Online Lecture: Negotiating Dance Dramaturgies of Aging

Dance is an art form deeply shaped by age. In many Euro-American theatrical dance

traditions, performers are deemed to peak professionally by their mid-30s and often retire in their

early 40s, making performance in later life rare. Conversely, in Japanese performing arts, age

reflects accumulated experience and does not necessarily signal diminished creativity. This study

revisits four of my dramaturgical works in professional contemporary dance across Japan–US,

China, Thailand, and Japan–Singapore–Germany to examine how intercultural dance dramaturgies

of aging negotiate divergent age cultures. From my perspective of an aging female Japanese dance

dramaturg, aging is a process through which embodied history informs performance aesthetics.

Dance dramaturgy serves as a comparative framework that historicizes dance culture and

culturalizes dance history, enabling dialogue between contrasting age paradigms.