Staging Age The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film

by Marshall, Leni; Lipscomb, Valerie Barnes

• ISBN13: 9780230623651
• ISBN10: 0230623654
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-07-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This groundbreaking text examines how artists on stage consciously perform age and aging. From Shakespeare to Beckett, dialogue and stage directions reveal varying understandings of age.Staging Ageexplores how performers respond to audience expectations, offering conscious--and unconscious--portrayals of the spectrum of age to their audiences. This essay collection is the first to address issues of age and performance in a variety of media, including theatre, film, and dance.

Author Biography

Valerie Barnes Lipscomb is Assistant Professor of English and directs the Writing Resource Center at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. Her work on the performance of age in drama has appeared in such journals as Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies and the Journal of Aging and Identity.

Leni Marshall is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Stout.  Her work on multicultural U.S. literatures and critical understandings of aging, ageism, and old age has appeared in the Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, The Women’s Review of Books, the Doris Lessing Studies Journal, and the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Film
ôThatYounger, Fresher Womanö: Old Wives for New (1918) and Hollywood's Cult of Youth	p. 11
The Unconscious of Age: Performances in Psychoanalysis, Film, and Popular Culture	p. 27
Old Cops: Occupational Aging in a Film Genre	p. 57
Theatre
Performing Female Age in Shakespeare's Plays	p. 85
Mediating Childhood: How Child Spectators Interpret Actors' Bodies in Theatrical Media	p. 109
ôWhatAge Am I Now? And I?ö: The Science of the Aged Voice in Beckett's Plays	p. 129
Molière's Miser, Old Age, and Potency	p. 151
Dance
Old Dogs, New Tricks: Intergenerational Dance	p. 165
Age and the Dance Artist	p. 191
Still Tapping after All These Years: Age and Respect in Tap Dance	p. 207
Notes on Contributors	p. 225
Index	p. 229
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