Creativity, Arts and Older People

Theatre of Wandering is a new performance that explores care, community, creativity and dementia on the streets of Coventry city centre. Inspired by Night Never Gets Darker, a performance created by Theatre Director Naoki Sugawara from OiBokkeShi (Okayama, Japan) Theatre of Wandering has been co-created with hundreds of people of all agesfrom across the city..  Naoki… Continue reading Theatre of Wandering Rehearsal and devising notes [1] →

Entelechy Arts BED Tavistock Square London 2017. Image: Peter Jarman. In the 1980s as a young theatre maker I apprenticed myself to a group of women in their eighties and nineties living in the old docklands communities of Bermondsey south London. Born in the late nineteenth century they had survived everything that the twentieth had… Continue reading Finding your way back out →

The text popped onto my mobile screen. Jacqui, one of the founders of our beautiful Meet Me programme, had died of coronavirus early this morning, peacefully and not alone. It said that she was cared for and comfortable. Tomorrow would have been her eightieth birthday.  I’ve just put some music on and had a good… Continue reading ‘What will survive of us is love’ →

  “Such is hope, Heaven's own gift to struggling mortals; pervading, like some subtle essence from the skies, all things, both good and bad; as universal as death, and more infectious than disease!” Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby Nearing the end of week one of the Covid-19 lockdown and at Entelechy Arts it’s business as usual, albeit in… Continue reading The Store Cupboard →

Four years ago when I visited Saitama Arts Theatre on the outskirts of Tokyo as part of a delegation of UK artists we had the opportunity of meeting with older performers from the GOLD theatre company including Kiyoshi Takahashi. He told the story of how, after joining the company had found himself in hospital for… Continue reading Learning from ‘the gaze of the other’ →

  Late evening. We stand in the hotel foyer saying our goodbyes. Outside it has started to rain heavily. The air is full of 'saudade' that intermingling of sadness, joy and love that only the Brazilians have a word for. Earlier, when we were all sharing a meal together, one of the performers, Mituyo-san said… Continue reading Saudade →

  If a space ship came by from the friendly natives of the fourth planet of Altair, and the polite captain of the space ship said, ‘We have room for one passenger… so that we can converse at leisure… and learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race’… I would go down to… Continue reading BED →

This morning a tantalising preview of a report on the role of the arts in supporting global health drops into my twitter feed; work that has been undertaken by Daisy Fancourt with the World Health Organisation European Region. It’s going to be published in November and covers findings from 3000 studies.  The taster pages contain… Continue reading AGE AGAINST THE MACHINE: 21st Century Tea Dance: The Festival Edition →

‘The future is a fiction’ says a voice on the radio as I drive away from the performance. ‘It’s an imaginary place and it’s wide open with possibility. And as we age the future becomes smaller and narrower…. the infinitely possible becomes probable’ Christopher Green’s ‘The Home’, opening Lewisham’s Age Against the Machine Festival of… Continue reading The Home →

  The following is the manuscript of an article that I recently wrote, published by Taylor & Francis in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Volume 9 Issue 3, on [October 2018], available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19443927.2018.1500939    It is about some of the ideas that have underpinned the past and current work of Entelechy Arts as the… Continue reading My Aunt was always doing wild things →