One day when I was an art student in Paris, I was having a coffee with a friend at the brasserie La Coupole. La Coupole was famous years ago for organising thés dansants (dancing teas), where people would gather in the afternoon to dance and socialise. Nowadays, thé dansants are a bit more scarce, and mostly attended by older people. As we sat there, a very chic old lady, quite elegant, came to talk to us. She told us she’d come to the thé dansants every Sunday. She loved to dance and she’d also meet lovers! It was almost 15 years ago, and that image stuck in my mind. I have been interested in older age and its perception in society for quite a while. Maybe the reason is that my parents are 10 to 15 years older than most people from my generation’s parents. This seems to have opened up my perception of age. Then I moved to New York, where I lived for seven years, and Asia, for two years, where I met quite a lot of extravagant, dynamic seniors, very integrated into society. The idea to do a project about those people had been growing for years. When I moved back to France, I was immediately struck by a very reduced general view on seniors. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, seniors suddenly stepped into the spotlight. Two main reactions emerged: the empathic one (“let’s protect the elderly, they are fragile”) and the annoyed one (“we don’t want to stop living because of the old”). Ageing is often represented as a weight, or stereotyped greatly. Lives are becoming longer, but getting older keeps a negative connotation. This does not only come from the young, it can also come from the seniors themselves. I can see it through my mother’s view and her friends’, for example: ageing terrifies or disgusts them. All they see is an unavoidable decrepitude. Obviously, getting older can be difficult for some, but it does not have to be. I decided to go to meet seniors who haven’t stopped living because they are older. Some of them dance, others work, do a lot of sports, or fall in love – desire is still here. Often, society’s paternalist view tends to limit the opportunities. Certainly our envelope changes and transforms itself, but its beauty is only a matter of perception. If fire is still burning, there is no reason to stop. “Thés Dansants” in France was a starting point and a first chapter. The project aims to introduce a part of society that we know little about but that concerns us all. Now I would like to extend it to other interests that we don’t associate with an older age in France, as well as to other countries.