The New Vic - by Colin Ramsell

T HIS 
H OUSE
E NTERTAINS
A ROUSES
T ITILLATES
R EVITALISES
E NTIRELY

By Colin Ramsell, member of the 'Ages and Stages' performance group 

Being involved in the 'Ages and Stages' project - by Becky Salt

Getting involved with the 'Ages and Stages' project has given me an insight into the history of the New Vic Theatre and how it has positively influenced valued members of our community. Not only have I learnt about how the different departments within the theatre have developed over time but I have also met some inspirational people of the older generation that I have learnt great amounts from.

Through participating within the workshops, I have had the opportunity to contribute my ideas and beliefs about the topic 'Perceptions of Age',  whilst also revealing innovative thoughts of how the final documentary performance could be produced. 

By creatively re-enacting people's memories it has enabled me to understand how greatly the New Vic has impacted the public and how in time they have developed their style of productions. Having the chance to work with people from both generations for some time now, I have been able to build strong relationships and make valuable friendships that I hope will last for some time to come. There are various different personalities and interests within the group however, we all share one common passion, of the theatre and the all-important connection with the New Vic. 

On a weekly basis, being involved with the 'Ages and Stages' project is something I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to. I have encountered new knowledge and have learnt new skills and qualities about myself. 

Becky Salt - member of the 'Ages and Stages' performance group 

'Theatre is good for you' - by Michael Lewis

It's official – going to the theatre is good for you. Michael Boyd in his reinstatement of his brief for the design of New Shakespeare Theatre writing of these distinctive qualities - “No other art form addresses our humanity with the full human presence in the way that theatre can: the actual presence of the body and spirit of the person, shared in the same space through real time with an audience breathing the same air. …” (pg 25 The Guthrie Thrust Stage: A Living Legacy). He goes on to say that the closer you can get a large audience to the performing area, sharing the private emotional detail as well as the inspiring epic, the better. A consensual exploration of our common humanity! That is is what's good for us.

At the New Vic we have the tremendous success of Alice in Wonderland. An interpretation of a story that has a wide influence delightfully for all ages. A creative expression of a concentrated team effort – take-away magic made by people. The interpretation reflected the age it was written in and the issues then of poverty and ignorance. It seems like a good tonic in these uncertain times to be reminded that creative ingenuity by people is the way forward rather than depending on systems.

See you down at the Vic – if not I shall want to know why.

By Michael Lewis - member of the 'Ages and Stages' performance group 

Taking part in the Ages and Stages workshops

I am one of the older members of the Ages and Stages group. The New Vic gave me a new lease of life after retirement. It could do the same for you!

Judy - member of the 'Ages and Stages' performance group

Making the Ages and Stages documentary

We have now started the devising process for the 'Ages and Stages' documentary, which will be performed in the main Vic auditorium on Wednesday 11th July. An intergenerational performance group (including members of the New Vic Youth Theatre and our existing group of older participants) are attending weekly workshops at the theatre, where we are starting to draw together ideas for the documentary, using extracts from the interviews, group discussions and archival materials gathered by researchers at Keele. The documentary will explore people's experiences at the New Vic over the course of their lives, and the relationship between ageing, theatre and creativity.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be inviting members of the performance group to write their own blog posts about their involvement in 'Ages and Stages' and their experiences and memories of the New Vic...

Michelle Rickett

Ages and Stages in Boston!

Boston Public Library

Duck Tour

Boston Common

By Michelle Rickett 

I attended the annual Gerontology Society of America conference in Boston this November and, along with Mim Bernard, presented a paper about the Ages and Stages project.

The sheer size of the conference (over 3,500 people) and the diversity of subject matter initially seemed daunting, but I soon found that it was a friendly, welcoming atmosphere and a well organised programme.The conference was in a great location (the Hynes Convention Centre) in central Boston. I had a 10 minute walk through two malls and passed various coffee shops to reach the conference venue; I (mostly) showed restraint in not shopping on the way there or back!

I really enjoyed being at a conference with so many papers and symposia focused on the social aspects of ageing. One highlight was the ‘Changing Age’ symposium, which explored how education might be used to change societal views on ageing, and included thought provoking papers by Harry Moody on the ‘risk society’ and Jennie Keith on cross-cultural views on changing age. I also enjoyed the sessions on narrative gerontology (which focused on the stories people tell about their ageing) and was fascinated to hear blues singer, Toni Lynn Washington, talk about her experiences in the music industry over almost 60 years. I was also delighted to bring home a signed copy of one of Toni's CDs with me!

Mim and I presented as part of a symposium about the arts and ageing, alongside other NDA funded projects focused on music, art and creativity. The atmosphere in our session was very warm and supportive, and it was great to share our research with other academics with similar interests.

We also managed to take some time to see Boston, which looked particularly beautiful in the cold, bright November sun. We took the 'duck tour', explored the Back Bay area, and visited Boston's stunning public library.

David Amigoni's visit to the University of Regensburg

Last week I attended the excellent international conference ‘The Cultural Politics of Ageing in the Nineteenth Century’ at the University of Regensburg, Germany (24-26 November), organised by Prof. Anne-Julia Zwierlein and Dr Katharina Boehm (Department of English and American Studies), and funded by the DFG. While my involvement in ‘Ages and Stages’ has been one of the most exciting and satisfying things that I’ve experienced in my research life of the last two years, for others there seemed to be a nagging question of my fit. Conversations would go like this: ‘so, you’re a professor of Victorian literature? so what are you doing working on a project about the representation of ageing in twentieth-century theatre?’ I suppose this has conditioned me to begin talking about my involvement by saying things such as ‘well, I’m a Victorian literature expert, BUT …’  In fact, and jokes aside, a significant portion of the Vic’s documentary output, on which our project largely focuses, was rooted in the nineteenth-century history of the Potteries community; thus, having a knowledge of the nineteenth century has always seemed to me to be a help, rather than lumber I have to clear away before I can get down to business. This conference was, consequently, an excellent opportunity for me to test out the thesis that so much of what we understand, today, about the meaning of age and provision for older persons, has its origins in the nineteenth-century representations, and a history of urban expansion, which concentrated older people, making them visible to representation as never before; and which also drove the need for institutional solutions, such as workhouses (post-1834), almshouses, and (after 1908) pensions.

 This is, in fact, the thesis of Karen Chase’s ground breaking interdisciplinary work on The Victorians and Old Age (Oxford University Press, 2009), which examines across the century and in detail the interaction between social and cultural history, and strategies of representation employed by nineteenth century novelists and social investigators. Karen Chase (University of Virginia) was a speaker at the conference, showing us how she was extending her important work in this field by exploring representations of later life sexuality (as opposed to sensuality), through a beautifully nuanced reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (which is likely to become the canonical of text of a Victorian literature of ageing).  Teresa Mangum (University of Iowa) is another leading Victorianist who has made important critical interventions on the representation of age over the years: her paper , on age and the cultural phenomenon of the late nineteenth-century ‘New Woman’ illustrated two trends: first, an intergenerational emphasis on the representations of gendered ageing embedded in wish-fulfilment narratives about ‘elixirs’ of permanent youth. Indeed, intergenerational representations of ageing, and successful ageing, were prevalent in unexpected places (as revealed in Jochen Petzold’s [Regensburg] paper on The Girl’s Own Paper of the 1880s). Secondly, Teresa Mangum’s paper illustrated an increasing interest in recovering a late Victorian ‘science’ of ageing that was emerging from discussions of heredity, evolution and cellular science. Anne-Julia Zwierlein’s paper on ageing and the science of vitalism was another illustration of this trend, while Lynn Botelho’s (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) paper addressed the way in which a nascent, if non-professional, medical gerontology can be traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Another scholar of the early modern period who was present at the gathering was Gordon McMullan (King’s College, London). Gordon presented his work on Shakespeare and the idea of ‘late style’, illustrating the way in which nineteenth-century constructions of an ‘ageing’ Shakespeare can shape (and misshape) assumptions about late life creativity. This is one of the topics that Gordon and I will return to in our AHRC-funded research network on late life creativity, which will launch at Keele in March 2012, and continue at King’s in May (watch this space for details of the supporting website). For my part, I was able to present a paper on the representation of ageing in Arnold Bennett’s post-Victorian The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and its adaptation by Joyce and Peter Cheeseman for the Vic Theatre in 1971, richly illustrated from the Peter Cheeseman Archive. For me, this was a new, and localised, take on the idea of ‘neo-Victorian fiction’, and further evidence of the fact that nineteenth-century discourses on ageing figure as afterlives in our own lives.

With all of this going on, the conference organisers still generously and hospitably enabled us to experience something of the beautiful medieval city of Regensburg, a World Heritage site since 2006. The Christmas Market, experienced on a cold and dark Saturday evening, illuminated by real fires, more spit-roasting pork than you could conceive, and Christmas lights, was a special experience; as was the Sunday-morning guided tour of the Old Town before boarding the planes for home.  

 

David Amigoni