A celebration of the artist as an older person
A festival, starting today, features artists who are 65 and over. Claire Allfree reports on a rare celebration of wisdom and experience
Three months ago, Mark Baldwin stepped down after 16 years as Rambert dance company’s artistic director to embark on a freelance career. “And almost the first thing someone said to me was: ‘Oh I’m glad you’re stepping down now while you’ve still got time to do your own thing’,” says Baldwin, who is 65. “I get patronising comments like that quite a bit.”
This week Baldwin choreographs a new piece, G(rave) for older dancers, as part of a new festival at the Southbank, which aims to celebrate internationally recognised artists who are 65 and over.
Alongside Baldwin, the line-up includes the singer Cleo Laine (90 years old), the writer Judith Kerr (94), the pianist Alfred Brendel (87), the theatre director Nancy Meckler (77) and the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes (also 77).
It’s a rare moment of recognition for our older artists in a culture that’s predominantly geared to acknowledging the achievements of the young. “I used to receive awards for emerging artists,” says Baldwin. “Now I give them out. But the thing is, I still feel like an emerging artist. Dance is about lifelong learning.”
Called B(old), the festival aims to recognise precisely this fact: that artists tend to consider themselves artists for life. Meckler, who co-ran the physical theatre company Shared Experience for 22 years and recently directed a production of King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe, believes that an artist’s accumulated knowledge enriches their work.
“I was asked to direct Lear when I was in my 30s and I turned it down because I thought I was too young. Shakespeare is so challenging that age and experience really help you have a breadth of understanding about what some of the plays are about.”
The benefit of experience is something Baldwin and Rhodes also hold dear. None of them, or Meckler, is anti-youth but there is a thread running through the trio’s conversation that suggests they sometimes feel their expertise is ignored. Compounding their frustration is the yawning cultural gap between the generations. Rhodes, whose contribution to B(old) is a series of flags that will be displayed on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall, recalls showing her students the pattern on a leaf or a flower as a design inspiration, and being amazed that rather than look closely at it, they started Instagramming it.
“They didn’t know how to look at it properly,” she says. “They all design on computer and to me it looks like a hack. None of them knew how to repeat a pattern. None of them had heard of William Morris.”
“I sometimes roll my eyes when I go to see a show hailed as revolutionising theatre, and it’s something I’ve seen many times before,” adds Meckler, who’ll be directing a monologue by Juliet Ace at B(old). “When you’ve seen companies such as the [experimental American company] Living Theatre, which had people pouring on to the street, tearing their clothes off and jumping into each other’s arms during a performance of Frankenstein [in the Sixties], it’s a bit hard to get excited by the fact that in Network [the National’s recent feted production] some audiences were sitting eating dinner on the stage.”
Do Baldwin, Meckler and Rhodes think our tendency to lionise young artists has a detrimental impact on the arts itself? “Our education system demands that young people work out what they want to do immediately,” says Baldwin. “But some people come to dance later, or discover they have a talent for art or photography at a different point in their life. Eve Arnold became a photographer in her 40s. When I was at art school, I was told you might stumble across something when you were 23 but it would take you until your late 40s to work out what that was and how to develop it.”
“Everyone is always looking for the new hot voice,” adds Meckler. “So when artistic directors are programming theatres, they ask, ‘What hot new voice can I find?’ But it can be a terrible problem because these hot new writers then get snapped up by TV and because they’ve had no time to grow as writers they can’t come up with the goods.
“At the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone has started asking TV companies to leave her writers alone for a bit so they have time to develop.”
How do Meckler, Baldwin and Rhodes think the entertainment industry tackles the subject of age generally: do they feel patronised by films that cynically chase the grey pound or frustrated that the complex reality of older people’s lives is not depicted enough?
“Actually, what I find patronising is the idea that I would want to watch a TV programme about old people at all,” says Meckler. “If you are in your 70s you want to see something that’s challenging and stimulating, funny and sexy. You don’t want to see characters who are wondering how to prepare for retirement. I suppose [the film industry] tried with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is all about people thinking life doesn’t have to be over because they can go and live in a really funky hotel in India. But I’m not that interested in watching that – it’s escapist nonsense.”
What she finds even more patronising is the way arts organisations value younger audiences over older ones. “You hear people saying they always want to get young people into theatres which is right of course, but it’s as though older audiences who go have no worth. As if people in their 50s are not sexual or cultured beings,” she says. “But Jonathan Church told me when he was running Chichester [Festival Theatre] that it was the older audiences who got the humour, the subtlety of the piece. And why wouldn’t they? These are people so steeped in theatre, who love it so much, they have dragged themselves to be there even if physically it might be a bit difficult.”
While everything at B(old) has been created by pensioners, you wouldn’t always know it from the events themselves, which include Liz Aggiss exploding sexual taboos in a
Rhodes asked her students to look closely at the patterns on a leaf. Instead they all Instagrammed it
provocative one-woman show, a performance by drag queen Lavinia Co-op and a talk by the Arab feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi.
Meckler, Baldwin and Rhodes all agree that the younger generation have it much tougher than they did when they were starting out, simply because the arts is a much more crowded field. “It’s so much harder to stand out as a choreographer now: there are so many more people doing it,” says Baldwin. They also think it was much easier for their generation to make their mark because there was so much more to fight against.
“I was part of a very antiestablishment theatre crowd in the Sixties: we refused to stage plays in theatres for example,” says Meckler. “Now the fringe has become mainstream. It’s very hard to be radical in England today: nearly everyone is immediately taken up by the establishment.”
“Well, everyone apart from old people!” says Baldwin. “We’re the only ones on the outside.”
B(old) is at the Southbank Centre from today until May 20. Tickets: 020 3879 9555; southbankcentre.co.uk