Holly's Comets

(This story appeared in High Performance #58/59, Summer/Fall 1992.)

Every Monday morning for the last seven years, a group of men and women meet at the Woodstock Community Center in upstate New York for two-and-a-half hours of movement exercises, theater games and improvisational sketches. These sessions are open to the public; no previous theatrical training is necessary. The only restriction on participation calls for another kind of life experience: to be a member of Holly's Comets, you must be at least 60 years old.

Holly Beye, Ruth Craig and Diana Kahn Shornstein created the Comets in 1985 as Beye was facing a "terrific depression" upon retiring from her job as a school librarian. The women "realized that retirement in America is a very frightening phenomenon. The guidelines that are set out for people are horrible. It's like pulling you into a trough of death and sickness."

One way out of the despair was to confront it head-on, to refuse to slide gracefully into uselessness. Beye and her friends posted fliers throughout town inviting community members to help form a performing ensemble. Seven people attended the initial meeting, all but one of whom have remained active in the group to this day. They started developing a working style informed by Beye's background as an experimental theater artist and political activist in the '60s, a style emphasizing emotional openness and collective feedback. Noami Leaf Halpern, a featured dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies and the 1939 World's Fair, joined the group in 1988, adding movement work to the repertoire.

News spread through word of mouth, public performances and the local press. Group members have also collaborated on an hour-long documentary called Lives of the Comets; Refractions, an imagistic video poem choreographed by Halpern; and a weekly public access television series. Today there are 25 active Comets.

While several participants have previous performance experience in regional theater, the ministry and even on the burlesque circuit, a larger number do not. The Comets include visual artists, writers, retired teachers and civil servants. "I've often wondered what other characteristic we all have in common, outside of our love of ham or acting or whatever and I can't place it. I can't find anything that draws us together," observes Eli Schneer. It is precisely this diversity that gives the ensemble its vitality. Like much contemporary performance work, what the Comets do is rooted in the voices, bodies and memories of its members.

Personal experiences such as attempting to renew a driver's license, dealing with Woodstock tourists or coping with the loss of loved ones are all fuel for performance. The Comets also rethink themes like the concept of family to present the fullest possible picture of older people's lives in a society fixated on the young and restless.

"We're exploring aging as it's happening to us," Beye says. The process has led them to take on subjects like mourning, sexuality, cohabitation and lost dentures with a clarity and precision that Hollywood has yet to achieve. "Look at the older people you see on commercial TV," says Halpern. "They're always caricatures, never real people."

Much of the material generated in the Monday sessions is by nature ephemeral and sometimes underdeveloped, but particularly resonant scenes are reshaped for public performance. When the Comets perform in nursing homes—which they are disinclined to do, given the relatively dismal state of care and overreliance on medication they have too often found there—they can address the residents on their own terms, not as outsiders but as peers. "We have something very special: a past," Beye tells these audiences, using an inclusive pronoun not to condescend but to dignify. When performing for children, they find they are often the first "old folks" the kids have ever encountered up close. "I'm no longer afraid to get old," one Woodstock boy wrote after a performance.

Although the Comets are quite outspoken about the politics of aging, from health care ("there's an enormous, money-making industry in keeping people sick in this country. . .") to the use of the term "senior citizen" ("when I hear the word, I see people in these 'senior communities,' where the grass is all exactly two-and-a-half-inches high. . ."), their personal investment in the group springs less from a desire to change public policy than simply to explore a process together.

"We've seen some of our members go through some pretty terrible stuff," says Holly. "One of our founding members is now in a home because he's had a stroke. That's pretty sad but it's not scary because we know it from the improvisations."

Many Comets attribute significant, unexpected personality developments to their involvement with the group. John Stokes, for instance, describes how the Monday exercises have allowed him to feel free to express "outrageous things," to do things he wouldn't otherwise do. "I'm going to try to express what I actually feel...I don't know what may happen, but I'm game enough to try it."

Ronald Ehmke is a fiction writer and performer who curates the Performance Program at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #58/59, Summer/Fall 1992.

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999