When art is the only medicine | Anne Basting | TEDxUWMilwaukee

so if you stop the average person on the street and you ask them what is art what you might hear in response is something having to do with paintbrushes or maybe canvases or museums or maybe dance positions or a stage or something like that but really I think of the arts of so much more the arts can be a way of being in relationship they are so much more than just a tool or a venue or even a field or an economy they are a way of bringing people into relationship with each other the open symbolic communication the emotional communication that is the arts that is what can bring us together across our differences of culture of class of age of generation of ability all of those things I've learned that lesson a couple of times in my life more than a couple but I wanted to share just a few of them with you today so the first time that I learned this was a pretty pivotal moment it's a special level of Dante's hell called middle school you know you you might have experienced it I found just through ordinary acts of mundane girl meanness that I had no friends for three years it made it tough on the person going through it but I have to tell you now as a parent I see it also as incredibly difficult for my mom who did a bang-up job she in hindsight was pretty genius about her approach she knew I liked art so she put me in art classes with a with a professional artist it just it just so happened that the art classes were me a despondent thirteen year old and about a dozen retired teachers social workers doctors and moms every week we would gather together we'd our sketch pads and our paints and we would go out to the park and we would draw and in the act of interpreting the world together we found each other and communicated to each other and bridged our generational differences our cultural differences all the kinds of differences that we had I really found a way of being in relationship now a second time a really powerful moment but that happened it was a pretty unique situation not your average place of learning this lesson that was in the locked unit of a nursing home now I arrived at that place at 30 years of age with a newly minted PhD in theater studies right I had studied did a whole dissertation about studying the social performance of aging and I found by following around seniors theater groups all over the country you might not have known those existed they are groups of older adults who come maybe they come to theatres late in life having always wanted to do it but never could or they were professional performers their whole lives and yet the traditional theater blocked them out at a certain age so I was following them around and I saw the incredible power that theater had to transform the way we understand aging I saw it literally turn widows into comedians I saw it turn widowers into Romeo's but as I was getting really excited and writing the dissertation and even turning it into a book and saying theater has this transformational power to dramatically change the way we think about aging it dawned on me not in one of those performances did I see a wheelchair not in one of those single performances did I see a walker I saw one cane hundreds of performances so I arrived at that door of the nursing home in Milwaukee looking to see if the translation transformational power of theater could actually work for people with Alzheimer's disease now that word when you say it you can feel it can't you it's incredibly heavy you say the word Alzheimer's and it drops like a lead weight in the middle of the room it's incredibly heavy that nursing home was a heavy place I every week I walked out there I had to brace myself to go through the door the wall it was like a wall of urine smell that you had to push yourself through and suppress the gag reflex every time when you walked into the common room the TV was blaring it happened to be Wheel of Fortune on the week that I think the day and the time that I was there and also the people my little group that was gathered together kind of slumped over really weighed down with what we call now pharmaceutical restraints antipsychotics really to kind of suppress them so that's how I arrived there and I thought you know what I'm gonna try this I'm gonna try theater I'm gonna try story I'm gonna try sound and movement and maybe we'll tap into memories of family will tap into memories of family pets or celebrations anything that could bring them out and and and connect us in that way well for six weeks I tried that and for six weeks I failed pretty miserably and then on the seventh week I started smoking no kidding I give up and I just lit up no um I actually just tore a picture of the mall bro man out of a magazine and I took a sketch pad with me and some markers and I said you know what let's forget memory let's just leave it let's make up something together anything you say I'm gonna write down on this sketch pad it can be anything it could be a nonsense word it can be any any any sound you want to make which was more than sounds than they'd made since I've been there for six weeks what do you want to call this guy someone lifted their head and said Fred and really Fred felt like a miracle right Fred who Fred Astaire where do you want to say they live and a woman lifted her head and sang Oh Lahoma where the wind goes sweeping down the plain that story went on for 45 minutes I could tell you the entire thing because it's seared itself into my memory and at the end of that 45 minutes when we sang and we were laughing it was incredible what had happened in that room and how we had exchanged and echoed each other and built something that was a combination of memory and imagination and hope and regret and just joy and the most the biggest miracle was probably that the staff that I hadn't really seen but the entire time was gathered around us - and their mouths gape you know that this was even possible in this setting so it was an incredible shift and as you might imagine after that seventh week I went back every single week pushed through the wall went in did the same thing every week I just got to see if that works again and again and again and again and again it worked I took different pictures with me I didn't do the same one every single time but we told about a dozen stories and as I looked around that room I thought why is this just one hour a week why can't this just be the way we're in relationship why can't it be normal why can't it just be the way the staff practices and engages with people how could we do that how could we foster that how could we go from this pixel to protect the innocent to this an engaged learning open place to get there we were going to need research research is not easy in this situation it turns out that the arts actually work on multiple levels and when you have a multiple level factor that you're doing as an intervention it's tricky it's hard to do a randomized control trial and if you can't do a randomized controlled trial you can't get giant NIH funding and if you can't get giant NIH funding you can't do a large enough study that will reeled results that the industry will actually listen to you and make any change so there have been smaller studies that have really started taking it apart to figure out why and how this works this is one of them in nursing homes and assisted livings maybe you've experienced this people live in what I call group solitary confinement there may be a whole group of people gathered but there's really almost no penetration of relationship there's no exchange there's very little even when people are being fed it's like there's a force field around an individual person and sometimes that's caused by symptoms sometimes your symptoms of whatever you're experiencing will actually cause you to kind of isolate but most of the time that's caused by the toxicity of the environment in which people are in and also by hesitation how do I talk to someone like that by fear of family not knowing how to relate or by staff being super busy and running by the thing is that social isolation has severe health costs and the thing is creative engagement can actually ease that second study there it is if we actually spent just 1% of the money we spend on pharmaceutical research to find a cure for dementia which we haven't done very well at four decades now and it's doubtful I believe that we will 1% of that research money if that went toward programs that fostered a sense of purpose and meaning in people's lives we'd be a lot farther down the road toward preventing dementia and easing the symptoms of dementia this was actually an incredible groundbreaking study by gene Cohen he was really trying to get underneath the arts and figure out what are those mechanisms why does it work what's happening inside of the study that he did painting intergenerational painting groups or a choral music group or a theater group in New York and what he found really at the end of the study was that it was a building a sense of mastery and secondly that it was building a sense of purpose and legacy to to have people think forward to the next generation and that it was also growing a sense of social network and support around a person and with that we know that we can move we can use the arts to improve people's health so if we're gonna shift if we're gonna do this thing where we shift that one magic mulberry moment into everyday practice into just how we are in relationship we're gonna need to do a couple of things and one of them is build a field and that's a lot of the work that I've been doing my career since the malboro moment is trying to build that field and I like to say this is probably the only positive legacy out of the malboro man it's this is the nonprofit that came out of it the Timeslips creative storytelling and now it has an online training for staff for family members for students who want to have a positive engagement with people with memory loss through creative engagement and people are taking it all over the world which is very hopeful for me the other thing that we're gonna have to do I love this slide is that we're gonna have to see even if you create a magic moment inside of one facility if that administrative body of that facility doesn't buy in it will just eventually close around it right it'll just squelch that magic so in nine in 2009 to 2011 I collaborated with Luther Manor it's a retirement community out in Wauwatosa and with sojourn theater which is professional theatre company and I had students at UWM and my playwriting and then a colleague storytelling class and we thought let's get that improvisation that sense of creative engagement into the system itself can we get it I mean this place 700 people live there and 700 people work there it's a million square feet this place it's a little village unto itself could we infuse it across the board in the care community so at the end of the day what we did was we read Homer's Odyssey and we read it from the perspective of not Odysseus who roams all over the world but from Penelope his wife who stays at home and makes a sense of home and we read it together and the students and the staff broke it into a million different activities we wrote poems we told stories we made origami birds that would carry letters from Penelope to Odysseus we even we did dances of welcoming Odysseus home we even because Penelope was a weaver we made a three quarter mile long weaving that would traverse the the whole route of the play that we would create to go through the care community and that's what we did we created an original professionally produced play in collaboration with the whole community that went through the community itself for an outside very curious paying audience so at the end of it we learned that we actually had embedded it into the administration and there's a couple clear examples of that the first one was during the one of the rehearsals there's a moment when one of the characters probably not unlike all of us was really afraid to go into the nursing home where she didn't want to go in and we had in the the script that she goes out the window she's so desperate to escape that she actually goes out the window of the care community so we rehearse this we put it on and she goes out the window within 90 seconds someone has walk is walking down the hallway and saying excuse me did you just go out the window the CEO got a phone call and he's concerned about the risk of someone going out the window 90 seconds it took for the phone call to go to the CEO and for this person to come down and we said yes we indeed we did go through the window is that okay well the CEO whose name was David Keller the CEO would like to know if it is instrumental to the plot of the play and we said it is she said then it's okay so that was incredible the second moment was in the final big final piece and you can see it here it was at the very end of the play penelope waits for Odysseus and Odysseus finally finds her he's searching for her the whole play and he finally finds her and we made an open call to anyone in the community staff family residents of an independent living or in the nursing home which two areas that never mix I'll tell you it's like there's a grand canyon between the two open call anyone who wants to play Penelope come on down just beyond the stage behind the curtain at what 2:30 or something like that and every time Odysseus the the actor from sojourn would go to the curtain and kind of peek in he never knew if anyone would be on stage it was like this ultimate moment of collaborative trust and improvisation for a performer and every week I'm very proud to say there were people there there were people with Alzheimer's there were people on Hospice in these giant Gerry chairs who had been asked to come down there were people from independent living there was staff there were family members who found it is the only opportunity they had to bring their loved one into something that was meaningful and engaged we really had made it work I could not have been prouder but then I remembered much like I haven't seen wheelchairs then I remembered that 95 percent of older adults actually live at home only 5% of people are ever in a care community how could we bring creative engagement people who are living at home and more than ever before in the history of Aging in this country they're living alone in Milwaukee County alone 23,000 older adults are living alone so how do how do you do that how do you bring that engagement to people like that sojourn theater back onboard UWM Meister's my theater students we collaborated we studied the systems that are in place to reach people like that so we studied home-delivered meal systems we studied interfaith which older adult programs which has all kinds of volunteer programs there's one right in the audience that bring volunteers to out to people's homes to give them rides different places all kinds of different programs we also studied the system of home caregivers how could we slip creative engagement like water into the system so that it reached people it could come out to them come back to us we could build on it and reshare it back with them so they could see that they were part of something meaningful what we developed was the most simple and elegant invitation to engage questions of the day created 45 of them and they went out with neil drivers they came back on little handwritten cards that are just gorgeous and the handwriting you can feel the labor and the intensity behind the answers they came back in phone calls which we turned into radio pieces they back on the website and in Facebook and actually we followed those up with invitations if people wanted to do you want an artistic house call would you like some artists to come out with you either by phone and to engage or in person to engage more deeply we invited them to paint we invited them to dance now to UWM students have incredible experience with this just as an example they went out and they met June and they brought a question what is something you treasure in your home and why and June responded my oven now this perplexed them I don't know if they could actually locate the oven in their apartment they followed up and they said they learned through story exchanging with June they said June told them about how she used to be a baker for her family she was the one who would bake and supply cookies to the family at Holiday time that was really her identity in her role with the family so they said does your oven work yes well let's bring the ingredients next week and together that next week they filled her house with the smells of almond cookies with banana frosting and they put three cookies into a little baggie and on that baggie they fastened it with a little card and on one side of the card it had the recipe for the almond cookies with banana frosting I just I can't get over the banana frosting part that's what I keep saying and on the back of it it said these cookies come from June's oven which is her treasure what do you treasure and then they sent those cookies out with the home-delivered meal drivers to either eat because they love treats or back out with the meals themselves to share now those stories and more were actually featured in an exhibit in City Hall which also has an interactive component so that if you go down there you can answer the questions and you can also hear some of the audio pieces down at City Hall right now it's on exhibit actually until the 20th of October so the thing is my experiences in junior high and middle school really ultimately not so different than my experiences in nursing homes turns out that some of the most rapidly increasing populations of people being prescribed off-label antipsychotics our teenagers and older people in nursing homes really our care systems are designed to manage behavior they are not designed to bring people into meaningful relationship that needs to change we really need to redesign our care systems so that they are meant to bring people into meaningful engagement isolation as a species we can't tolerate it we need to be in relationship isolation really tears at our psyche so my hope is that we can redesign those care systems so that they are built to bring people into engagement they are built for the Arts and that we change the way that we train artists and that we see the arts so that they are a way of bringing us into relationship because sometimes the only medicine that we have the best medicine that we have is the arts

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 65,508

Keywords: Medicine, ted, Health, tedx, tedx talk, United States, tedx talks, TEDxTalks, Culture, Drama/Theater, ted talks, Social Justice, ted x, ted talk, Lifestyle, Psychology, English

Id: cPA6lklMQxM

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 01 2014