This is to be an international conference focusing on the aging body – a subject that has long been the subject of medical, cultural and political research – with special reference to dance. We shall be looking at culture-specific notions of the beauty and movement, agility and expressiveness of the body as they relate to the status of the aging body in dance. Models will be used for a comparative discussion of the differences in normative discourses and institutions and in gender-related concepts of body and movement between the Euro-American and Japanese dance traditions, i.e. between “youth-oriented” cultures on the one hand and a culture which – like Japan’s – reveres aging dancers as part of the country’s “living heritage” on the other. The distinctions and changes in such traditional cultural patterns in contemporary (globalized) dance as well as the theoretical challenges they pose for dance and cultural research will be pursued in the papers presented at the conference, and as well in the roundtables and presentations of the invited artists. The conference is based on the cooperation of the Zentrum für Bewegungsforschung, FU Berlin, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and is funded by the DFG and the Japan Foundation.

For the program and other information see below.

By: Gabriele Brandstetter und Nanako Nakajima.

An event of Zentrum für Bewegungsforschung, FU Berlin.

For the entire programme please visit: www.bewegungsforschung.de/veranst_agingbody2012.html

The symposium is in English.