Invading Capitalist Ageism in Applied Theatre through Anti-Ageism Praxis

Abstract

This article highlights how in the UK ageism derives from invasive and pervasive capitalist practices, where our cultural understanding of ‘being old’ is driven by institutional exit from the labour market. The article explores how ageism has bled into applied theatre practices and problematizes the widespread use of reminiscence theatre as an ageist methodology, as it restricts older people’s experiences to the past. Issues of power between the facilitator and practitioner are also explored by questioning the exclusive nature of reviewing and editing older people’s personal recollections and who determines what memories have creative value. This article advocates that the field must now fracture away from reminiscence models and instead I propose an Anti-Ageism Praxis (AAP), which functions as a resistance against the invasion of capitalist informed ageism and oppressive ageist theatrical engagement. Instead, AAP places emphasis on shared power, co-collaboration, being present and creating theatre that is informed by real time moments, feelings and thoughts.

The UK is ageing rapidly and in less than twenty years from now one in four Britons will be over the age of 65 (Centre for Ageing Better 2020). While this reflects a drastic shift in life expectancy, capitalist perceptions and attitudes towards old age foster a societal environment of ageism where ageist practices emerge. A 2020 study by the Centre for Ageing Better shared that ‘one in three people within the UK report experiencing age prejudice or age discrimination’. The British national press has also detailed that ‘a quarter of millennials believe it is normal for older people to be unhappy and depressed, while 40 percent believe there is no way to escape dementia as you get older’ (Topping 2018). Therefore, it is unsurprising that old age has become an undesirable process that one is supposed to resist.

Applied Theatre has been instrumental in presenting alternative representations of old age and has been celebrated for creating ‘an avenue through which to understand ageing, individually and as a community, better’ (McCormick 2017: 101). However, this work has yet to address the presence of ageism within applied theatre and how this prejudice has unconsciously shaped the ways in which facilitators work with older people. In this article I examine how ageism within contemporary UK culture is a product of invasive and pervasive capitalist practices. I then explore how ageism has seeped into applied theatre with older adults and ask whether often-used frameworks for theatre making might in turn reify the very ageist practices they seek to eradicate. Through an investigation of reminiscence theatre, which is a practice of collective memory to inspire performance, I consider the complex issues of power between facilitator and participant and the exchange of memories. I explore how this form all too often restricts older adults’ experiences to the past and places the facilitator in a powerful position as they can act as a gatekeeper through which memories are made to pass enroute to becoming a performance. Creative ageing practices can serve as an important disruptive intervention to ageist utilizations of collective memory. In this vein I propose an Anti-Ageism Praxis (AAP) that actively resists the invasion of ageist capitalist frameworks and, in so doing, presents alternative ways of using acts of remembrance to inspire and create theatre that is made for, by and with older people.

CAPITALISM, OLD AGE AND AGEISM

Ageism, a term coined by Robert Butler (1989), is defined as ‘the systematic stereotyping and discrimination against older people because they are old’ (139) and is one of the most prevalent forms of discrimination, impacting our understanding of the ageing process, older identity and what later life might consist of. Within capitalist societies ageism is driven by the labour market, state pension age and the institutional enforcement of retirement, which has been described as ‘an age discriminatory social process designed to exclude older people en masse from the workforce’ (Walker 1990: 59). Initially introduced by Otto von Bismarck as a political response to the growing Marxist movement in Prussia (McLeod 2021), state-supported retirement in contemporary society is marketed as a reward to loyal employees and a time to enjoy leisurely pursuits. However, the implementation of statutory retirement age has formed obligatory conditions for leaving the labour market and thus exit from the labour force ‘continues to be popularly seen as the transition point into old age’ (Laws 1995: 115). This capitalist age scheduling has influenced our cultural definition of when one is ‘old’ and their place within society.

While there are now age discrimination laws in place to protect older workers, for those who do remain within the workforce employers ‘generally provide less training to older employees, starting at age fifty, than they do to younger employees’ (Lagacé et al. 2022). The systemic removal of older workers has created a fertile ground for ageism to emerge, resulting in those more than 50 years of age being viewed as struggling to adapt to change (particularly to new technology), less capable to learn, having decreased work performativity and not as competent as their younger counterparts (ibid.). This not only enforces an ageist ideology that devalues the skills and capabilities of older adults but for older workers within these conditions there are few alternatives but to retire. Therefore retirement ‘is not only the principal gateway to later life but is the conduit that links the institutional structures of work and non-work’ (McDonald 2012).

However, capitalism’s definition of old age is fluid and responds to the increase in life expectancy, impacting global economics and state pension legislation. For example, in the UK the current state pension age is 66 years for both men and women although this is anticipated to increase in 2026 (Age UK 2022). The rise in retirement age is due to the increase in people living longer and healthier lives, matched with concerns of the financial sustainability of state pensions, which are funded by workers who pay tax. Thus, there is an impetus to keep individuals working for longer to fund the growing population of retired older adults (Parker et al. 2020). The capitalist scheduling of when one can retire indicates that while ageing is an individual process, retirement is a form of state welfare that is absorbed and configured within a capitalist logic and is dependent on the economic health of the country. Therefore, our cultural definition of when someone is ‘old’ is in a constant state of flux and is in receipt of capitalism’s ever-changing needs. Ultimately, there is no permanent threshold of when one is ‘old’, but rather is an economical social construct.

THE APPLIED THEATRE PRACTITIONER AND IMPLICIT AGEISM

Applied theatre practitioners are labouring within an ageist capitalist culture that they are not impervious to. Within this system higher status is given to those who are young or appear as youthful, and older adults are portrayed as ‘suffering from poor and/or worsening health and ageing as a process of inevitable decline towards death’ (Centre for Ageing Better 2020). The subtle nature of ageism exists all around us; even birthday cards are host to ‘examples of aggressive ageism, often combined with sexism containing crude jokes about the coming of old age with all its supposed horrors’ (Bytheway 1995: 77). Therefore, systemic ageism is widespread and not only impacts how we treat our own ageing selves but inevitably informs how we respond to those around us who we deem to be ‘old’.

During my interviews with leading UK practitioners one way age prejudice was present was in their initial assumptions around working with older people. One practitioner reflected, ‘[W]hen I started the project I had a set expectation of what an older person’s drama group would look like’ (Author’s Reflective Journal 2021). This sentiment was compounded when another shared, ‘I expected everybody to be like my nan … I just had this preconception that they all need everything to be slowed down’ (Author’s Reflective Journal 2021). These responses are in contrast to my understanding of why the interviewed practitioners carry out their work, and I suggest this has occurred subconsciously due to implicit ageism. Implicit ageism is described as ‘the thoughts, feelings and behaviours toward elderly people that exist and operate without conscious awareness or control’ (Levy 2001: 578). It is something that arises when individuals are frequently exposed to stereotypes associated with old age. For example, ageist stereotypes often portray ‘those over the age of 70 as being all alike with regard to being helpless, frail and unable to contribute to society’ (Ayalon et al. 2021). These stereotypes become embedded within our subconscious and operate without our awareness, resulting in unintentional discriminatory behaviour. Due to the subconscious nature of implicit ageism, once an individual has encountered and acquired a series of age stereotypes these are automatically triggered by the presence of an older person (Levy and Banaji 2002: 64). Therefore, due to society’s approach to growing older, acts of ageism become fated, as ‘every socialised individual who has internalised the age stereotypes of their culture is likely to engage in implicit ageism’ (Levy 2001: 578).

REMINISCENCE THEATRE AND AGEISM

Reminiscence theatre is a form of interactive drama that invites older adults to exchange memories and reflect upon their experiences of the past. Sometimes these recollections are simply enjoyed by the group and are used as tools to create a sense of community and connection. Reminiscence theatre is also adopted to stimulate and inform material and develop performances that are often performed back to participants by individuals who are much younger than those to whom the memories belong to. The impact of such performances has been recognized for promoting ‘reconnection and respect for the past through the conversations that ensue after the performance’ while promoting personhood and identity (Maeve and Prendergast 2009: 170). Originally used with participants who are living with dementia, reminiscence theatre is a significant part of creative ageing’s heritage and should be honoured for its ground-breaking contribution towards promoting a greater sense of self and challenging ageist stereotypes. Indeed, reminiscence theatre is so pervasive that it is ‘perceived as the default practice when working with older people’ (McAvinchey 2013).

Across all areas of applied theatre there are issues of participants being ‘mined’ for content who are then not re-engaged in the wider creative process. The sector is acknowledging this, and calls for participant centric modes of practice can be found in Performing Care: New perspectives on socially engaged performance by Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson (2020). While reminiscence theatre is valuable it is a participatory approach that can also fall victim to solely ‘mining’ older adults for material. Consequently, acts of ‘mining’ become vulnerable to perpetuating ageism when the facilitator insists on predetermined remembrances of a certain event/time that has been subconsciously influenced by ageist assumptions. As one practitioner explained, ‘I still see practitioners basing their projects on World War II and I’m like can you do the maths, not all older adults lived through the war’ (Author’s Reflective Journal 2021). During my conversations with leading practitioners there were calls for the sector to adopt a framework that departs from theatre making being viewed as an independent practice by those who are specifically trained/considered as being ‘talented’ and instead position participants as co-collaborators who determine the themes of reminiscence theatre projects and have ownership over the theatrical shaping of their memories (Stuart Fisher and Thompson 2020: 229).

Reminiscence theatre that imposes a rigid pre-selected time-based framework also doesn’t consider the wider lived experiences of the participants and can remove agency from the older person with respect to their own memories. This minimizes older adults to an oversimplified and limited understanding of their experiences of the past. Consequently, the older individual can be reduced to preconceived notions of what has been and that their life (which they are still living) is minimized to nothing more than a collection of moments that have now passed. When memory recall fails to acknowledge the present and consider the future, this reduces the older person to a historical artefact rather than a being who is in a constant state of emergence. While it is important to acknowledge the wide-ranging benefits of reminiscence, I advocate that as ageism continues to be brought to the forefront of societal concerns, now is the time to carry out a re-examination of our cultural understanding of time/memory and consider the ways in which power also interplays with reminiscence approaches.

REMINISCENCE THEATRE AND POWER

First let’s consider reminiscence theatre’s relationship with time. A culturally specific notion, here in the West time is traditionally associated with clock time technology and has become what Henri Bergson (1910: 233) coined as ‘spatialized’, where time is viewed as a series of separate intervals. In Bergson’s terms these units of time become measured by the rotation of the world around the sun and therefore our common understanding of time is:

We introduce [space] unwittingly into our feeling of pure succession; we set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them simultaneously, no longer in one another, but alongside one another; in a word, we project time into space … and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another. (Bergson 1910: 101)

When drawing upon reminiscence practices the examination of a particular period becomes separated out from the life span and is viewed as an independent and isolated moment. This moment of time within creative ageing is usually examined through an extensive interview process or in workshops that artistically explore the memories that exist around the chosen theme. Usually, these approaches access the personal histories of the participants, which are then documented and collated. Similarly to oral history, to ensure best practice it is advised that prior to participation clear communication must be exercised where participants are made aware of the purpose of the interview/life review, what the interviewer hopes to achieve and how their recollections will be used (Oral History Association n.d.). Borrowing from the Oral History Association it is recommended that once this has been achieved a formal record of agreement should be made. However, despite one’s best efforts to strive for a sense of equity, notions of power initially arrive at the beginning of a reminiscence project where the ‘interviewer or facilitator sets an initial agenda and the interviewee, the narrator, the subject, the group member, responds with an account’ (Bornat 2001: 226). Arguably, the power sits with the practitioner or artistic organization who have exerted authority by choosing a particular time and overall project theme prior to engagement with participants. Rather than themes or concepts deriving from participants’ own interests, the older adult must respond in relation to what the project wants to gather and achieve. To mitigate against this power dynamic one solution is that reminiscence practitioners should ‘be prepared to extend the inquiry beyond the specific focus of the project to allow the narrator to freely define what is most relevant’ (Oral History Association n.d.).

Unfortunately, this is not always the case and therefore there is potential for the direction of the interview to sit solely within the practitioner’s predetermined framework. Borrowing from the scholarship of Boyd Branch and Erika Hughes (2014), an antidote to this would be adopting an ‘embodied historiography’ approach, which is described as ‘the practice of regarding performers as historical documents, using the act of performance to expose the subjective processing of memory and historical events through the live layering of multiple perspectives’ (108). Embodied Historiography ‘ruptures the processes through which the historical subject is narrativized’ and instead reveals the words of the participants by allowing the narrative to go where they want to take it (Branch and Hughes 2014: 111). This dialogical environment disrupts the domination of the facilitator’s agenda and enables the performance to become in dialogue with the older person and the story that they want to tell. Consequently, when the participant becomes bound to the predetermined questions and there is no room for conversational exploration or expansion, the process departs from being a shared endeavour and instead becomes one where older adults are simply used for their knowledge and life experiences.

As Michel Foucault (1975) notes, power is socially constructed through the relationship to another and the actions that take place between them. In this instance the relationship of power exists among the participant, the facilitator and the action of memories being shared. This process evokes what Foucault considers to be the mechanics of power, where ‘one may have a hold over other bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines’ (1975: 138). While the memory sits within the participant, what happens once this recollection has been shared often falls to the domain of the practitioner. Similar to what Foucault coins as a ‘docile body’, which ‘becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated by others’, the participant and their reflection becomes a ‘docile memory’, as the practitioner exerts authority over how the memory is handled and used (164). Sometimes facilitators are conscious of this power dynamic and embark on a democratic process where participants are involved in the creative journey of bringing their memories to life. This can include participating in improvisations or devising performances that involves them as actors and co-creators. However, reminiscence practice also includes the formation of performances that do not include older participants and thus the interviewee’s experience does not extend past the interview. In this context once the exchange of memories has occurred the participant becomes a resource that has now been utilized. There is value in a person becoming a source or witness to a historical moment, however reminiscence theatre is not oral history but indeed is theatre and performance and therefore I advocate should be concerned with the live body saying its own words rather than leaving a record.

The next stage is for the memories to now be collated, edited and shaped into a performance. As Diana Taylor (2003) writes, the transfer from the private experience of the individual to the public domain forms the sharing of lived experiences, as their memories act as historical accounts, presenting regional issues or key dates, all while transmitting knowledge that is incredibly valuable. However, the public sharing of memory also throws up considerations of representation and can spark important conversations regarding issues of misrepresentation, mishandling or inaccurate reporting of personal accounts and the details of private disclosures (Bornat 2001). Borrowing from the field of memory studies, the relationship between memory and performance also raises questions of agency, such as who has the right to shape these memories and what makes the facilitator the source of authority on how they are represented and disseminated. As memory studies theorist Susannah Radstone (2008) proposes, despite contributing to the political and cultural landscape, the sharing of memories ‘risks turning two-way traffic into a one-way street’ where the participant is there to serve rather than to co-create. Thus, when looking to work with memory I suggest that practitioners investigate their motivation to do so and identify the ways in which the sector can improve this form.

ANTI-AGEISM PRAXIS

Re-membering can be a powerful tool in creative ageing practices and to do this responsibly I am working towards the development of an alternative theoretical framework for the exploration of memory that I have titled ‘Anti-Ageism Praxis’ or AAP. AAP is a paradigm for working creatively with older adults that understands the older person as an equal collaborator and co-artist in the present. This framework uses the temporal nature of theatre, which is an inherently time-based art form, to tackle ageism. Therefore, I invite practitioners to reconsider their understanding of time and the ways in which memories can be used. Drawing upon the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1910), AAP invites practitioners to consider that not only is time something that is equated to mathematical units or quantitative measurements but can also become a physiological process in which one experiences time. The qualitative nature of time in Bergson’s terms results in time being considered as ‘la durée’ or durational, wherein lived time becomes an inner subjective experience that is felt. Rather than practitioners seeking to explore a specific time period that sits separately from their life span, in Bergson’s (1910: 78–9) terms time should be considered as a flow of components that succeed one another and therefore do not exist separately. Bergson proposes that time ultimately flows together and merges, and similarly to how we receive music as one whole piece, time is not experienced minute by minute but rather as a duration. Therefore, within creative ageing the past does not sit separately from the present but instead the past and the present penetrate and are in service of each other.

And yet, acts of recollections are not simply a retelling of the past in the present but derive from the interviewees’ standpoint in the present. Barbara Adam (2008: 7) explains that when recollections are placed within a personal time frame, such as a time of stress or illness, these retellings become subjected to one’s standpoint and perspective in the present, which is fluid/mobile and is subjected to a self-selective editing process. Therefore, AAP advocates that rather than using memory as a source to explore a date or historical event that is in service of others, memory is utilized to examine the individual and their relationship to the present. The interview method becomes modified to no longer centre on one’s recollections of the past but focuses on participants’ reactions to historical images and artefacts in the present. In collaboration the facilitator and participants then use these responses as material that they collectively shape into a piece of theatre. In simple terms this framework isn’t about fulfilling the project or facilitators’ anticipated outcomes but instead hands power back to the participant as their responses, interests and own personal agenda directs the projection of the work. Thus, the past becomes part of the present when the practitioner becomes interested in one’s reactions rather than their recollections.

Therefore, in AAP terms if objects such as a photograph of one’s younger self or of a historical event are to be used within creative ageing, then this can be done to assess how the participant feels about that image in the present moment or what this means to them today. For example, within my own practice I utilize open-ended questions such as, ‘How does this make you feel?’ or, ‘If you could say something about this today what would it be?’ to inform the next stage of creativity, which may inspire a particular character or scenario.¹, ² These characters and scenarios may examine much larger societal themes, such as the role of women in the workplace, and quickly participants are able to form an alternative creative world that is inspired by how the past has made them feel in the here and now. In this sense facilitators begin to challenge ageist stereotypes that suggest older people are disengaged from the present and are only interested in the past. Instead, no longer are the aims of the project about the sharing of cultural memories or memory as a vehicle for knowledge exchange but becomes about the individual and how their responses to memories can inform and influence the development of their own creative work. In Paulo Freire’s (1970) terms this approach challenges issues of power by engaging in a process of co-intentionality, where participants become ‘jointly responsible for a process in which all grow … here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other’ (61). This removes a binary construct where the older participant is placed on the margins of what is created and instead forms an inclusive pedagogy where their reactions in the present inform and lead the next stages of practice and ultimately the themes and outcomes of the project.

CONCLUSION

As the UK population of older adults continues to grow, now is the time to challenge Britain’s gentro-phobic culture and interrogate ageism’s relationship with applied theatre. I urge the sector to consider how applied theatre can intervene, disrupt and act as a mode of resistance towards the siloing of older people from the mainstream into the margins. Therefore, to invade ageist ideology and return artistic power back to older adults I advocate for facilitators to re-examine the ways in which they are working with older people and how memory and time exists within this. To achieve this, I call for the mobilization of new means of engagement such as Anti-Ageism Praxis as an artistic strategy that focuses on co-collaboration, shared power and work that is informed by the present feeling rather than past recollections.

Notes

1 The responses to these open-ended questions can be used as the first sentence for a ‘free writing’ exercise, wherein participants are given a set period of time to continuously write, carrying on from their opening sentences. The task provides the group with fragments of text that can then be refined and developed in collaboration with the facilitator to form parts of a script/series of monologues that stem directly from the participants’ response to a historical artefact.

2 Identify with the group the key themes that have emerged from their responses to the historical item. For example, previously a group’s responses to seeing an image of the Suffragettes protesting sparked discussions regarding sexism (Author’s Reflective Journal 2021). This then inspired a collection of improvised scenes that examined sexism in 2021, which were later developed into a script.