PROFISTAT

Culture

Cooperation measures

Act Your Age

ACT YOUR AGE stimulates the European community to engage with the aging body through the art of dance. The initiators of ACT YOUR AGE are Contemporary Scene Centre (Italy), Dance House Lemesos (Cyprus) and the Dutch Dance Days (The Netherlands). They made two observations: 1. Aging presents our society with great social challenges, being one of the most important demographical changes in current times that has strongly set in in European countries. 2. Despite the fact that the elderly will take up almost a quarter of the population in less than thirty years’ time, seniors are excluded, more than included in our modern society which seems to be more and more focussed on youth. The project partners concluded that the same is happening in dance. The dancing body is almost invariably a young body. The older performer’s strength and proficiency have hardly been explored. A great part of the current and future population is hereby not represented in the professional dancefield, nor visible on stage for the audience. The initiators of ACT YOUR AGE felt challenged by this impasse. They believe there is enormous value in engaging with seniors. Embracing the thought that art is a vital part of society, the partners therefore commit to a young generation of choreographers ready to give the aging body a stage. Through a two year program including research, workshops, residencies and expert- and community meetings ACT YOUR AGE creates a framework for an intensive intergenerational exchange between European seniors, dance artists and audiences alike. By doing so the partners aim to inspire the dance field to broaden their current artistic scope. At the same time, they activate their colleagues to contribute to constructive thinking on the challenges aging faces the European society with on the long term. Convinced of the importance and sustainability of the project on an artistic as well as a social level, a dialogue with new potential partners is part of the project.

https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/projects/ce-project-details/#project/522344-CU-1-2012-1-NL-CULTURE-VOL121

Stichting Nederlandse Dansdagen (Dutch Dance Days)