace laps and laps of the stage, their paths almost but never quite passing. Like ships in the night. And while they may pace one lap too many – their magnetic field of infatuation protracted to the point of gravitational collapse – the moment that they face each other and at last lock eyes is heartbreakingly, but understatedly, tender. In MOTHER, choreographer Susan Kempster has prepared the ground for an intergenerational meditation on love and loss, whatever the ambiguities of their relationship. That is, if you’re prepared to sit with it to its bittersweet end, when the young man steps unexpectedly out of her orbit.

Finding sophisticated movement that is not too pedestrian, but also suitable for my ageing body is one of the challenges. Performing has a different kind of space to it than when I was younger, and I notice my own presence in strange ways, almost as if from outside of my own body. There’s a different kind of weight now.
—Susan Kempster

Saturday 13 April

Company of Elders with ZooNation Youth Company.

The Exchange

DC: In the ominously titled The Exchange (an encounter between the Company of Elders and Zoonation Youth Company) there is breaking, there is popping, there is locking, there are somersaults and there are backflips (these last two not attempted by any Elders, fyi). For reasons unclear, the Elders are dressed in funeral burgundy tones while the youth company get to wear urban blacks and dark blues. The joke throughout the work, I think, is that older people look a bit funny dancing hip hop.The show is preceded by a short promo which seems a little more thought through than the ensuing production. I wondered later whether the quality of the production really mattered, though. A better way to look at it might be to say that the performers (young and older) were impressive, everyone on stage and in the audience (mostly friends and family) was having a good time, the rehearsal process (shared in the promo film) was presumably fun and positive, so in the end, an Exchange was had, a community brought together: a net positive all round.

I think that there definitely needs to be more dance venues and spaces for people of older age to perform and train regularly as they deserve to be seen and learn from choreographers from all over.
—Georgie Mziu, ZooNation

Wednesday 17 April

London Story

DC: Six performers in navy blue fitted t-shirts and tights. Chalkboards frame the stage on all three sides with timings and instructions. A red LCD timer which lets the audience know where we are in the piece (this’d be great at the Royal Opera House, I catch myself thinking). Above them, a small black panel with a stick figure in neon tape. A musician (Mattef Kuhlmey) with an electric guitar stands upstage right in front of a laptop. Next to him, a large pile of clothes which the dancers will wear throughout the piece. The artist Christopher Matthews (who also choreographed Act 3, see review above), dressed in black and adorned in neon tape, comes in and starts creating large stick figures (based on Cunningham’s computer DanceForms) on one of the large black sheets. The set must use material found in or near the theatre, and every performance follows a different structure: we are firmly in Cunningham Town. In this reimagining of Merce Cunningham’s 1963 Story, trios, duets, solos, a people pile, and more, are danced, all in strict Cunningham technical form. These beautiful living architectures of precarious tilts, accelerated promenades, micro weight-bearing ankle adjustments play out in front of us, in that anal-retentive fashion that was the Merce Cunningham way but remains so thrilling, a kind of clash between technology and muscle and bone. How odd it is, I think as I watch, that this man’s weird idiosyncratic moves, initially composed in a New York studio in the nineteen forties, is still so assiduously performed eighty years later. I feel like I am travelling in a time capsule, rushing through the second half of the twentieth century. I am simultaneously mildly bored and completely thrilled. These older bodies (the performers of Berlin’s Dance On Ensemble are all seasoned professionals and range in age from forties to sixty) are as exciting to watch in motion as any performer I’ve ever seen. When on earth, I wonder, did we decide that dance should only be performed by the young?

Professional dancers are maintaining their careers longer and keeping themselves healthier. The real challenge comes when the infrastructure isn’t there to support this. Specifically when dance companies maintain archaic practices of ‘forced retirement’ at a certain age (usually between 35 and 40), choreographers aren’t as artistically developed and thus not challenging, to experienced dancers, and venues feel the need to ghetto-ise older performers rather than simply presenting them and their work as valid on its own merits. I look forward to the day when age is as unnecessary to comment on as race…but we see how well that is going.
—Ty Boomershine, Dance On Ensemble

(never ending) Story

DC: Mathilde Monnier’s 2021 response to Cunningham work is shorn even further of artifice. The dance floor is surrounded at the back and sides by LED floor lights and the dancers wear colourful sports attire and trainers. It kicks off with a repetitive pas de bourrée and a hop in unison, the dancers facing the audience, and from there melds off into different granular variations of a constant flow of movement. The sound of their trainers create rhythms as they fall in and out of formations; patterns emerge and morph. After some time, still dancing, they begin to recite parts of an improvised poem by David Antin, also a response to the Cunningham work. Suddenly the musicality of the bodies bouncing around the space is altered with words, sentences uttered over the physical strain of performing steps and moving around the space. Poetic meaning flits between verbal and physical embodiments.

At one point during Monnier’s never ending (Story), the poem attributes this line to Merce Cunningham: ‘I don’t do these choreographies to surprise people but for a need for poetry.’ It’s a good way to summarise the evening, and indeed the festival: a reminder of the need for more representation of this kind.

Representation is perhaps the heart of the matter. Dom wonders: isn’t there something absurd about seeing dance exclusively as the province of the young? After all, dance, like most performing arts, sort of doesn’t really ‘work’ in its artifice: the audience perceives involuntary shakes, sweats, trips, flubbed lines. Perfection isn’t the point: the thing we go to the theatre to experience is that very tension between aspiration and failure. Once you see that the beauty is in the struggle you come to realise that our obsession with young artists is deranged.

Writers and critics are partly guilty of this. We love to say that a dancer soared or flew across the stage, but of course she didn’t – she simply jumped. Metaphors notwithstanding, she was subject to gravity, like the rest of us, and the beauty was in the attempt and in the commitment to it (call it technique if you like). In the end, all the grand jetés, assemblés, sissonnes in the world are failures of a kind. They land eventually and the only thing there is for us to enjoy is the poetry in the attempt and in the fall. The rest is just athletics.

What that poetry is, Liza thinks, is the art of performance itself. From all the dance pieces in Elixir, the thing that stood out most was the dancers’ execution – seemingly effortless, but thoroughly finessed. It was the way in which they carried themselves, not necessarily what they carried, that was striking. A sort of self-awareness that is not self-absorbed, but rather all-embracing. As if there existed a certain kind of ‘knowing’ between the dancers and their audience. A knowing equivalent, in Kempster’s words, to an ‘acute, astute, sense of how the body is moving’. And that’s what makes them ‘better performers’, they each expressed in their own way; and makes us better readers of their ageless poetry. ●