Australia
These projects occurred over a period of 7 years in Central and Western Queensland during my time as Artistic Director/CEO of Crossroad Arts and later working as a freelance artist with Open till Late, through Francis of Assisi Aged Care, and Lutheran Services. The projects took place in Aged Care Facilities in Gladstone, Mackay, Longreach, Winton and Mt Isa as well as a variety of other alternative settings. I used 4 different approaches in working creatively with older adults:
1. The Reminisce Method; focused mainly on older people without dementia where I used several art forms and strategies to trigger people’s memories to create public outcomes in theatre, dance, photography and film. 2. The Timeslips Method: focused mainly on people with dementia where there is no emphasis on recalling memory and where imagination, improvisation and creativity are used to value and celebrate incoherence and forgetfulness in art works that range from free form poetry, rambling narratives and theatre. A combination of the 3. Timeslips and Reminisce Methods particularly in mixed groups of people with and without memory loss. 4. Improvisation: where art is created in the moment with no planning. Much of the work here focused on dance, theatre and visual art.
Other Creative Ageing and Intergenerational Projects can be found in the Oceania, Indian and Japan projects
Portraits in Landscape
Diary and field notes of an Intergenerational arts project in aged care homes in the towns of Gladstone, Biloela, Mackay, Longreach, Winton and Mt Isa
Homer’s Odyssey and Constantine Cavafy’s poem Ithaka form the basis of an intergenerational theatre project across several towns and aged care centres in Queensland.
Cheek2Cheek
An intergenerational creative ageing project at Homefield Agedcare Memory Unit for elderly
people with dementia
Longreach to create a dance in the desert
An intergenerational project that explores the history of Debutante Balls in the Mackay Region
Life to be Lived
Members of Winton’s 65 and Better Club celebrate their life stories with songs, dances photographs and film
A film that looks at a day in the life of Stephanie Greenwood from Winton. 2nd prize in the 2016 Winton International Film Festival
Letters on Gordon St
Painting is my Oxygen
Painter John Pickup reflects on his life through his paintings
MWRP
Penelope’s Bus Stop
Wolf’s Tooth
George Orwell’s classic fable brought to the stage in a new one woman adaptation by playwright Steve Mayer-Miller featuring Sherri Smith and musician Glenn Gospell.
Fishwife and the Changeling
The Extra Mile
Hole in my Shoe
In 1914, large crowds stood on Paxton’s Wharf to farewell soldiers leaving to fight in the Great War. One girl refused to turn up that day. Four years later she sailed to Paris to try and find her brother. When she returned her town had been destroyed by a cyclone.
A creative ageing project that began at Hibiscus Gardens Aged Care Facility in Gladstone using reminisce methods of triggering people’s memories of the places they grew in and the different non traditional tracks they walked along during their childhood. The outcome of the project was a photographic exhibition of individual portraits of each of the residents photographed by the participants and exhibited at the aged care facility and eventually exhibited through digital projections in publicly non traditional spaces such as empty billboards along the Landsborough Highway near Winton in Western Queensland Australia.
Post Script: 5 years later I still continue to drink McGuigan’s Black Label Merlot. Boxes of it are kept in the laundry cellar. At $9 a bottle it’s the best value in town. And it’s also a wonderful loosener for reviving old memories
