It’s a rare dance event at the Wells where the youngest person on stage is 54. But in KnowBody – a programme of six works created for older dancers – sags, wrinkles and even reading glasses become assets to flaunt.
From Dominique Mercy’s hallucinatory meditation on time and loss (haunted by the ghost of Pina Bausch) to the somewhat oblique Frida Kahlo tribute performed by Generación del Ayer, this is an evening that joyously, eccentrically and gutsily showcases its cast’s collective years of living, learning and knocking around.
Bookending the programme are duets by Mats Ek and Ana Laguna, tenderly observed vignettes of a couple in later life. The first, Potatoes, finds wry domestic comedy in their differences: Laguna is self contained and practical; Ek abstracted and vague. Memory unites them in a delicate courtship, their embraces overlapping the present with the past. Both are danced with an unselfconscious authority and poetry that are testament to decades of knowledge and work.
In the specially adapted version of Hofesh Shechter’s In Your Rooms, the cast are mixed in age and ability. Yet the fragility of the most senior dancers lends an extra power to the choreography’s thrumming emotions, and the final, climactic image of the group, clustered together, shaking their fists at some unnamed threat, is magnificent in its poignant ferocity.
The highlight of the programme, however, is Jonathan Burrows’s The Elders Project, created for nine dancers who have come out of retirement for the event. Burrows’s choreography unlocks the performers’ memory and expertise, while Matteo Fargion’s accompanying songs encapsulate stories from their lives. The Elders Project doesn’t airbrush away the grimmer truths of ageing, but this clever piece does make it look like fun.
