Creativity, Arts and Older People
A blog by David Slater
In and around the neighbourhoods of Deptford where the company is based, Entelechy’s 21st Century Tea Dance programme has become an important and re-occurring event in the lives of many lonely and isolated people. For many, for whom the pattern of one day very much resembles the next, it has become something to look forward… Continue reading Loneliness
The office is full of words. Not the awkwardly squeezed arts meets social care kind of text of funding bids and evaluation reports, these are words that take you by surprise scattered on the dining table with the tulips and biscuit crumbs: ‘salt fishcakes’, ‘distressed daughter’, ‘embarrassment’. It’s the debris of yesterday afternoon's workshop with… Continue reading Death by Chocolate
The eight-year old participant says it all: “To me nothing could have been better: the noise and the bubbles because they look magic; everybody working together to create a new world.” We were in the main dance space at the top of the Siobhan Davies Dance Studios in south London. The event was conjured into… Continue reading Weaving
‘What kept you awake was a feeling that everything in the world has its own size, that if you found its size among the swellings and diminishings it would be calm and shine’ from Tall Windows by Robert Hass I sneak into the theatre transformed into a playground of hanging silks, wires and ropes and… Continue reading Off Balance?
We’re in a rehearsal space in Nós do Morro , high on the slope of the Vidigal favela with Ipanema beach and one of the greatest views of Rio stretched out beneath us. Outside a blazing afternoon sun; inside six older women weaving in and out of each other, chanting from photocopied scraps of text:… Continue reading Vidigal: Shakespeare, Sex and Sonnets.
One of the seeds planted by my Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship comes to fruition. Our most recent 21st Century Tea Dance at Entelechy in The Albany Theatre, Deptford southeast London, just went global with a live link-up with older performers from EngAGE from Burbank in California. Together over the last few months we have been… Continue reading Transatlantic boyfriend goes live!
The whole experience is wrapped magically in a scorching Indian summer: late September and the temperatures are in the high twenties. Seven days spent preciously- rich experience juxtaposed with a ‘doing nothing in particular’ rhythm. Two older actors from the Brazilian company Casa das Fases spend a week with older performers from Entelechy. ‘We learn… Continue reading Casa das Fases and Entelechy in London
‘Now just imagine the triumphant procession’ says the narrator in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, only here on this south London street there are no fictional animals (just real people) and it is the beginning of an adventure rather than the end. I was going to write about the theatre of the performance event but it… Continue reading The triumphant procession
Creativity, Arts and Older People 