Acting her age Montreal dance icon celebrates advancing years the only way she knows how By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 3:04 PM CST Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025 Last Modified: 9:16 AM CST Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025 Updates

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Once people get over a certain age, they stop volunteering how old they are.

Even “over a certain age” is a euphemism for that word, old. A word that has become an epithet instead of a description in our youth-obsessed culture. A word that women especially have been socialized to fear — or spend a lot of time, money and energy to avoid becoming, even though there’s only one true way to avoid becoming it.

Not Margie Gillis, though. The Montreal-born and based Canadian contemporary dance icon will readily, happily tell you she is 71.

“And a half,” she offers with beaming pride, the way a child who is still excited about accumulating years might.

Gillis is also not afraid of that tiny three-letter word — so much so that she straight-up titled her latest full-length solo work Old, which Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers will present at the Rachel Browne Theatre this weekend.

Created in collaboration with Winnipeg-based visual artist Randal Newman and choreographed and performed by Gillis, Old is an exploration of the agony and ecstasy of aging.

The inspiration for the work came from a personal place: simply, Gillis herself was aging.

“I was aging, and a lot of my friends were frightened of the word old. They didn’t want to use it. They didn’t want to do it. And I was like, ‘Yeah! I’m the freshly old. I’m the newly old.’ And I was kind of into it,” she says while seated in the Rachel Browne Theatre, barefoot with her long silver hair cascading around her shoulders.

Gillis has had some powerful elder role models, too: her aunt, who just turned 103, and the late American actor, singer and teacher Betsy Parrish, who died in 2022 at 97. In 2013, Gillis collaborated with Parrish on Bulletins From Immortality, a piece based on the poems of Emily Dickinson.

Parrish was 88 at the time.

“And I really decided that life was my lover and I had no intention of giving up my sensuality,” Gillis says. “I know it’s hard, and you have knee injuries, you get sick, and there’s stuff that happens — you lose friends, and you lose lovers, and you lose close people. But there’s also some wonderful things about aging, and I don’t think it’s worth giving those up. Mainly curiosity and keeping curiosity alive.”

In Old, Gillis is clad in a white dress that doesn’t quite fit and is, quite literally, surrounded by the wreckage of a life in the form of an impressive set designed by Newman.

Composed of a pile of antiques, the set transforms the Rachel Browne Theatre into a treasure-filled attic filled with pieces from Gillis’s and Newman’s own family collections, including a traditional Quebeçois door from her family home, its peeling paint curling like white chocolate shavings on a cake, and her great-grandmother’s settee.

Chairs — and in particular a rather insistent rocking chair with which she has an argument — take on resonance in Old, almost becoming other characters onstage.

“All the hard parts and aggression and different things that you experience through life came out with that chair and then the other chairs — what’s broken and what’s beautiful that’s broken,” she says.

Some of the set’s rougher edges have been adorned with gold leaf, a nod to both the Japanese art of kintsugi — repairing broken pottery by mending areas of breakage with gold — and “a nod to the injuries we’ve all suffered,” Newman says.

As a dancer, aging has meant figuring out how to move her body in new ways — yielding, softening and getting good at falling. Not forcing. Not fighting against.

“I’m enjoying it. Aging has got a lot of scary bits about it, but it’s got a lot of wonder about it, too,” she says.

For Gillis, to age is to live.

“We’re alive,” she says. “There’s a miracle going on. And so much of our time we spend not listening to that miracle, or knowing that miracle.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com