Barbara Schaffer Bacon

It was karaoke night when I visited my Dad at the Soldier’s Home last week.

During the thirty minutes it took for staff and volunteers to round up and assist about 35 elderly and infirm veterans into the canteen, the excitement was building.

“Where’s Joe? He usually does a song.”

Finally, with everyone assembled, Helen was invited to lead off the program. It was her birthday and 87-year-old Helen offered a pretty sweet rendition of "Harbour Lights," originally sung by The Platters. Tom, 90, followed with a raucous interpretation of Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs’ "Lil’ Red Riding Hood" - complete with the best howl I have ever heard. 

Midway through the program, the group called for Lloyd. A staff member with a smooth Elvis sound, Lloyd stepped up with "Love Me Tender." I looked around the room where the veterans often sit in silence, and everyone in the room was moving, swaying, smiling, and singing or mouthing the words. It was community and art - in this case music - was working its magic. Seeing the veterans sing, seeing them engaged and engaging one another, enabled me to see each of them differently than I had before. They were able, they could move, they remembered verses even though they couldn’t necessarily remember what they ate for dinner.

A collaborative team in Wisconsin took the idea of this potential further recently with The Penelope Project.

The Penelope Project uses the story of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey to engage an entire long term care community in the creative process. Discussion groups, movement exercises, visual art, stories, and music are all emerged from this multi-year project culminated in the performance of Finding Penelope, a professionally produced play, inside the care facility.

The Penelope Project demonstrated beautifully how art could “build community by bringing enduring, meaningful, and challenging 'activities' that involve creativity and learning to all those who live, work, and visit a long term care facility.”

Significant documentation, reflection, and evaluation are underway. The project was led by Anne Basting of the Center on Aging & Community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with the Department of Theatre; Luther Manor Health Center; and Sojourn Theatre.

This power of art is something I’ve observed and experienced hundreds of times but it always overwhelms me. I like to think I am like choreographer Liz Lerman in that way.

Lerman, a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow, often describes her exhilaration as her first senior (as in older) dance students started to respond to her invitations to move. I am always inspired by Liz’s sheer enthusiasm for people and ideas. A conversation with her is both kinetic and electric as she actively probes and makes connections. It can feel like a workout – both exhilarating and exhausting.

Her new memoir, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, offers a chance to experience Liz Lerman and her ideas at a more relaxed pace. Through her stories and reflections, you can appreciate how her way of being and artmaking have grown from her life experiences as a dancer, choreographer, daughter, and person of faith and curiosity. But, characteristic of Liz, her memoir invites your own reflections and meditations as well.

In the book, Liz describes the need to change her way of thinking to be effective as a teacher with her senior dancers and how the modifications and adaptations she made created the foundation for the practice of making dances that has distinguished her career as a choreographer and community builder. Through a series of meditations on projects spanning her career Lerman “combines broad outlooks on culture and society with practical applications and accessible stories. Her expansive scope encompasses the craft, structure, and inspiration that bring theatrical works to life as well as the applications of art in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, and human rights law. Offering readers a gentle manifesto describing methods that bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world... ”

I’ve already given three copies of her book as gifts.

Since I’ve actually been hiking with Liz, the title has special meaning for me. But the insights she offers hold gifts for everyone.

*Arts Watch is the bi-weekly cultural policy publication of Americans for the Arts, covering news in a variety of categories. Subscribe to Arts Watch or follow @artswatch on Twitter to receive up-to-the-minute news.