Deconstructing Contemporary Dance Discourses by Acknowledging Elderly Female Bodies

This article uses a choreographic project to discuss the relationship between elderly women and contemporary dance. It focuses on how participating in the project is of artistic value to these women and what happens in the meeting between me as a master’s student and researcher, the project itself and the women. The article is based on a master’s project in dance pedagogy aimed at using action to change normative ideas about a dancer’s body. The artistic practice is based on the women’s lived experiences. Through improvisation and with a somatic approach as a choreographic performative practice, collaborative transformative learning emerged from the participants. By articulating and visualising the experiences of elderly women as a marginalised group, the meaning of the concepts of dance, body, and age was deconstructed and new insights were gained to challenge and broaden normative ideas about dance and the dancer’s body. The discoveries presented in this article show that elderly women have the capacity to change through dance. By using a decolonising methodology, I argue that deconstruction can be achieved in interactions with others and experienced as artistry. In conclusion, I claim that age norms and bodily ideals in contemporary dance discourses can be challenged by taking the advantage of the resources of older women and by giving them access to contemporary dance.