Dancing Across the Lifespan: Negotiating Age, Place, and Purpose

This  book critically examines matters of age and aging in relation to dance.  As a novel collection of diverse authors’ voices, this edited book  traverses the human lifespan from early childhood to death as it  negotiates a breadth of dance experiences and contexts. The  conversations ignited within each chapter invite readers to interrogate  current disciplinary attitudes and dominant assumptions and serve as  catalysts for changing and evolving long entrenched views among dancers  regarding matters of age and aging.
The text is organized in  three sections, each representing a specific context within which dance  exists. Section titles include educational contexts, social and cultural  contexts, and artistic contexts. Within these broad categories, each  contributor’s milieu of lived experiences illuminate age-related factors  and their many intersections. While several contributing authors  address and problematize the phenomenon of aging in mid-life and beyond,  other authors tackle important issues that impact young dancers and  dance professionals.