Dramaturgy of assistance: performing with dementia or age-related memory loss

ABSTRACT

The autobiographical shows The Waiting Room (by John Mann and Morris Panych), and Sonic Elder (by Vancouver’s The Chop Theatre), both featured performers with dementia or marked age-related memory loss who performed rock music live on stage. These professional Canadian productions used a dramaturgical approach (dramaturgy of assistance) that foregrounded relational and embodied selfhoods, thus highlighting the performers’ musicality and relationships. While The Waiting Room partially sought to mask the performer’s need for support to maintain a slick, commercial aesthetic, Sonic Elder’s approach was more transparent about exposing memory challenges, and to a greater extent disrupted traditional loss-based dementia narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Theatre
• dementia
• relational selfhood
• embodied selfhood
• dramaturgy of assistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julia Henderson recently completed PhD in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her dissertation explores narratives of ageing and old age in contemporary Western theatre. Julia’s work appears in Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Research in Canada, and Age Culture Humanities.

ORCID

Julia Henderson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7110-0250

Notes

1 The concept of dramaturgy of assistance is expanded from Arthur Strimling’s description of what he calls ‘choreography of assistance’ in Roots and Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theater (2004, 111). Strimling notes that he uses choreographic strategies to support the participation of senior actors with varying physical capacities, such as staging actors in seated positions, or building in ways for actors to assist each other when moving about the stage. Strimling does not develop the concept beyond this brief discussion. Long-term artistic director of Graeae Theatre Company and renowned international disability theatre and performance artsits, Jenny Sealey, has used the term ‘access aesthetics’ to describe a similar approach (Johnston 2016, 153–161).

2 The TimeSlips project is ongoing to the present and has developed online training and certification for facilitators, and many other resources. It continues to inspire storytelling projects around the globe (TimeSlips Creative Storytelling Inc., n.d.).

3 All performers in Sonic Elder were invited to participate in interviews with the author. Only one both consented and was able to schedule an interview.

4 The Chop Theatre’s Kismet One to One Hundred is a piece created by four creator/performers (Emelia Symington Fedy, Daryl King, Anita Rochon, and Hazel Venzon) who travelled across Canada and interviewed 100 people, aged 1 through 100, regarding their experiences and beliefs about Kismet, or fate and destiny. The show blends verbatim theatre and the travellers’ own experiences, and its central narrative turns around a character who is 100 years old. The piece has been produced at a number of theatres across Canada and was nominated for two Jessie awards (The Chop Theatre 2015b). The Chop’s How To Disappear Completely (text by Itai Erdal with James Long, Anita Rochon, and Emelia Symington Fedy) is a piece lit and performed by Itai Erdal in which he ‘demonstrates his approach to theatrical lighting while also reflecting on the events that followed his mother asking him to take her life’ after she had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The work has toured to multiple locations in Canada, the United States, and Britain since 2011. It incorporates film and photographs Erdal took to document his ageing mother’s end-of-life experience (The Chop Theatre 2015a).

5 Carlos Joe Costa was the drummer in the first version of Sonic Elder at Club PuSH. Due to the autobiographical nature of the show, parts of Sonic Elder’s content substantially changed when Buff Allen joined for the second version staged at The Penthouse.