STU lecture explores aging in sports and intergenerational theatre

 Kristi Allan and Stephanie Dotto gave their presentation on how intergenerational performances in theatre can create a better environment and show for everyone. (Brianna Lyttle/AQ)

Winter’s Tales: A Play About Curling, Hockey, and Old Age was not the typical play to be presented in St. Thomas University’s Black Box Theatre in April 2024.

The play was also a research project revisited on Oct. 15 as part of the STU's public lecture series, facilitated by Kristi Allain and Stephanie Dotto.

The show and research project brought together volunteer performers above the age of 60 as well as those between the ages of 18-25 to explore how intergenerational performances produce a joy shared between generations, encouraging performers to connect with each other and challenge societal norms and stereotypes. 

Volunteers collaborated to form the story of the play through sharing their own experiences with curling and winter sports, with the end result being a verbatim theatre production.

The project began in 2014 with a collaboration between Allain, a STU sociology professor, and  Dotto, a Mount Allison University drama professor and STU postdoctoral fellow. Inspired after seeing a verbatim theatre piece based on research, Allain wanted to combine her research in winter sports and aging with Dotto’s expertise in using theatre as a means of social justice.

“Stephanie and I did our PhDs together at the Frost Centre [for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies] at Trent University. So we've known each other a long, long time,” said Allain.

The lecture detailed how the researchers interviewed 30 male curlers and hockey players until 2019. 

The interviews examined how men’s sporting practices and the masculinity displays within them changed over the human lifespan, exploring how different age groups played together. 

In Winter 2023, they began recruiting participants, most of which had no prior experience, for the performances. The aforementioned collaborative workshops began in 2024.

“As a sociologist, we are always thinking about ways to make our work more accessible to broader participant pools. I want them to be able to see how I use their work, without forcing them to read an academic article,” said Allain.

Many aging performers in theatre face challenges with finding fulfilling leading roles, with many being delegated to perform stereotypical background characters. Dotto said that Winter’s Tales avoided that issue by having a wide range of roles.

“We combined multiple people … [The interview participants] were part of the process before we finished the script. So the script was designed to give everyone a big role,” said Dotto.

What most surprised Dotto was how quickly intergenerational bonds formed. The relationships formed between participants in the workshops did not conform to the expected outcome of mentor-mentee or grandparent-grandchild relationships. 

One such example was that a young person and an older person formed a “jocular” relationship commonly seen in young peers. 

Older actors found wisdom in the energy and enthusiasm of the young, with younger people cherishing the company of the older actors, especially in the absence of grandparents.

To connect the participants to intergenerational joy, the researchers strove to engage them in the present.

“Theatrical rehearsal is future-oriented, theatrical performance is wrapped up in the present,” said Dotto.

Allain was most surprised by how quick and willing elderly participants in the interviews and the workshops were to take risks. Through the interviews, Allain learned that participants in elderly hockey leagues regularly died and sustained extreme injuries mid-season.

“A sport like hockey is inherently risky as you get older. So in the leagues where I interviewed people, people died regularly, each season … I think what surprised me was the kind of frankness that people talked about their injuries, their bodies, how hockey made them feel, but that they also found a lot of joy in hockey, even though they knew it was quite risky and that it could result in them losing their life,” said Allain.

The final conclusion of the research was that the nature of theatre created uniquely interdependent intergenerational relationships and joy. 

Allain wanted audience members to understand "later life is complicated; it's not all joy, it's not all awful. It's full and complete and has all the kinds of lived experience of all the different kinds of life stages.”