Every summer since my final year at university I have enjoyed my almost yearly travels to Leicester. It has become somewhat of a pilgrimage for me. A marker of my growth and learning, a re-assessment of my skills, a networking extravaganza, a sharing of practice. People Dancing in the Summer was where my love affair with community dance began. In the Summer of 2018, after completing my degree in Dance and Choreography at Falmouth University I took part in the 'Introduction to Dance for Parkinson’s' course lead by Danielle Teale and David Leventhal. About a year prior to this my mum had been diagnosed with Early-Onset Parkinson’s after 19 years of misdiagnosis and fluctuating symptoms. I had grown up caring for my mum – there was a time before her diagnoses where she couldn’t even scratch her own itches, let alone feed, dress or clean herself. Now suddenly with the correct medication and diagnoses she was moving again. We developed little dance phrases to help her complete day to day tasks like making a cuppa, getting out of bed, walking through pesky doorways that would make her body freeze.
I took what I had learnt in the People Dancing course, paired it with my lived experience of living with and around a person enduring intense Parkinson’s symptoms and started leading my own sessions in partnership with Parkinson’s UK Cymru. These sessions were the beginning of a journey into community dance leading I never saw myself taking. Things snowballed, and four years plus a pandemic later I have just completed a community dance apprenticeship with Rubicon Dance in Cardiff and am leading my own full-time program of varied community dance sessions as of September.
This summer, in a somewhat mirrored fashion to when I completed my degree, I made my way to Leicester to take part in People Dancing in the Summer. This time I was there as a wide-eyed, fully trained new practitioner just starting to find her feet in her own leadership practice. I was lucky enough to take part in all three days and found myself being completely immersed in the courses. Naturally, I took part in the course 'Live Well & Dance with Parkinson’s: Finding Flow…' lead by Heidi Wilson – Strictly Parkinson’s leader and senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University, Dr Sophia Hulbert – Physiotherapist, dancer and researcher, and Dr Sara Houston – prize-winning researcher in to dance’s effects on Parkinson’s and deputy head of school at University of Roehampton.
My interest in taking part in this course was multi-faceted – it was about dance with Parkinson’s practice which had been my gateway in to community dance, it would maybe give me even more tools to take back to my mum to help her increase her quality of life, it would re-engage me in the practice of leading dance sessions for people with Parkinson’s, and it was being facilitated by three incredible women that I would happily pay to have a conversation with, let alone be taught by!
The combination of artistic and scientific course content paired with a deep sense of reflection throughout the day lead to one of the richest learning experiences I’ve ever had. Every second of the course was enthralling and had my brain going 100 miles per hour.
During the course Heidi and Sophia introduced imagery of three pillars of practice:
Your own practice
- Your artistic principles
- Your music choices
- The key components that make your sessions uniquely yours.
Knowledge of the condition
- You have an onus to understand the condition your participants are living with
- You have an onus to facilitate sessions that impact their symptoms
- Can you find places where the evidence can celebrate the positive effects.
Pedagogical Approach
- Your teaching style
- How do you set up the room?
- How are you going to offer/show progression
- Are you building social connection?
They offered the image of these three pillars as scaffolding, through which you can bounce through (I imagine in some parkour fashion) to create flow in your practice which in turn translates to flow in your sessions. This imagery has really stuck with me and I have found myself applying it to my entire community dance practice. The circular, swirling, bouncing flow through this scaffolding has offered me a framework that is set – yet I can explore in any direction I want, spending longer on certain aspects and perhaps vaulting over others to come back to them later down the line.
Despite all the rich learning points offered to us across the day with Heidi and Sophia, the thing that stuck with me the most was the sense of community that was created in that studio in a matter of hours. We were all there to learn but not just from Heidi, Sophia and Sara but also from each other. The sharing of experiences between us was a constant throughout the day, and our approaches were all so different there was so much to take away. It's testament to the flowy, sharing state that Heidi and Sophia created in that studio that day, but also to the openness of the People Dancing in the Summer event.
Looking along the flow that is my journey as a community dance practitioner I am hoping to begin leading sessions aimed towards people like my mum with Early, Young or Juvenile Onset Parkinson’s in the very near future. I know that many of the tools I learnt in that studio in Leicester this summer will be supporting me along the way as I grow from the small stream I am now, to one day becoming a wide river carrying as much experience and knowledge as Sophia, Heidi and Sara in the water with me.
Photo credit: San King.