Context - What Performance Initiatives are there for Older Women?

Context

I've been trying to get my ahead around contextualizing this project .  I'd like to know how many older women are exploring or training in singing, acting, devising, composing - in the UK or anywhere else.  I'd know many are engaged in a continuum of these activities - they've been doing these things since childhood, but I'm really interested in how many women are currently beginning their experience/relationship/careers/development or whatever later on in life in these art forms.

What's the situation for women around the globe?  What do women want for themselves or expect their activities in their older years to involve?  At some point older women can find some time for themselves and instead of pouring their energies into supporting others' development and life enrichment can give a bigger chunk of time to their own.

As older women shopping for something to get their teeth into, how many consider performance?  I know women have taken up other subjects and very successfully - writing, painting, businesses.  I maintain that the media doesn't show the range of what older women are really doing with their lives.  Lots of women's later life activities quite blow my mind but the media doesn't write stories mirroring these things.  How can you go shopping for something you don't know is on sale?

I know women will try Zumba, pole dancing, belly dancing etc.  These are often treated disparagingly by the media or trivialized - they're just a hobby.  It's ok for older women to have hobbies.  What happens when they want to take things more seriously?

What Performance Initiatives are there for Older Women?

I posted this question on an international forum for those involved in music which has a particular interest in gender issues affecting music education, GRIME (Gender Research in Music Education).  I first became aware of it when I was researching an essay on Music and Feminism.  It's base is in Canada.  Here's the link: http://post.queensu.ca/~grime/index.htm.  The one response brought to my attention 'POW' a circus performance company for women over 40! Here's their link too: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~powcirc/.

I had imagined that the academics, composers and performers who subscribe to the GRIME email list and attend their functions would be the best source of information on the subject of older women in performance or courses especially designed for older women.  In fact, the circus company in Australia was the only activity to be flagged up.  Naturally I'd Googled the words 'performance' with 'older woman' or 'older women' and I only achieved the now familiar search result of links to various young men's postings on the sexual skills of older women or else medical postings on the various health problems suffered by some older women.  Have you tried Googling for activities for older women?

Funding, skills development and widening participation events have largely been directed  at young people and/or ethnic groups or those with disabilities.  Older people in general have been ignored at a time when this demographic enjoy better health than older people in previous generations and are now embracing longer active and working lives.  At 55 I could well have another 15 years of wage earning ahead of me, so why not creative skills development?

Some women would ask why keep talking about 'older women' and being an 'older woman'.  Well I look back on what my interests and abilities were at various stages in my life and in older years I find these have changed a lot.  I like young people.  I like men too.  But I just don't have many older women playmates to create artworks with.  They aren't at Uni with me exploring the methodologies, strategies, playing the instruments, cross collaborating with other performance fields.  The older women on the campus are usually lecturers, academic staff or administrators.  Older women often study fine art and crafts.  In my year there is one other woman who's 40 but the term 'mature student' applies to anyone over 25 years of age.  I'd say our interests and abilities are very different - our skills are distributed differently.  Young people at Uni like to socialize with other young people.  They form play/work/creative relationships with one another.  I've been fortunate enough to create work with young musicians and choreographers and we come together as artists but these activities haven't led longer term collaborative activities.  Maybe it's me.  But I won't know the answer to that unless there are other older women for me to see interacting - perhaps more successfully.

Well, I've gone on quite a bit here and no doubt I should edit this to be more succinct and have better direction etc. but I'm tired.  I'm full time hosting and teaching English as a foreign language for another few weeks yet and have to fit this project in around that activity, usually first thing in the morning and last thing at night.  Plus now's the time to landscape the garden as the long stone wall is finally mended.

There are probably many questions I haven't asked here and lots of observations I haven't made too.

Come on sisters.  Fill in the gaps!??

PS  Look at the publicity materials for performance and arts course providers - how many of them include images of older women?  Not my Uni for sure!  (But they did give me a place to study).  Forward me pictures of older men and women learning new skills in Higher Education?