‘What kept you awake was a feeling that everything in the world has its own size, that if you found its size among the swellings and diminishings it would be calm and shine’
from Tall Windows by Robert Hass
I sneak into the theatre transformed into a playground of hanging silks, wires and ropes and aerial hoops. Some older members of the Entelechy company are spending time with contemporary circus company ‘Upswing’ dipping in and out of the devising process for their new show Old (working title).
Director Vicki Amedume is working with a company of older aerialists. ‘When your profession requires super human strength and skills that do not last with age’, she asks, ‘what happens to you when you get old? How does it affect self worth when you loose your place in the world?’
Witnessing seventy and eighty-year old members of our company, take risk and playfully surrender their weight to the swinging hoop is to glimpse the paradox of age. The poet Czeslaw Milsoz writes of a journey visiting the places of his early youth: ‘I was incomprehensively the same, incomprehensively different’. Here in the theatre you grasp this same sense.
Creativity, Arts and Older People 