If somebody dressed up in Blackface for a very sympathetic and strong solo performance about Frederick Douglass and his struggle to abolish slavery, how would a body take that? How should a body take that? I think that most sensible people would take one look and just walk right out the door: Blackface? Are you joking?
But what about young people play acting old people – “Oldface”? Looking around me, sensible people don’t seem so prickly as to that. The spellchecker underlines the word in red. “Oldface”: the young playing the old. I’ll add it to my personal dictionary.
I am certainly no sensible person, but I wanted all the same to walk right back out when I saw Boglárka Börcsök – the talented, well-trained and cultivated performer and choreographer of Figuring Age, the evening’s one-woman performance around oldness and part of Festival Everybody 2025 at Carreau du Temple, Paris.
Boglárka Börcsök is streaked pale with whited greasepaint. Vital, serious-eyed, concentrated, Börcsök stands in the central place of what seems a hospice tent, over-heated and too-white bright, with a hospice bed to one side, her leftside. I notice that Börcsök wears a white blouse and transparent surgical gloves, clipped mid-finger. She leans forward in that way some old ladies – my girlfriend, Karine, for instance – especially, do.
Standing there in the light of the tent, Börcsök is channeling the single spirit of Éva, Irén and Ágnes, pioneers of modern dance in Hungary. These women were battered first as women in the post-1918 keep Hungary great national, tradition and murder whirlwind that brought fascism, war and massacre through into the mid-1940s. Then as dancers, the women were officially repressed as bourgeois avatars in post-1945 communist Hungary.
Like a specter then, Börcsök in Oldface picks a stiff and unsteady way through the spectators who fill the few ordinary seats and the whole floor of the tent. I stand upright somewhere to her right, my arms crossed; in what passes for a corner. My old back has decided this: I avoid sitting on the floor at all times.
As Börcsök moves, she tells telling bits and pieces of Éva’s, Irén’s and Ágnes’ girlhood, womanhood; a bit about dancing. Can these things be separated? She asks often for help getting up or around.
Also, I notice, my hackles giving a little sigh, she orders people into situations more suitable. Gently, so as a sensible person might not notice. But it’s there, in the performance, in my experience, in the old.
I am thinking. “There is a difference between infirmity and oldness”.
I furiously remember my great grandmother, brittle and luminous as a paper lantern. Weak. But strong: “Sweetie, a-now. Your hand”. Once, my mother has me open a Mason jar of some preserve she’s put up years before, and while I’m struggling with it, jokes she’d not be dying. Instead, she’d wither down to a wisp of a command lingering at the bottom of one of those Mason jars. She’d wither down, she says, to Sibyl with diktat.
Oldness, I am thinking now, is, after all – and Börcsök, it seems to me, is also semaphoring this – becoming weak while continuing the habit of strong. Exhaustion is weakness’ killing stroke.
As performance, Boglárka Börcsök’s Oldface shtick certainly works for me.
But then, maybe it is her theory of ghosts, or, rather, theory of haunting, that is really at work inspiring the deep ambivalence and strong praise in this essay, not the greasepaint or figuring in Oldface.
Börcsök says there are two kinds of ghost: the eaten ones, the ones who have become part of a body and the merely swallowed ones, undigested bits. The former, I guess, would be transparent ghosts, see-through, like new glasses, like history, adjusting or distorting vision. The latter, I guess, would be specters like Scrooge’s Jacob Marley, Banquo or Hungarian Admiral Horthy’s desperately reactionary post-1918 nation and tradition regency or Victor Orban’s 2024 illiberal democracy, haunting the present and veiling the future.
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I saw “Figuring Age”, written and performed by Boglárka Börcsök 14 February 2025 at Carreau du Temple, Paris. “Figuring Age” is based on the film documentary “The art of movement” by Börcsök and Andreas Bolm, a film maker. The film features the real versions of the three aged modern dance creators evoked in Börcsök’s one-woman show.
Happy to see you exploring the issue of Ageism here. You rcommentary is thoughtful & thought-provoking. Thank you for that. Bold to begin with Blackface. As I resd on I thought of Fred Astaire's marvelous "Bojangles of Harlem" in Swing Time (1936), an homage in toned down Blackface to the great Bill Robinson. Astaire was known for recognizing Black entertainers (Follow thre Fleet), yet was his Bojangles over the line? Certainly over Our line, today.
When it comes to Ageism, I feel we're in reverse. It was less an issue in 1936 than it is now. Is that because people didn't live as long as they do today? As a culture, now, we don't seem to be embracing the gifts of our elders. That's fatal.
Posted by: Robert McDowell | February 22, 2025 at 09:56 AM
There's old, older, elderly, Old and very old. Every label makes somebody wince. Neither you nor this actor can imagine...and it isn't the same for everyone. Too many variables, and some of them can't be isolated, let alone measured. I came from long-lived. My maternal grandmother died at 92, my mother at 96, my father at 91, and if they had had (read: been able to afford) better medical care, they would have lived longer. My paternal grandfather was old when he died at 79. My late lamented, the love of my life, was vigorous but vulnerable when he died (from complications of a preventable stroke) at 79. My mother used to say, "Old is either 80+ or ten years older than you are right now." My take on it is that longer is better only if it's better. I'm 83, in good health and dangerously wise. Listen up, show some respect, or get the hell outta my way.
Posted by: Jacqueline Lapidus | February 22, 2025 at 12:32 PM