Ageism comes out to play in Brighton

Choreographer Liz Aggiss
performing
English Channel in 2015
Photo by Joemurrayfilms,
via Wikimedia Commons

Brighton and Hove has an Ageing Well festival in progress. I picked up a glossy (expensive) brochure in London Road Sainsbury's and took it home to read with a cup of lapsang and almond cake.

I'm flicking through the programme - origami, cookery, drawing for beginners, dancing with teenagers, taking photos on your phone and my antennae are waving around like sparklers. I sense ageism coming out to play.

I look closely at a couple of events. Art in the 21st Century reads:

"Join us to try out and explore some of the many creative and fun things we can do using a computer, including photography, creating artwork, making your own music, learning a musical instrument, singing, crochet, crafts, dancing, poetry or another creative activity."

Another:

"A special Festival session of Age is a Stage, our playful and creative performance workshops for the older generation (50+) who still feel young. Come along and see what we do at these weekly sessions; no experience is necessary, just a willingness to break the rules, be creative, be silly, be playful and look at the world with a fresh eye."

When I think of Art in the 21st century names that come to mind immediately are Bernadine Evaristo, Paula Rego, Liz Aggiss, Jane Fordham, Annie Lennox, Tracie Chapman, Agnes Varda, so I recalibrate myself. But I wonder who thought this one through and who do they mix with? Why include crochet in a screen-based event? Is it a surrealist happening? The second session, for "the older generation who still feel young", I also struggle to grasp. It's that phrase 'feel young' that suggests we haven't a chance, in our normal state of not feeling young, but a little bit peaky or realistic about the years we carry with us, of ever being silly again.

Agnes Varda
collaborating in her
eighties

Fifty year olds are working. Sixty year olds are working. Seventy and eighty year olds are working. We are at the top of our game after a lifetime of trying. I don't recognise myself or my friends in this apology for a festival which might at least have stretched itself a little into a creative debate about what it means to age well (or badly), to question the politics of ageing for Brighton's older writers, artists, musicians, film makers, photographers, dancers, actors, producers, designers etc. etc. Was it one challenge too far for dullards who scatter exclamation marks around like glitter to make up for the lack of real excitement?

Public money perpetuates the stereotype of older person as passive consumer/social incompetent and/or inexperienced in matters of sewing, baking, computers and origami. Someone who's forgotten how to do things but might want to pick them up again....What has it cost? I can't even use this glossy coated brochure to light the fire.

What can we do? There are many ways of seeing. Paula Rego's self-portraits after a fall, resisting the adjective 'silver'. I like the Verandah poems of Jean Binta Breeze, how Fabrica Gallery engages with the issue of ageing in its programming and outreach, how Liz Aggiss demands we think about what it means in her performance work. It's about tuning. And we know how to do that. Right?