IT’S HARD TO SAY
DANCING AROUND THE FEAR OF ART, LONELINESS AND DEMENTIA
of her shirt. I copied her, leaving the stem poking out. It looked like the beak of a yellow bird. I started whistling. Jane copied me. We gently danced our banana birds. We whistled and bal- anced our bananas on our heads, hands and feet. We listened to them like tele- phones. We smoked them like cigars. Then Jane asked Joyce if they had any more bananas. I only had the one so I grabbed a gourd. Jane retrieved a second banana. She placed her bananas in her imaginary holster. Mine went into my waistband. Joyce said, “Ready...Set…” (Jane wiggled her fingers), “Fire!” Jane’s draw was so fast I got caught with my hands in my pants. We erupted in peals of laughter. THIS IS THE STORY of a pool. An ephemeral pool. A pool that Joyce swims / floats / occasionally splashes around in with others / occasionally submerges in alone.
Joyce is a mother, grandmother, retired court reporter and creative writer. I have asked her to help me write a handbook on how to support dementia caregivers. She comes from a family of strong women, but when it comes to caregiving she chafes when people say, “Oh, you’re so strong, you’re so brave. It must be SO hard.” “What is SO hard, tell me?” she writes in the handbook. “And what would you expect? ‘You’re so brave, you’re so strong’ – would you expect a caregiver to be anything else?” Many of us have been treading water since the pandemic started. Joyce has been caregiving 24/7 with very little respite. I imagine a constant caregiver hiss, a drone drowning out everything else. “The pool” metaphor surfaced during the wintertime. “It’s hard to come out of caregiving, out of the pool,” Joyce writes. “Come see
me inside the pool, swim with me and keep the loneliness at bay.” Dementia caregivers are especially susceptible to Caregiver Burden, a medical term used to describe a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. “It’s like existing in another substance,” Joyce writes. “Grief touches every place, every cell, like water, it changes you. Joy can emerge from grief. Rowena comes and jumps in the pool with us.” I MET JOYCE AND JANE in February 2020 when I was looking for partic- ipants for a creative research project I’m piloting. Over the past five years my For You performance collective collaborators, Erika Chong Shuch and Ryan Tacata, and I have developed a person-centered performance prac- tice. Our goals are to bring strangers together and to make performances as gifts. We wanted to see if this practice
By Rowena Richie with Joyce Calvert
THIS IS THE STORY OF A DANCING BANANA. Try saying it out loud: “Dancing banana.” On the first syllable of “dancing” and the second syllable of “banana” your mouth turns up into a smile. This is the story of two dancing bananas. I have a new friend. Her name is Jane. She is a remarkable visual artist, a retired high school art teacher, a mama of two kitties—Grace and Frankie, a wearer of many hats (literally and figuratively), and a lover of the moon, hummingbirds and butterflies. Jane is also a person living with Alzheimer’s Disease. Jane and I were dancing over Zoom recently when she asked her wife, “Do we have any bananas?” Her wife, Joyce, nodded at the fruit basket. Jane sauntered over and retrieved one. I grabbed a banana, too. Jane tucked hers into the front
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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