This study describes and analyzes the role of a Senior Programme of the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain) aimed at fostering older people’s lifelong learning, active ageing, social participation, and intergenerational relationships. Based on qualitative Action Research and Participant Observation, this article examines the participation of senior students as stakeholders in this Programme and in two European projects, SIforAGE and TOY, developed between 2012 and 2017. The findings reveal the importance of these learning and research activities to promote intergenerational solidarity, the quality of life of older people, and the development and improvement of the Senior Programme itself.

In the last fifteen years, various projects and publications in the interconnected areas of theatre studies, theatrical pedagogy, and literary criticism have highlighted associations between theatrical creativity and constructions of age and aging. Despite a thriving “theatrical gerontology,” the work of contemporary dramatists, especially those outside European and American canons, remains scarcely analyzed. Núria Casado Gual looks at the dramatic work of Joanna McClelland Glass, a Canadian writer born in 1936 in Saskatoon, and who currently lives in Florida. Despite the recognition that McClelland Glass has received in North American academic and theatrical circles, her plays written between 1984 and the present remain unexamined and a more complete study of her playwriting career is yet to be developed. Through the double lens of cultural gerontology and dramatic criticism, Casado Gual offers an overview of McClelland Glass’s theatricalization of old age, based on the main characters and secondary figures that can be associated with this stage of the life course in her work. The composite characterization of McClelland Glass’s older figures ensures not only the complexity of the author’s portrayal of aging-intoold-age, but also its verisimilitude and, therefore, its meaningfulness. McClelland Glass combines notions of progress and decline in the dramatic depiction of her aged characters, generating an ambivalent narrative of aging that re-presents this essential human experience in a truthful and dignified way. Ultimately, McClelland Glass’s recreation of old age is shown to contain the main defining traits of her theatre, as well as the insights that it offers on the complexities and mysteries of the human life course.

The radical demographic change produced by the ageing population in the Western world has entailed a complete transformation of its popular culture. The cinema is one of the popular arts to have been especially affected by the so-called ‘longevity revolution’. In fact, an important part of Hollywood celebrity culture and the mainstream film audiences belong to the same ageing demographic. The increasing necessity to tell and consume stories of ageing for the big screen is not only reflected in the growing number of films that feature older characters in their lead roles, but also in the changes produced in the cinematic narratives themselves. Film scholars within the inter-disciplinary field of cultural gerontology have started to address this phenomenon from various perspectives. Building on from their critical consideration, this article focuses on the particular case of Michael Radford's Elsa & Fred, a contemporary film released in 2014 that, paradoxically enough, helps renovate the youth-oriented genre of the romantic comedy through a ‘silvering’ romance. Taking into account contemporary manifestations of the romantic comedy genre, the essay proves that Radford's comedy contributes to the development of the ‘gerontocom’ as a new sub-genre in which old age is central to the protagonists’ characterisations and storylines. By considering the interaction of the generic rules of the genre with the hyper-visibility of the protagonists’ agedness, this article also shows the ways in which the film overcomes polarised views of ageing and enhances the figures’ own process of becoming in the last stage of their lives.

Alice Munro's 2001 short story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ and its 2006 film version, Away from Her, directed and adapted for the screen by Sarah Polley, are two interconnected narratives through which diverse (and even divergent) representations of romantic love and memory in later life can be analysed. Even if the two texts are constructed on an apparently simple plot line, which basically depicts the last phase of a 44-year-long marriage once the wife, Fiona, presents symptoms of dementia and is interned in a retirement home, they both allow for, at least, two contrasted interpretations. As will be demonstrated, these two possible readings unveil different cultural, social and psychological facets of memory in connection with late-life expressions of love; and each of them contributes, in their own way, to the construction of a dialogical narrative that mediates between the complexities of old age, dementia and gender difference, while at the same time demonstrating the power of literature and the cinema to reflect and refract the complexities of contemporary forms of ageing.

In our increasingly aged societies, old age continues to be equated with decline (Gullette 2004) and becomes the source of the most invisible yet persistent forms of discrimination, namely, ageism (Butler 1969). Even though theatre, like other artistic forms, has traditionally promoted a negative image of ageing (Mangan 2013), some contemporary plays have begun to favour more complex portrayals of old age. Nevertheless, when considered from a gender-based angle, these portrayals often acquire quite a problematic undertone: while roles for older female actors remain exceptional, many peripheral or, if centred, mainly problematic dramatizations of ageing femininity in the theatre arena fuel age prejudice against older women on and off stage. This article offers an age-focused analysis of two plays that counteract stereotypical images of female ageing through various dramaturgical strategies: Michel Tremblay’s Albertine in Five Times (1984) and Matt Hartley’s Here I Belong (2016). Through a comparative analysis of the Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic devices employed in the two plays, and the examination of the meanings of age generated by the characterization of the two female protagonists, we hope to demonstrate that Tremblay’s and Hartley’s texts contribute to creating a truly anti-ageist theatre while at the same time enhancing the visibility of the older woman on the stage.