National Creative Aging Conference
“ … if we don’t look after and look to those younger audiences, what is the future? A bunch of us getting older, trying to do stuff for old people. That’s really boring.”
Nathan Brine, director of live stage productions at the Path Entertainment Group said that recently, as reported in The Stage. I wish he’d been at the National Creative Aging Conference in Newcastle earlier this month. It might have ridded him of ‘I believe the children are the future’ virus. (I believe the children are part of the future, of course I do, but I think I’m part of the future too, and you, dear reader - and we’re not children.)
I was one of the keynote speakers at the conference in Newcastle, organised by Equal Arts, working with Arts Council England and Baring Foundation. It was a really positive gathering of people working in the field, with a lot of practical workshops, and some great showcasing of work by and with older people.
The morning had started with my fellow Unfolding Theatre trustee Mani Kambo and women from Newcastle’s Angelou Centre involved in a catwalk fashion show of clothes and poetry from Leah Thorn’s Older Women Rock project, and it carried on in the same vein throughout: celebration of a wide range of lived experience, work shared proudly and honestly, expectations challenged.
I spoke about the evaluation of Celebrating Age. I have written about that here previously, so won’t repeat myself other than to say this is the kind of funding partnership which I think should be much more common. Neither will I give you a blow by blow account of my day, which included introducing a couple of workshops and chairing a discussion on agism that would have relished getting stuck into that quote from Nathan Brine.
I will pick out a few themes I took from the day and from reading the Baring Foundation publication we were all given: “Creative Ageing: What Next?”
Older people are not all the same, though they are all complex
We know that the arts sector as a whole is not as inclusive as it likes to think it is. Recent work by CADA, the Creative Aging Development Agency for England, whose co-chair Elizabeth Lynch rounded off the first conference session, has shown that people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds have highly unequal experiences of creative aging.
One story which stuck with me from the day was a man from Newcastle Council of Elders who said that since moving into over 55s housing six years ago he had never experienced or heard such racism, misogyny and homophobia as he had from his fellow residents. As a gay man, he suggested, agism was the least of his worries. I immediately had a nightmarish vision of being in sheltered housing with all the people I hated at school – the racists, the homophobes, the Lads, many recently-minted transphobes and anti-vaxxers no doubt – after decades of being able to avoid them.
As Jackie Kay said in the final plenary, “people are complex and we don’t stop being complex as we age.”
This is intergenerational work
One of the workshops featured Magic Me and London Bubble Theatre exploring “at what age do we start aging creatively?” The answer certainly isn’t to do with how many trips round the sun you’ve made – indeed, the session was an argument for intergenerationally. Both organisations work not just with older people but also with children and young people, and often bring people of different ages together.
That “work with older people” is not a separate domain but part of “working with people” was a theme throughout the day. In the Baring Foundation What Next? publication Pauline Tambling draws out the similarities and the differences between the arts and young people and arts and older people work. A key difference is that policy has, largely, gone with ‘the children are the future’ line, and not prioritised older people. That needs to change.
This is emotional work
An unexpected aspect of the conference was how emotional it made me at points.
We were asked none workshop when we last spent time with people not our age. I had a sharp and sudden realisation of how I’d missed talking to the women in my dad’s sheltered housing scheme since he died at the end of 2021.
Although there is so much that’s positive about aging, and about exploring creativity when older, there is also loss and greif, even if you come into your own power and agency differently. That wasn’t ignored at the conference, which ended with the brilliant Jackie Kay reading a poem about losing her parents which I am not afraid to say had me wiping tears away.
Working with older people means dealing with emotion – as we saw in evaluating Celebrating Age this also means training and supporting staff well. The needs of a creative workforce that can safely engage with these matters requires further attention.
Creativity as a right
Another session which also had me thinking about my Dad’s experiences was that involving Hoot Creative Arts and Kirklees Care Association. They are currently exploring a Digital Creative Care Plan for people entering care settings. Although my dad lived mainly independently in his housing association sheltered housing, I think he could have done with one of those, especially in his latter years. The activities in the scheme seemed to have reduced, as staffing had - a widespread phenomenon in admittedly difficult settings. Creativity or coming together to enjoy some creative activity, is a human right and needs to be built into care settings of all sorts as people age – just as it does in schools and workplaces.
Older people as emerging artists
The final theme to draw attention to is older people as artists – either artists continuing a life of professional practice in their latter decades or artists finding or returning to a calling after work or family duties have abated.
Sian Stevenson of Moving Memory Dance Company led a session at the conference and is also featured in the publication. She described having to challenge her own assumptions, which lead after several projects to Moving Memory becoming a company “led by older women, starting from a place of shared experience and understanding.” The women are not participants: they are leaders.
I’ve said more than I meant to. You can watch a three minute video from the day below - watch it till the end.
Equal Arts are keen to hear from anyone working in this field about what they think should come next – you have till Friday 3 November to tell them via this form: https://forms.gle/ddrPwVw9yXPUjZqD6
A Brief Plug for Masculinity
Obviously I am not plugging the idea, the noun, Masculinity. (No, you can’t make it a verb, you hipster-doofi.) I am plugging Masculinity, an anthology of modern voices, edited by Rick Dove, Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson, to be published by Broken Sleep Books in January 2024 and available for pre-order now. I am happy that a couple of my poems will be in there, part of a kaleidoscopic examination of what it might mean to be a man right now. Spoiler: it’s diverse and multi-faceted. More nearer launch time.
I ache in the places where I used to play:
a Tactics Tomato
This playlist features songs by some of my most beloved artists, from albums made when they were in their 70s or 80s. (Richard Thompson may have been 69 when he put out 13 Rivers but what’s a year between friends?) The artists also had to still be with us at the time of writing, and long may it remain so. This ruled out classic ‘late’ tracks by Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Ralph Stanley but happily Uncle Willie has recently made a strong version of Cohen’s Tower of Song. (I do literally have an Uncle William Nelson, funnily enough, but Smokey Robinson is no relation.)
Put it on, do 25 minutes and 34 seconds work without interruption, then break for five minutes. Repeat to taste.