Still Here, Still Strong

This short film shows how social science research findings in the form of I-Poetry verses can be brought to life through theatre to educate and to engage both performers and audiences. The poems reproduced in Still Here, Still Strong highlight the ageing adults’ voices regarding the tensions between the cultural expectations associated with versus the day-to-day lived reality of “being old.”

Still Here, Still Strong is a hybrid of theatre and film created through a collaboration between scholarly researchers Lynne Gouliquer, Carmen Poulin, and Chen-Fen Chen, and artist Lisa Anne Ross, featuring performances from a class of undergraduate theatre students. The students, led by Director Lisa Anne Ross, interpreted through character, physical and emotional embodiment and breath, scholarly created poems (I-Poetry verses). The poetry was produced from the data of an interdisciplinary social science research project called: Life stories of elder elders: Tales of resilience, identity, and longevity. This research study was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the film production was made possible with supported from the University of New Brunswick, Laurentian University, St. Thomas University and the Arts NB Residency Grant.

The SSHRC study was conducted by Drs. Lynne Gouliquer and Carmen Poulin. Dr Chen-Fen Chen, a Taipei scholar also contributed data and interpretation. Initially, themes were identified and analysed from the life-history stories of forty-three older adults using the Psycho-Social Ethnography of the Commonplace methodology. Subsequently, using an adaption of the Listening Guide methodology (Gilligan et al., 2003), I-Poetry verses were produced and crafted from “I statements” of the participants associated with the emergent themes (e.g., I don’t feel old). The older adults who participated in the study were over 85 years old and the majority beyond 90 years. While the study was primarily based in New Brunswick, participants from Ontario, Quebec, and Taiwan were also included.

The I-Poetry poems, created by Gouliquer and Poulin and members of the P-SEC research team, served as verbatim monologues. Subsequently, they were interpreted and performed by theatre students at St. Thomas University under the direction of Artist/Professor Lisa Ross. The performances were rehearsed and performed as ‘live theatre’ but were then creatively filmed by Zak Rogers, with support from Technical Director Chris Saad, to serve both the needs of the performance and the ultimate needs of the film. Rogers and Ross worked collaboratively to build the overall narrative of the film, including narration from Ross. Rogers used editing to build visual collages of individual students to amplify the meaning of the various themes. The final touch was the addition of an original score that created a link between the past and present and rooted the film in a sense of resilience, humour and depth.