In your seat and on your feet – Accessible dance, Season 3-Episode 39

Rachel Bar, the Director of Research and Health and TCAS Postdoctoral Fellow at Canada’s National Ballet School in Toronto speaks with Lisa Loiselle about dance and movement for those living with dementia. Rachel speaks about her lifelong involvement in dance and as a professional ballet dancer, and how that took her down an academic path researching how dance affects the brain. That subsequently brought her to working with older adults and people living with dementia, artistically and through program development.

Sharing Dance Older Adults is a collaborative program between Baycrest and Canada’s National Ballet School that works to make dance accessible for older adults with various physical and cognitive abilities. There are several versions of this program: In Your Seat and On Your Feet. These variations focus on dance across the lifespan and creating a joyful human experience in an accessible way, including delivering a group program and an at-home version. There are so many reasons and ways to dance, and Rachel talks about how the Sharing Dance Older Adults program includes and considers them all. She also speaks about the benefits of dance and how it can challenge the stigma about dementia.

As this program has expanded and continues to find ways to be more accessible, an app was launched in April 2021 to provide meaningful programs for Canadians, with hopes to expand internationally in the future.  

 Resources:

Journal article: Dancing With Dementia: Exploring the Embodied Dimensions of Creativity and Social Engagement (https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article/61/5/714/5903628) [see attached pdf]

link to the Sharing Dance site: https://oa.sharingdance.ca/

research project website: https://sdseniorsresearch.com/

https://www.dancingwithparkinsons.com