A 2 day programme featuring performances, screenings, and debates with Liz Aggiss, Rocio Boliver, Marcia Farquhar & Anne Bean.

Old Dears is a programme on the radical, influential and fiercely feminist practices of an older generation of artists who embody the lived realities of feminist histories and whose work continues to contribute to discourses around gender politics. 

LADA’s programmes Just Like A Woman and Old Dears are part of the 2015 Sacred season at Chelsea Theatre, London, in November 2015 and the culminating events in LADA’s Restock Reflect Rethink Three project (2013-15) on Live Art and Feminism.

Friday 27 November

Liz Aggiss, The English Channel
8.00pm

After 60 years, Liz Aggiss finally gives herself permission to do what she damn well pleases. Better late than never! She’s reached an age where doing the right thing is optional. Should she please you, or should she please herself?

Old Dears On Film
9.00pm

A screening of performance documentation and works to camera by an ‘older’ generation of trailblazing women artists introduced by LADA’s Aaron Wright and featuring Francis Mezetti & Pauline Cummins, Bobby Baker, Monica Ross, Lois Weaver and more.

Penny Arcade, My Life As History

9.45pm

International performance legend Penny Arcade reports from the summits of age on the loss of connoisseurship in the arts, the death of ability and the hatred of excellence.

Saturday 28 November

Gasbags - A Panel Discussion
6pm

Looking at how the practices and visibilities of women artists have shifted over the years, and the ways in which Live Art has offered a different way of working and thinking for women artists, producers and scholars alike. With artists Anne Bean, Liz Aggiss and Geraldine Pilgrim and curators/producers/thinkers Claire MacDonald, Judith Knight, and Nikki Millican.

Marcia Farquhar, Recalibrating Hope: (h)old dear and let go
7.30pm 

Marcia Farquhar plays from a collection of 7” singles listening back to look forward. She will play the songs to which she danced, and dreamed of becoming a woman back in sixties' Chelsea. Returning to the World's End she will face the music and talk over the before and after of the period in-between. 

Rocio Boliver and Collaborators: Between Menopause and Old Age, Alternative Beauty
9pm

A performance by Mexican artist Rocio Boliver and a group of women who have just taken part in her workshop on issues facing older women artists, like ageing bodies, disempowerment, and invisibility. Rocio describes her workshop as “demystifying "the horror of old age", inventing my own deranged aesthetic and moral solutions for the "problem of age." Come and see what this fearless group of warrior women got up to.