Everybody Sings: Finding intimacy in later life

Margaret Jennings chats with Shaun Dunne, whose production Everybody Sings is based on older people’s views on intimacy and marriage Chorus of voices on the reality of relationships.

The complexity of intimacy and sexuality among Irish men and women in their later decades, who grew up in an era when they were told ‘you have made your bed, so lie on it’ when their relationships failed, is one of the themes of a theatre project due to be shown next month.

Called Everybody Sings, it features music, film, and live performance and is based on conversations with 50 people, mostly in their late 60s, who responded to an invitation to offer their insights and opinions on the theme of intimacy and

relationships.

Those stories were related confidentially to Shaun Dunne who makes theatre and film with real people at the core — taking lived experience and abstracting it into material that is then turned into the production.

The project was commissioned by the organisation Age & Opportunity as part of it’s nationwide Bealtaine Festival, a month-long programme promoting the arts for older people, in May.

“I heard a lot of grievances about how people of a particular age are treated in regard to sexuality, or their capacity to

negotiate intimacy later in life,” says Dunne.

I met many people who are in secret relationships that they wouldn’t tell their kids about, because they feel like their kids have a kind of horrified attitude at their older parents moving on to someone else, or maybe having sex, or any of that stuff.

When they feel others are judging them, they can then impose that stigma on themselves, he says: “It’s unfortunate that some people feel that because their hair is white and they’re in their late 60s that the shutters are down and I do feel that is a kind of attitude that prevails.

“But with that generation in Ireland, they have experienced a lot of hardship and trauma as a group, in terms of how they were socialised — like making their bed and lying on it — and that stuff is referenced, and is definitely part of the art I have made,” he tells Feelgood.

And he adds: “It felt to me like this was the really urgent stuff that needed presence, rather than like how many times is x or y having sex a week.”

While couples who are happily married for 50 or 60 years get lots of airtime, the opposite —the grey area, or the

complications of relationships as we grow older — doesn’t, he points out.

“I think a lot of the people I met had very interesting things happened to them. For instance, some of them are living with their partners but living separate lives in the same house and they have been doing that for 10 or 15 years.”

And not everyone was afraid of moving on to another relationship either. On the flip side to those who felt stigmatised, there were also people he met who said: ‘Why wouldn’t I? I’m on the dating sites’.”

Aged 29, Dunne says it was a personal learning journey too: “There is a great thing that happens — I become better equipped as a person through all the insights I get when collating and extracting, from this work.”

For instance: “Sometimes you get intimacy from the care you provide for your partner — maybe a simple action like

making their breakfast every day, or giving them a hand massage. It doesn’t need to be something as full on as some people think,” he says.

While there was “a real connection between intimacy and sex being linked to partnership”, with a lot of the people he spoke to, that intimacy also broadened out.

“It can be about the people you meet during the week and the conversations you have, or if you’re going to a club or active retirement group people are doing things together that create a closeness. It might be a singing class.

"That’s why I called the piece Everybody Sings. There’s a live choir sound-tracking the film and singing for me is a metaphor for intimacy because when you sing with people, you get close to them.”

Despite the age gap, Dunne has made friends with a lot of those he interviewed. “We were working together so it was

professional, but I know at the same time I will keep in touch because you do get close to people when you are making art with them.

I love having older friends and I love having younger friends and I think for anyone who just rolls around with their own age group, it’s a very boring way to live your life — it’s very limited, he says.

“And although Bealtaine is a festival dealing with themes about growing older I think we should all be going, to see for ourselves.”

Everybody Sings is on in Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on May 15 and 16 at 7.30pm. For other news of festival events countrywide go to www.bealtaine.ie