School kids, their adult helpers, parents and neighborhood picnickers doing the first performance of choreographer Laurence Bertagnol’s “Connexion 6: Création Instantanée et participative” dance project for the suburban city of Bagnolet, July 2023. Photo © Guillaume Ison, courtesy Ville de Bagnolet
I wrote last September about GRICP, an intergenerational dance program put together by choreographers Jean Christophe Bleton and Laurence Bertagnol. Full disclosure: after interviewing the pair, I joined the group. I’ll do it again this year, not because I want to bop till I drop, but because
Good sense, innocence, cripplin' mankind/Dead kings, many things … clutter the mind –Strawberry Alarm Clock, 1967
Bleton and Bertagnol’s GRICP is a democratic project with a straightforward argument: since dance is primary human art, everybody should have access to it. Bleton and Bertagnol agree that there’s nothing special about dance among us codgers when compared with infants and the ruck of non codgers; dance performance is by nature inclusive: it belongs to its performer, not their social situation (BAP September 2022: Cie Les Orpailleurs: practicing the dangerous art of thought in muscle & blood, skin and bone).
Since talking with Bleton and Bertagnol, there seems to have been a spate of dance performance featuring performers entering what the French call le troisième âge – a dignified (and, by the way, non-chronological) way of referring to humans over 60.
What I’ve seen since the first of the year 2023 are two parts of a gender-blending triptych by Bleton (Ne Lachons Rien, the concluding piece, debuts in Paris in January 2024) along with Rachid Ouramdane’s Un jour nouveau, a short musical comedy nostalgia-style piece, accompanying Angelin Preljocaj’s and the remarkably talented Alterballetto troupe’s reflection on the social condition of the ageing and Portrait, Mehdi Kherkouche’s hip-hop-contemporary-dance performance as Netflix-style dysfunctional-family soap. These last were all at the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot last January and represent, along with Bleton’s triptych, pretty much the gamut of current approaches to aging in dance performance.
At least parts, if not the whole, of the interest in dancing codgers seems to me due to general post-Covid live dance performance effervescence. And also, there’s the sheer number of over-60s in good shape on both sides of the stage, so there are plenty of performers and, since we love nothing so much as studying our own selves, market opportunity.
But it may be that the real push towards featuring le troisième âge comes from the nature of Dance. Unlike narrative and sound and visual representation, Dance is, as Isadora Duncan knew when she revived it, the sacred art that joins our otherwise incoherent dust to universal flow, the marriage of Earth and Sky (BAP July 2023, Shards of Beauty: dust, stardust, sheep and wolves).
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