Musings of a Dance/Movement Therapist

Dr. Lori Baudino on SYTYCD Dancing for National Dance Day

Dr. Lori Baudino was seen and named, although not identified as a dance movement therapist (DMT), on a brief clip on national TV's So You Think You Can Dance Thursday, July 28. Baudino was teaching and learning a flashdance at Mattel's Children's Hospital at UCLA for SYTYCD-proclaimed National Dance Day July 30.

Click here for more about Dr. Baudino and how she practices DMT at Children's Hospital. To find out more about dance movement therapy, check www.adta.org.

 

Nuts and Seeds Lower Risk Factors for Alzheimer's Disease

I was very glad to read this article, Go Nuts! in Health Care Insights listing all the health benefits of nuts and seeds. I enjoy a small handful of walnuts and fruit in yoghurt every day, and 4 dark chocolate covered almonds at night. Given that my dad had dementia, albeit as a result of a stroke, and his sister/ my aunt had Alzheimer's, I'm glad to know that in addition to dancing and dance therapy, eating nuts and seeds is good for brain health. According to Nancy Lombardo Emerson, "Nuts and seeds are stars among brain healthy foods, and eating a daily portion of a variety will help you reduce LDL cholesterol, blood sugar, oxidative stress and inflammation, all risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and some other brain diseases." Glad to know that eating foods I like turns out to be good for my health.

Emerson is a researcher and assistant professor at B.U.Alzheimer's Disease Center. On that site, I found a link to NH Public Radio station program,  Alzheimer’s Disease: What We Know and What We Are Learning, featuring Dr. Robert A. Stern, Co-Director of  BU Alzheimer's Disease Clinical and Research Program and Dr. Paul Raia, Vice President for Patient care and family support for the Alzheimer’s Association of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I found the following comment insightful:

alzheimer's
paul corrao - Thu, 12/04/2008 - 11:03
paul corrao, m.d. I studied neuropathology at several institutions, including the AFIP. The classic triad associated with dementia- neurofibrillary tangles, intranuclear inclusions, and amyloid plaques- can only be diagnosed with a brain biopsy or at post mortem. The kicker, though, is that these findings are only statistically associated with Alzheimer's. You can have the disease without one of the three, and even without all three. Conversely, cases are known where the clinical picture of Alzheimer's is described in the absence of the above triad. The same is true of the assertions about genetic changes. The changes described are only statistically associated with greater risk for dementia. In any given case, all bets are off. I don't deny that there are people who exhibit a dementia-like picture, but I contend that there are economic, political, sociological and philosophical considerations to this issue that are being overlooked or ignored. I have in mind the extent to which we seek a pharmacological cure to every human problem; that the problem at times is the disposition of an elderly relative, in the face on great social pressures otherwise; the fate of property; the possibility that what we are are really seeing is a biological manifestation of the limits and destructiveness of hyperindividualism in American life; the excessive pressures to produce and consume in our culture, which renders other forms of nonmaterial contribution, like wisdom, superfluous and counter-productive in modern life; and so forth. Readers should not miss the role this issue is playing, for example, in fund raising for NHPR. Also, as our economy becomes more and more a service one, raw material in the form of dependent individuals is needed to keep the system going. Nhpr has a right to raise funds, but the issues I raise should not be omitted in the process.

Psychotherapy & the Arts Newsletter - July 2011

I just finished reading the July edition of Download Psychotherapy and the Arts - July 2011. Terrific article about the arts and dementia by Heather Hill and William Feez and reviews of what sound like excellent books.

Dance Therapy for People with Alzheimer's and Dementia

Dance Therapy for People Suffering from Alzheimer's & Dementia, article posted in April 20, 2011 in Alzheimer’s Society (ARDSI), Greater Mumbai is interesting, but confuses music and dance therapy.

Whereas a music therapist may use dance and movement, music is the primary modality used. A dance therapist may use music, but the focus of the interventions is dance and movement. Dance and movement can be used even when a person is hard of hearing or nonresponsive to the music and rhythm. In addition, the dance therapist has a minimum of 2 courses of graduate level movement observation upon which they base their interventions.

 

Wonderful link here. Once again, I find the UK so far ahead of us in dementia care, with greater resources provided, opportunities for social science research, and creative arts therapies. Sighhh!

 

Ozzie the Octaband Helps Children with Special Needs Attend to Learning

Thanks to Lindsay Wintringham for sending me ways she uses the Octaband as a learning tool for children with special needs:

I am a special education teacher for grades K through 2. I wanted to share my experience with the Octaband with this population, as well some helpful tips! I work with students with Autism as well as Aspergers Syndrome.  I have many students with attentional disorders, low-cognitive abilities, language-based delays, as well as sensory-processing needs.

Step 1- Name your Octaband. Ours is Ozzie.
Step 2- Establish rules. For example, when the teacher says “Freeze” you drop Ozzie and put your hands on your head. You don’t pull too hard. You don’t get upset if you don’t get the color you’d like.
Step 3- Give students time to feel and play with Ozzie before you try anything structured. This will (hopefully) allow some of the novelty to wear off before you use the Octaband as a learning tool. They are usually sitting, and the only rule is when they hear freeze, they drop it and put hands on heads.
Step 4- Model the right way and the wrong way to use Ozzie. Establish clear expectations before you begin, and if a student doesn’t follow the rules, they will watch.
 
Each student gets 1 or 2 arms of Ozzie, and we practice “Freeze”. Here are some ways I use the Octaband in a small group setting for reading and math to help us learn:
-          ABC’s  (take turns saying the letter’s in order)
-          Spelling words one letter at a time
-          Rhyming
-          Days of the week
-          Months of the year
-          Counting backwards
-          Counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s
-          Practicing odd and even numbers

In doing all the above, they have to take turns and know what comes next. We always go around the circle in order."So "A...B...C...." or  "HAT.... CAT... SAT..."   OR "19...18...17...16". Sometimes I make them start over if they make a mistake. 

We use Ozzie sitting down, standing up, and sometimes we use him over our heads.  Everyone is either all sitting or all standing. Ozzie the Octaband has been a great tool to help students practice fundamental skills in a unique and multi-sensory way. My students make requests for Ozzie to come out and play, and they know they have to follow the rules if they want to participate. Many of the skills we target while using Ozzie are challenging for students with disabilities. They also struggle with group activities, taking turns, and following expectations. I have all boys, and none of them like pink. That being said, my students love using Ozzie so much, they don’t even realize they are learning!

Dancing with Alzheimer's and Dementia

In her blog The D Word: Dementia, Cynthia Winton-Henry shares a tender and touching story of dancing with her mother during mid to late stage dementia. I am struck in reading it how much more impressive it is to read the family members' story than to read the story of someone working with a person with dementia using dance. It's beautiful because Cynthia knew her mother before dementia, and is able to see and identify the positive ways in which their relationship grew when the dementia began to change her mother. As co-founder of Interplay: unlock the wisdom of your body, Cynthia is able to articulate and show through video how playful and interactive her mother could be despite the dementia (or possibly because of it). Able to remain in the moment, Cynthia was present to receive the gifts of her mother's clarity and profundity as they emerged through play and in relationship.

 

I wonder once again why dementia. What do we learn from this difficult disease? It seems that there is a great deal to learn. Tom Kitwood in Dementia Reconsidered:

“Contact with dementia ... can - and indeed should - take us out of our customary patterns of over-busyness, hypercognitivism and extreme talkativity, into a way of being in which emotion and feeling are given a much larger place. People who have dementia, for whom the life of the emotions is often intense, and without the ordinary forms of inhibition, may have something important to teach the rest of humankind. They are asking us, so to speak, to heal the rift in experience that western culture has engendered, and inviting us to return to aspects of our being that are much older in evolutonary terms: more in tune with the body and its functions, closer to the life of instinct (Kitwood, 1997, p. 56).

That must be why I feel so good on returning home from dancing with people with dementia this afternoon. Seeing these folks once a month, we remember each other. I'm just as surprised by my ability to remember their names as their ability to remember me. Today, as a group, they were at their best. One staff person after another came by and were astonished by how much their clients could do. And me, I learn from them. My place in the universe is reinforced by our relationship.

A Critical Journey

via www.artsjournal.com

Deborah Jowitt's Dance of Words.

Robert Wilson / Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach

There are times when I am so busy and there are so many things that I want to post to my blog, but have difficulty choosing, and don't post. That's what it's been like lately. Hopefully, this post will break my silence and the rest will out soon. But now I am eager to share this video. I am in the midst of reading Daniel Stern's Forms of Vitality, Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, ad Development. I paused to watch a youtube video of Robert Wilson whom Stern mentions and whose work I was unfamiliar with. It is that which I wish to share right here.

 

I hope you enjoy, as I have. I wish it were playing some place near me now.