WHAT FRANCES ALENIKOFF ISN'T TELLING - Movement Research

always a surprise. She climbs atop a boxed platform one minute, then hits the
floor and continues on her back and side all while moving, speaking or singing—
quite an accomplishment! Even though time impinges on technique, age opens
and fortifies being.
And her poetic narrative, performed in highly distilled discrete sequences,
functions discontinuously in performance. Her modes of mimetic variation
transcend literality and linear development, the way a telephone line vibrates with
several conversations at once. When we congratulate her after the performance,
she reminds us that there will be many more octogenarians like her, but I remind
her, not for a while, and hey, lucky us, we're talking to one now!
* * *
I initially posed the issue of age with Frances after reading Simone de
Beauvoir's Coming of Age (the French title is, forthrightly, Old Age; Sophocles
didn't write Oedipus Rex until he was 89—that got a laugh out of her). De
Beauvoir: "...and it is this old age that makes it clear that everything has to be
reconsidered, recast from the beginning. That is why the whole problem is so
carefully passed over in silence; and that is why this silence has to be shattered."
What is more mysterious than time passed and passing is perceiving its
modes of fleeting inevitability. It resembles the mnemonic recollection of the
world that your parents or grandparents inhabited, remote and hazily recollected
through faded photographs obscured by blurs and watermarks, or like the tinny
recording of an old radio program overlaid with crackling static. Stud Terkels's
similarly titled book, Coming of Age, is also inspiring and mind-blowing, a