Fragments of the past connect youth to elders

A play based on recollections of people with memory loss will feature in this year’s Adelaide Fringe Festival.

Above: The cast of ‘Also a Mirror’

Above: Urban Myth Theatre of Youth performers Patrick, Poppy and Sophia with Kath and Dennis

By Stephen Easton

A youth theatre group has turned the poignant stories recollected by people with memory loss into a play for the 2011 Adelaide Fringe Festival, to help break down the stigma associated with dementia.

‘Also a Mirror’ was developed by the Urban Myth Theatre of Youth at the suggestion of South Australian non-profit provider ECH, from stories and fragments of memories related to writer Sean Riley during sessions at two ECH respite programs, Walkerville and Sundowners.

ECH Manager of Service Development Eleanor Kennett-Smith said the idea was inspired by evidence that artistic pursuits can be beneficial to people with memory loss, and would shift attention to what their clients could recall, rather than what they could not.

“There’s a series of short stories but they’re all linked together.  Its not like a traditional story where you have a beginning, middle and end,” Ms Kennett-Smith said.  “It really is a series of different vignettes woven together with the commonality of the experience of dementia.”

“Some memories are just a phrase or a sentence that someone has said, or a memory they’ve related to the writer that has been incorporated into the script.  Others are more complete stories that have been interwoven in the play.”

“One lady talked about when she was a very small child and her father had horses.  She used to climb up the legs of these great big Clydesdale horses when she was three or four years old.  It’s a small fragment she’s related to the writer that has been included almost verbatim.”

Kennett-Smith said that as well as trying to defeat the stereotypical view of people with dementia, who often find others define them by their disease, the play is about trying to connect young audiences at the Fringe Festival with older people, especially those with memory loss.

“We were quite deliberate about having young people in the play because there’s often a barrier between them and older people,” she said.

“A lot of the memories are from people’s lives when they were young and full of hope and aspirations for the future.  This was about trying to capture peoples humanity; people’s experiences of love and hope and planning for the future are common experiences for all of us.”

And in her opinion, those young performers have done a great job, even moving one gentleman to tears when they performed a short extract featuring he and his wife’s love story at an afternoon tea last Thursday.

“They play out that drifting of memory that people experience when they have dementia.”  

“There is a moment when someone is searching for a word and they use all the strategies that someone with dementia uses; they express all the writhing frustration of someone with dementia trying to recall something small like that.”

The play was made possible through a Dementia Community Support Grant from the Department of Health and Ageing, the same program that funded ‘The Sundowner’, a similar play produced by Melbourne’s Kage Physical Theatre and premiering in early April.

The Urban Myth Theatre of Youth will perform ‘Also a Mirror’ at the Goodwood Institute Theatre from March 9 to 13.  For bookings and more information see www.adelaidefringe.com.au

Tags: 2011-adelaide-fringe-festival, aged-care, ageing, dementia, ech, memory-loss, urban-myth-theatre,

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