I am privileged enough to be able to travel with my dance work. Today I was showing work as part of the Koreda festival Inderoy in Norway.
I have been working with some really wonderful teenagers. We have been in residence in the middle of a care home. During our rehearsals, elders walk through the middle of the space. Slowly. often very slowly. Doors swing open by themselves, and a wheelchair slowly rolls by…
Doctors and nurses and care assistants stop and look, people come and go all day. This is a different kind of studio , the kind that feels porous like the body..
As we warm up this morning a woman takes a cake out of the oven, for the elders to have with their coffee. The smell of sponge drifts through the dancing..The teenagers arrive covered in a cocktail of perfume and hairspray.
A man walks slowly through the space with his cane, tapping a heartbeat into the room. Somehow his presence comes in to our work. He stops and looks at us for a while. A doctor improvises fleetingly in mid rehearsal and all 15 of us, improvise alongside him.
All week I have been so moved by how these multiple energies of the domestic and the artistic , young and old live alongside each other. How there is enough room for these different energies not only to co -exist but to inform each other deeply. How difference is essential to any creative endeavour.
The teenagers at the beginning of their arc and the elders on the other end. The ordinary and extraordinary rhythms of living and making together. Care homes have the potential to be creative and cultural hubs. The people who live in them should be able to access all kinds of arts and culture. I guess that means shifting the paradigm of how we value and hold older folk among us as active citizens that contribute to the health of any community.
This year I have been lucky enough to have had a year’s residency in my local care home in mid Wales. To have made a film and to have sat there in the dark together and hear people shout out ‘thats me’ when they see themselves and are visible and are seen by others. ‘Thats me’.. ‘Thats You’
