ABSTRACT
Aging (in dance) is often connected with the question of what a body is able or not able to do. Older dancers for example are often being asked (or asking themselves) within the horizon of audiences’ or colleagues’ expectations what the body still can do in terms of a certain physical capacity or virtuosity when it comes for example to ballet. However, this assumption is quite problematic. Although companies like the NDT 3 (Netherland Dance Theater) enable older dancers to be still present on stage, they often focus on comic characters, using for example singing as a mode of expression, relying on the idea of a professional life filled with rich artistic experiences made through the lifelong career of each protagonist. Apart from being an important project keeping older dancers (here over 40) in their profession,1 the whole dispatch of it is still linked to an artistic and social opinion of deficit, where the no longer highly flexible capacities of the body have to be replaced by aesthetic substitutes – for example expressed in a focus on (verbal and mimic) narration in the chosen pieces.
