'I love doing this because I get lost in this other world.' This was said in Autumn 2000 at the end of a workshop with a group of older people. We were preparing for an inter-generational project I had undertaken to lead in Northumberland. Doreen had already worked with me the previous year with six others on a performance project supported by Age Concern and the Queen's Hall Arts Centre in Hexham. Here we were again, this time with the prospect of devising and performing with children, other adults, and young adults with learning disabilities. Everyone shared the sense of excitement.
For a good number of years I have worked in all sorts of settings and situations. When, in early 2001, Miranda Tufnell and I set up the company Body Stories, this plurality extended even further as we began to establish our work in response to a gradual and growing culture of interest in applying the imagination to what it is to be 'well'.
Someone once asked me about what I got out of working with older people. This article might go some way to answering that. More important for me, is what other people get out of them. I think that as you get older - as I am doing - your voice and what lies behind it should not become unheard or unrepresented. In other cultures, to be known as the elders meant considerably more than it does for us today: you get the feeling that they were certainly listened to - probably because they had something to say which was worth hearing. In our own age we are slowly becoming better at considering the material needs of the elderly, the vulnerable and the infirm. But what about their other needs, those of self-esteem, contact, interaction and the pivotal role of the imagination? How might they be addressed, nourished and appreciated?
Our bodies and their potential for movement are a vital source for discovery and create involvement in life - throughout all of life. Older people have much to tell us if we were to listen - and, with movement - to watch and bear witness to. Movement is timeless and paradoxically deepens with age. In fact movement can allow the mover to become ageless, whether that movement has a large, robust capacity or remains in gesture form in the hands. When Doreen said that she loved being lost in this other world, we might understand her instead to mean that she has found herself in a new found place and that it is providing her with much joy.
My early experiences of devising workshops for older people were triggered in much the same way that I have responded to most invitations new to me at the time - in hospitals, in prisons, on a beach - I will see what I can do. Gentle exercise and chair-aerobics: the capacity to play and enjoy games like charades and those we made up: working with a poem or postcards of famous paintings. These were cheerful and entertaining sessions, but I came to know that something of greater importance was missing. With participants who were more ambulant we tried our own choreographies based on folk dance patterns with movement images and themes suggested by the group. At other times we would move from one still picture to the next. This was interesting because the responses were emerging from a shared experience of individual imagination. In turn this informed the work where participants needed to sit for the duration and where an imaginative response to something like 'what was the first thing you saw today' or 'let your hands move and recall a favourite activity or pastime' began to liberate movement from a recalled or new experience into the here and now.
This became key for me - how to draw upon personal or shared experience of life and living. How to use one's story as a picture, a feeling, a fragment; to explore and find its movement and, perhaps, its new or recovered meaning: movement being both metaphorical and the metaphor itself. I was grateful for seeing and realising this and found that it had real value at a deeper level. It was not instant and required a journey of various activities to prepare for it.
In 2000 a Year of the Artist award gave me an opportunity I had long thought about: to bring together people of all ages and abilities and to make a snapshot of them, people you could see at random on a street or in a supermarket. But this was to be no ordinary snapshot. I was hoping to bring dreams and hopes, their joys and difficulties, into the picture. Working at first with separate groups of older people, middle aged people, young adults with learning disabilities, teenagers and children who lived throughout Tynedale, we began to build up portraits of ourselves through movement. Initially this was done by exploring a recall of real or imagined situations. The task was to find a way of drawing on the felt experience and finding the movement that conveyed some sense of identification or meaning. We would sometimes allude to narrative - with the older members of the group we used themes drawn from walking in a remembered or imagined landscape: the children drew largely from favourite fictional stories - but we sought ways of moving that were not driven by the notion of 'this happened, and then that.'
Eventually all participants came together - 26 in all - to begin the process of warming to each other and becoming an ensemble who would perform what we collectively shaped and accumulated. The composer John Kefala Kerr had been commissioned to provide us with music. Solo portraits became developed sections of dance, some evolving into duo conversations and small groups. In the theatre of the Queen's Hall we stripped out the curtains and had no entrances and exits. Performers sat on either side of the stage when not dancing, visibly still part of the performance as they watched, like the audience, the unfolding piece.
Playing together loosened our imagination and this became a memorable event. The various parts of the piece we juxtaposed produced a number of funny, tender and poignant images. Here is one of many: I asked Doreen to reprise an earlier solo of hers for one of the closing images. The day before I had seen Tom, who was nine, scooting around the floor on his back using his feet to propel himself. These two unconnected pieces of movement reproduced simultaneously caused one of those moments that make the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end.
There were many other instances of arresting interaction between the older people and the other participants. Age was not an issue here, simply a given within the context of the project and the subsequent performances. The older participants were seen for what they were: strong, curious, sensitive, imaginative, vulnerable and hard working - just as the others were. Yet, somehow they stood out in how they conveyed so much with nothing like the flexibility and stamina of the other performers. Why was this? I believe it is because we see bodies, which have withstood and sometimes succumbed, to the challenges, the reveries, and the slings and arrows of life. I believe when I see, for instance, some simple movements and gestures from an arm, that this is not all that I see. Somehow I am made aware - as if it is conjured up in front of me, of an echo, or something like the vapour trail of a high altitude plane. As if something is behind the movement, something that is being expressed almost without any conscious intention to do so - as if the movement were the essence of a thought or feeling. I find myself in awe and in a reverie about all that which was lived beforehand, and which now informs this movement here in front of me. And what focuses my reverie is that invariably the movement comes without excess; its simplicity is profound. It seems to catch and liberate some personal wisdom as easy as if it were an out breath.
But what if even this measure of movement is too much; or is too much for me to expect or hope for? Earlier in 2003 I began a project in one of South East Northumberland's ex-mining villages. Through our process of consultation many local people expressed the feeling that the heart had gone out of the community and that it was made up of dysfunctional parts. This challenged our thinking about what it is for a community to be well, healthy and happy. It was proposed that this community project should run episodically, gradually bringing different groups of people together with various activities and events for two years: and it was suggested that I begin first with two already existing groups - the Day Centre and the First School. What began to emerge promised a treat for everyone.
After the card games were over at the Day Centre and the introductions made, we settled down to what became a new ritual for the next ten weeks - moving and captivating conversation. I found myself with a group of women in their late eighties and early nineties: all of them widows of miners and mostly now frail of body but terrifically alive in mind. I threw all of my tentative plans for physical movement work out of my thinking. I could not find any good reason for imposing movement games, themes or sequences. Vibrant discussion was where the greatest movement between us happened. It had flow and connected us all together. Mindful that many had commented about the community losing heart I introduced conversations where this essential part of the body stood as a metaphor for so much more. Each session had its theme: what is it to have a 'heart to heart' what do we mean by losing heart, suffering a broken heart, getting to the heart of the matter and when two hearts beat as one? What is heart trouble?
These Thursday mornings produced treasure and pleasure, with episodes of life recalled, relationships refreshed and new thoughts formulated. And they had a legacy. The afternoons of that same day I worked with Year Three and Four children at the First School. Following an introduction to how we might work together I began to filter the thoughts and themes of the Day Centre conversations into the movement work which gradually developed week by week into a performance. Called 'My Big Heart' and devised completely with the children's own movements, we presented it with examples of how we had worked to the rest of the school, parents and friends and with the Day Centre group as our special guests. As these things can often be, this was a very special event for everyone present and has become a small but imaginative step inside the community made possible by the life experiences of all who participated.
Here is a little postscript. Last August my partner, the painter Linda Kent, and I ran a one day workshop on movement and mark making - looking for connection and chemistry between marks made by the body in space and those generated with charcoal and paint on large paper. It was open to everybody and we had a good mix of people. Doreen had booked and was early to arrive. 'I'm getting too old for this, Tim' she said. I said something pretty casual to placate her, but when I caught her eye I could see that she had not meant this statement to be taken seriously. Yes, her physical flexibility is even less than it was three years ago, but when her 'other world' calls can she resist?
Body Stories can be contacted by telephone 01434 345059.