Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

Europe is at a crossroads with a dual demographic challenge – a declining and an ageing population. The Art of Ageing (AA) is thus a project of our time in that it seeks to question how public theatres react, interact and position themselves against this backdrop and develop stories for the stage mirroring the effects of ageing in the 21st century. Initiated under the umbrella of and in collaboration with the European Theatre Convention (ETC), 8 renowned European national state and city theatres from 4 countries, embark on a joint artistic research process to work with leading and emerging playwrights, directors, actors and artistic teams of their respective countries to develop new collaborative crosscultural research and documentary theatre formats and nurture an intergenerational audience as part of the creative process.

AA will run for two years from May 2013 and result in 6 new productions from 4 intercultural, multi-disciplinary artistic teams, which together with the research findings will be shared and toured between the participating theatres. The productions will be multilingual, incl. sign language and all teams will develop new outreach and educational life-long-learning programmes for their local audiences. In addition, an artistic prologue by the project’s patron and an AA partner conference will be organised. A scientific symposium and festival will be designed and delivered in collaboration with the geriatric medicine field, to conclude the project. A multimedia documentation project will also emerge which will both allow those following the project to engage from anywhere in the world, as well as be the basis for a knowledge-based exchange platform offering valuable peer-led learning on the coproduction process for public theatres, specifically regarding working crossculturally in confronting and sharing