ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of age in interweaving dance performances. Alongside race and gender, age is a salient marker of socially constructed differences. Different cultures assign different norms of behavior to different ages and create terms for identifying different stages. The author closely discusses German choreographer and performer Raimund Hoghe’s work. By interpreting his homage-performance in light of queer and gay aesthetics and interweavings across cultural constructions of gender, the text explains how Hoghe embodies the Japanese aesthetics of aging in gender. He often makes reference to Japanese Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno’s aging body, which, with its pride and beauty, is emancipated from the boundaries set by Western norms. In contrast to perfectionism as a product of the Western canon of beauty, Hoghe affirms the alterity of other types of dance practice in his piece, incorporating Japanese aesthetics. In a recent piece with two collaborators, An Evening with Judy (2013), which premiered in Asia at the Kabuki theatre in Kyoto, the sixty-five-year-old Hoghe reenacts the gay icon of Judy Garland, with the sense of equality and acceptance of another’s difference. In this piece, Hoghe performs in being vested to a range of Garland’s records that span early recordings at the age of seventeen through her last performance at the age of forty-seven. In his performance Hoghe depicts onnagata tradition of the Japanese Kabuki, which does not negate the performers’ gender and age.
