#aging-performers

#aging-performers

When the Academy Award Nominations were announced late last month, you could be forgiven for thinking they were lifetime achievement awards. In the Best Supporting Actor category, 74-year-old Stellan Skarsgård is competing against 73-year-old Delroy Lindo. (Sean Penn, at 65, and Benicio Del Toro, at 58, also in the category, are mere babes.) Amy Madigan, 75, is up for Best Supporting Actress. One of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees is in their sixties, and one of the Best Original Screenplay nominees is in his seventies.

Theatres are haunted houses: on any stage, the ghosts of past performances can rise. At the opera house in Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia, you can imagine the decades-ago premieres of Pina Bausch's first potent tanztheater shows, which left audiences either enraptured or slamming the exit door. An original cast member may still appear in revivals today, giving a tantalising link to the history of a company now packed with dancers who joined after the German choreographer's death in 2009.