Spots of Future Time: Tableaux, Masculinity, and the Enactment of Aging
Abstract
This article proposes the utility of tableau as a terminological and conceptual contribution to age studies. I explore how the transgeneric appeal of this theatrical form enables stillness and fragmentation to be a part of the vocabulary of aging. Referring to the work of two twenty-first-century artists – French photocollagist Gilbert Garcin and American novelist David Markson – I demonstrate the applicability of the aesthetics of tableaux to non-theatrical enactments of aging. Despite their generic and formal differences, reading Garcin and Markson in tandem prepares readers to think of older age, and older masculinities especially, outside the framework of narrative and, instead, in terms of the visual aesthetics of stillness. Drawing new links among aging, play, and the tableau form, the article asserts the potential of the static as a way of imagining the aging subject in the context of age studies more generally. The tableau’s aesthetics of living stillness, I conclude, opens up drama and age studies alike to more playful possibilities for imagining aging and for enactments of self-creation in later life.
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Modern Drama
Volume 59 • Number 2 • Summer 2016
Pages: 155 - 176
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© University of Toronto.
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Published in print: Summer 2016
Published online: 7 July 2016
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