Featuring Keynote Addresses by Elinor Fuchs (Yale University School of Drama) Margaret Morganroth Gullette (Brandeis University)

The symposium “Playing Age” offers a humanistic exploration of aging, old age, and inter-generational relations. Seminal theorists of play, from Johan Huizinga to Roger Caillois, claimed that rule-bounded games and mimetic enactments create a “magic circle” in which conflicts within the self and the community can be negotiated at a safe remove. More recently, performance and game theorists have insisted that even playing within the bounded precincts of a stadium, a theatre, or a video game influences everyday conduct, particularly when we play with volatile topics like inter-cultural representations, social class, race and gender. This symposium asks how aging and old age can be investigated through playing, specifically the playfulness of artistic representations, and whether aging is uniquely available for or resistant to imaginative inhabitations.

For more information and a conference schedule, please visit our website (see above).

Sponsorship provided by the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies and the Jackman Institute for the Humanities