Podcast on Elder Dance

Dance can offer comfort and enrichment to elders. Dance practitioner Janelle Belisle shares her experience working with elder dance classes. Engaging in an enjoyable activity has therapeutic benefits. The sense of community in dance classes is therapeutic and helps combat loneliness. Dance also provides exercise, challenges coordination and memory, and allows for creative expression. Touch in dance classes is healing. Research shows benefits of dance for various populations with serious illnesses. Accessible facilities and skilled instructors are crucial. Funding is important for these programs. Intergenerational dance spaces can be valuable. Community is important and elders deserve to be honored and learned from. Aging presents a period of profound loss for people. Friends and family die, our bodies lose function, and our minds become slower. It is inevitable for all of us. It's an integral part of life. Some say that dance, another fundamental aspect of the human experience, can offer some comfort and enrichment in our last years. In order to learn more about the importance of elder dance classes, I interviewed local dance practitioner Janelle Belisle. My name is Janelle, Janelle Belisle, and I'm a dancer. A lot of people think that's my stage name as a dance performer, but it's just my name. Dance is basically my whole life. I love it more than anything. I can't imagine life without it. I'll start at the beginning, and I'll keep it a short story. When I was a child, I began studying in a ballet school. I was about age three or four. So I had my whole childhood. I got to take dance classes in some pretty typical North American dance school repertoire in terms of style. Ballet, jazz, tap. And as a teenager, I fell in love with flamenco because I was so expressive, and it wasn't presented as you had to be a certain body type, but you just got to be who you were. You got to be a human and dance. It was very cool, especially at that age. Classical Indian dance was offered at my local community college in Southern California, so I got to take some of that. And I've continued studying, a pretty deep study of various Middle Eastern dances and classical Indian dances for the past 20 years. I started finding that I had a favorite age group when I was first teaching about 15 years ago. If there were, and I was teaching open level, open any age, any ability classes, so there was always a mix, which I think is fantastic because then people get to spend time with other folks that they may not encounter otherwise. But I always loved my students who were elders because they had such a, I loved the humor that they brought to the class. They always had incredible stories and perspective to share. Just absolutely loved working with elders in my open level, all ages classes. Working with elders in the United States is desperately needed, as at least 8 million adults over the age of 50 experience loneliness, a medical phenomenon that increases the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's. I don't know what we're doing with this society that we've created, but man, it's hard to watch how elders are living these days because some folks have a great life and their families are present and others are really isolated and not valued and they don't feel valued. And that's just so not how it should be. My way of trying to connect with that and help add to the quality of life, I hope I can, is to offer a dance experience. Not only because I get a lot of personal enrichment out of working with elders, but they deserve that resource of being able to take a dance class. But how can an activity like dance benefit our elders? I would start by saying, first of all, just engaging in an activity that you enjoy has some therapeutic benefit to it, right? That alone is reason enough. If you like dancing and if you like taking dance classes, if you like going out dancing, do it. While the negative outcomes of stress have been widely studied, the health benefits of leisure activities are just starting to be understood. In a study conducted by researchers from both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, community members in Pittsburgh who engaged in more frequent, enjoyable leisure activities had better self-reported life satisfaction and lower measurable blood pressure. The second thing I would say is the community is therapeutic. What I have been told that elders really get from the class, most of them tell me, this is a community. This is my community. And they keep in touch with each other. They communicate outside of class. They help each other get to class if they need to. It's beyond what most younger people experience in a class. And then of course there is the exercise aspect. Exercise is beneficial for mental health, for physical health. Dance offers some specific exercise benefits. It challenges the coordination, memory, and balance of participants, all important things to maintain as we age. And then I'd say maybe the fourth benefit that I see dance as having is it's a creative, imaginative, expressive thing to do. It's not just using your visual senses or your auditory senses. It's using your entire body. And it's using your whole experience as a human. This creativity is both an individual and a shared experience between all the dancers and the instructors in the class. Yeah, that's personally my biggest joy leading dance classes is the inspiration of finding a new impetus for movement. Maybe a dancer in the class inspires something for the instructor and the next week it's, oh, Gloria did this beautiful movement so we're going to think about the waterfall coming down the rocks. And that can be a really nice way to kind of incorporate everyone's individuality and to celebrate who everyone is. The element of touch common in many dance classes is another benefit for the frequently isolated elder population. I can't speak for every instructor, but I can say that many of us feel that touch is a very healing thing. In a somatic warm-up we do a lot of self-touch or tapping or other ways of bringing that sensation to the body. So we get those nerves warmed up across your face, under your eye, over your eyebrows. Let's rub our ears. Wake up our ears. But it is the integration of all of these elements that makes dance such a special activity. Research has shown benefits of dance classes for a huge variety of populations experiencing serious illnesses. Carefully designed dance programs have been shown to benefit the balance of people who suffer from Parkinson's disease to increase the communication skills of dancers afflicted by dementia and, with the careful use of touch, even improve the quality of life of dying people in their last days. But what does it take to have a successful class? Really, it starts with the actual spot where you're teaching. A place where parking, bathrooms, the studio space itself, that's accessible. Since access to the physical space is vital to dance classes, how do the shutdowns of the pandemic affect them? One thing that I think surprised a lot of us in the dance community was how easily elders took to the online class format. For dancers who are having a challenge with transportation, if there's a way for them to still participate from home, it's extraordinary how many of them will do it. Okay, so we know that getting to the class is the most important thing, but what about the actual dancing? The movement itself, it's usually you have to really think ahead and make it adaptable. Class is going to be started in our chair and then about halfway through class we are going to have the option to stand. Now, at any point during class you can remain seated the entire time, you can stand the entire class, so really tailor it to fit you today, whatever feels good in your own body. Securing accessible facilities and skilled instructors who can adapt their classes seamlessly to older dancers requires money, but what does it take to secure funding for these programs? Every organization I know that works with elders, a huge part of their success is finding and helping fund research that can support the vision that we believe in, which is dance is a really great thing for our community. And I've seen firsthand how these benefits are for the whole community. I had the privilege of attending several elder dance classes this past year and felt how meaningful it was for me to move together with members of the older generation and how important it was for them that a young person would want to come spend time with them on a day off. Luckily, I'm not alone in understanding the importance of intergenerational dance spaces. I really want to set something up where there's children or teenagers in a class with older adults. Teenagers are kind of cast aside in a way, and older adults are kind of cast aside in a different direction. I think about all the valuable experiences those teens would get from working with older adults and how good it might make the older adults feel. I haven't seen it yet. I haven't done it yet, but I'm working on it. Working with this population has made me see that community is extremely important as human beings. I'm just starting to understand that now. I've learned that through working with them. I would say that the other thing I've learned about working with elders is everyone is such a beautiful dancer. It's just incredible. Anyone who feels like we're not doing good enough for our elders, find out what you can do, because they deserve whatever you've got to give. It might not be giving a dance class. It might be something else. It's important to honor them, but also we don't want to lose the opportunity to learn from them. I feel like we're losing that if we don't do it.