The World Falls Silent – A Practice-Based Performance on Ageism and its Effects on the Dancer

Abstract The World Falls Silent is a practice-based artistic research project that investigates ageism and its implications for professional contemporary dancers. Employing an autobiographical and improvisation-based methodology, the study examines how socio-cultural norms, institutional frameworks, and choreographic practices shape a dancer’s agency, visibility, and artistic identity across their lifespan. Drawing on age-critical theory and collaborative inquiry with five co-researchers aged 50–62, the research explores the intersection between lived experience and artistic practice. Through embodied reflection, writing, and performance, personal memories are transformed into choreographic material that problematises the youth-oriented ideals embedded in contemporary dance. The performance comprises ten interconnected parts addressing themes of agency, power structures, conflict, maturity, and the dancer’s embodied archive. The study demonstrates how improvisation and autobiographical processes can function as both artistic and analytical tools to reveal and counteract internalised ageism. By positioning the ageing body as a site of knowledge, expression, and resistance, The World Falls Silent contributes to reconfiguring the discourse on age within the performing arts. The project offers alternative narratives of artistic continuity, proposing that the ageing dancer’s body not only carries history but also generates new possibilities for creation, interpretation, and the future of dance practice.