A development initiative for South Asian Dance in the North West

Aims

I followed my dream to Canada with three aims.

1. Learning about current practice in the field of dance and older people

2. Exploring my own ‘late style’

3. Meeting mature South Asian dancers to understand views on aging and dance

1. Learning about current practice in the field of dance and older people

With the kind support from people I contacted before my journey and the new opportunities that opened  door I could put together a very busy schedule in order to make the most of the trip and ensure I experienced and met as many people as I could.

It was very fortunate that within a limited period I managed to see so much. My time in Toronto coincided with the large annual Bengali Cultural convention NABC. I attended the weekend festival. Delegates travel from all over USA and Canada. Lead artists come from India. It is a place mainly of nostalgia and reminiscence but a wonderful example of an intergenerational event.

I visited large and small health settings, from modern care homes with two to three hundred residents to small basement rooms in community centres where art is being used to promote the health and wellbeing of the senior citizens of the country.

I was struck by the high standard of the residential centres I visited and noticed that alongside recreational activities the residents were actively encouraged to undertake tasks such as peeling potatoes or gardening, in the hope of maintaining a family atmosphere.

Different neighbourhoods within  the home often keep different pets. There are rooms where residents can have private meals with their families and boxes of toys in common social areas to encourage the family to bring children. All the care homes that I visited had well resourced art rooms and offered interesting arts projects. In one such place I joined in their regular music session. However I discovered that there was not much dance activity.

Every time I presented a dance workshop it was received with great interest. There was a clear appetite for more dance activities and what surprised residents most was the fact that I was using Indian dance techniques with them rather than dance forms they are more used to.

“What I learned and what I continue to reflect upon is that it is easy to create movements that fill one with joy. And from that joy comes a
feeling of self satisfaction. In the workshop we were shown how to share our movements with others and weave these movements into a dance that both binds us and expresses our own individuality. Beautiful”   

Louanna Cocchiarella, co editor, Journal of Alzheimer society, Canada

From my experience, it appeared that though Canada is a multi cultural country, culturally diverse dance and other arts are not being used in health settings. Often after our workshops there were discussions of new collaborations and exploring the possibility of using music and dance from other minority cultures

My discussions with local Indian dance practitioners also supported this observation. I found that most dance artists are focussed on excellence and teaching dance for performance. They expressed interest in what I was doing and had many ideas of how they can deliver work but no one I met had any experience of doing work with the health and art sector or had any connections with any health settings.
My respect for the richness of  community dance practice in the UK increased. In England it is a reasonably common practice for  South Asian dance artists to engage in different community dance initiatives.
 Comparing notes with other Churchill Fellows it seems that I was presenting more practical sessions than usual, even the round table discussions ended with everyone on their feet dancing. There was a genuine curiosity to know how a highly stylised form like Indian dance can be used in an informal way with their seniors. Sometimes, though I was prepared to give a verbal or power point presentation, it seemed more effective to take the people attending  through a practical experience. It created an informal joyful atmosphere, as always it dissolves any professional hierarchy in the room and allowed a flow of conversation and openness.

“You began with a quote, “Dance gives me an enhanced sense of well being” and your work demonstrated how you bring that to life. As you said more than once, you cannot cure illness but you can use dance and the arts to draw people away from their suffering, give them a sense of connectedness rather than isolation and a feeling of mastery in situations where they are vulnerable and feel that they have lost control. You showed us how you raise awareness of dementia and make those with dementia participators in rather than observers of the arts. Particularly meaningful was your discussion of creating performances that are “dementia friendly” and welcome all who want to attend and take part.

Equally enjoyable was the opportunity to become part of an in vivo demonstration of your work. It was wonderful to see our whole team up on their feet dancing around the room with so little inhibition”

Virginia Wesson, MD, MSc, FRCPC, Staff Psychiatrist, Mount Sinai Hospital

2. Exploring my own ‘late style’

After reading The Baring Foundations publication ‘Winter Fire’ by Francois Matarasso I was made aware of the fact that visual artists in particular can chart their careers in different periods as they acquire more skill, hone their style, become more or less risk taking and find their signature. This idea or appreciation of different stages and in particular a ‘late period’ is not translated to the performing arts in particular dance as it is such a physical form. However my one dream was to find new choreography for what can be called  a 'late style' of dance for myself. I had a short yet enriching experience of working with a young choreographer Jacci Collin's. We created a dance combining Jacci's method of using the idea of landscapes of life and my interest in a poem by a Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst.  I performed it for and with a group of senior dance students of Toronto's Roundhouse community centre.
It was interesting to see how Jacci found different incentives to inspire me to find movements and transitions from within myself. She then watched and arranged them to create a complete piece.
From this collaboration I have learnt a new tool of choreography and have successfully used this and sections of the dance in my recent workshops on my return from Canada.

3. Meeting with other mature South Asian dancers to understand views on ageing and dance

Finally I was curious to know how other mature South Asian dancer artists are adjusting to ageing. Due to some health concern and travelling schedules it was not possible to meet many of them face to face but I got an interesting picture of a variety of methods that other dancers are adopting.
The most common approach to aging for dancers was a move to teaching and producing.  Another reasonably new development is to progress  to dance movement therapy, particularly dance for people with Parkinson diseases. Since the Mark Morris dance group has developed high quality work and a syllabus in this field, dancers I met are going to the company to train to develop a different branch of employment beyond performing. There are other mature dance artists who are collectively creating new dances for performance or are inviting choreographers to specially create appropriate solos for themselves. One such artist that I met was Claudia Moore who discussed her own solo show and her hugely successful Old and Reckless series of festivals.  Recently I have joined a group of mature dancers and some arts organisations with interest in dance and older people to discuss a national festival of older people and dance. It will be interesting to develop a festival like Old and Reckless in the UK and learn from Claudia’s model.
During my fellowship I came across two completely opposing viewpoints
"You must give up dance before it gives up you.” and "I will go on dancing till I am eighty and until the public hoots me off the stage" Both comments touched me deeply. Swaying between the two I continue my search for my "late style”