Dancing with Dementia

05’48, United Kingdom, 2022

Concept & direction: Elaine Harvey, Sound design: Chris Gregory

 

Dancing with Dementia is a short dance film, based on an excerpt from the original audio documentary, which aims to animate and reimagine the metaphorical discourse around dementia by asking people affected by the condition to conceive of it as a dance. Comprised entirely of archived footage of social dancing in early-mid twentieth century UK, the film has been cut and re-combined to create a rhythmic and gestural choreography which is reflective of dementia as a social, relational and embodied phenomenon.

 

Elaine is a dance artist and director of the Moving Minds Project which provides year-round improvisational movement and dance sessions for people living with dementia and their family members. Her current research uses dance and participatory practice to explore embodied experiences of living with dementia and examines how the body might be better incorporated into the discussion around diverse conceptions of the self and lived experiences of dementia, and seeks to problematize the implicit assumption that selfhood depends exclusively on cognition.

 

The film will be part of the screening on 29.10.2022, 19:00-20:30, Festival and Congress Centre – Varna.