TIME BOMB

Dancers such as Pina Bausch and Sylvie Guillem have blazed a trail for the older body and its poetry on stage. Lucy Ribchester discovers how a new dance theatre piece, co-created by former Bausch dancer Finola Cronin, is set to interrogate our attitudes to ageing >>

Ask anyone to draw a picture of a dancer and the overwhelming likelihood is that they’ll sketch a body that is slim, graceful and implicitly young. Mainstream dance fetishises youth perhaps more than any other art form, but in celebrating athletic agility it also narrows the opportunities for audiences to see their own bodies reflected on stage.

More recently, however, the genre has been starting to catch on to the notion that we are all going to age, there is beauty in it, and the ageing process itself is a rich seam of substance to explore onstage. All of these ideas were entry points for dancer and academic Finola Cronin, when co-creating new piece Dances Like A Bomb, along with fellow performer Mikel Murfi and Junk Ensemble artistic directors Jessica and Megan Kennedy.

‘It’s not just about the experience of being older,’ says Cronin. ‘It’s also a much wider interrogation of how society views somebody getting older.’ The piece, Cronin says, reveals things about the body that are both frail and strong, while at the same time testing perceptions (both our own and those of others) about our ageing bodies.

‘We’ve had great fun teasing out these ideas about what it means to get older. Because, of course, people say, “oh gosh, I feel like 25 inside”. And we do at times. We don’t go around constantly saying, “I’m 45 or I’m 65 and therefore I must behave accordingly”. It doesn’t work like that.’