At Wartburg, the provider of senior care services in Mount Vernon, Director of Volunteers Ann Frey was skeptical when Josh Rice, a graduate student in theater at Sarah Lawrence College, came to her last year with a proposal to start an arts program on the Wartburg campus for people with Alzheimer”™s disease and related dementias.
Rice had discovered and gotten hooked on the puppeteer”™s art at Sarah Lawrence, which has worked closely with Wartburg through the college”™s community partnership program. Inspired by a class that explored the use of theater for social change and by an uncle who had lived with dementia under his family”™s care, the master”™s degree candidate developed his Mnemonic Theatre Project.
Puppets ”” designing and building them, giving them names and personalities and stories to tell, performing with them before an audience of friends and family ”” would bring together seniors who share the symptoms of progressive disease in a community of creative play and strengthen and reanimate their minds and motor skills in the process of animating their creations.
- Urany Sharpe displays her puppet creation.
“I had to sell Ann on the idea,” Rice said in a phone interview after a recent rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for a London performance next month by Giants Are Small, a multimedia arts production company. “At first she was like, ”˜Puppets?”™”
“I was pretty hesitant at the beginning,” said Frey. “I didn”™t want it to be insulting to people, because puppets are identified with juvenile.”
“He was so enthusiastic that I said, let”™s give it a try.” It would be added as a crafts project in Wartburg”™s award-winning Creative Aging program. Launched in 2009 and featured on the PBS documentary series “Visionaries” in a segment that will air in April, the program has 500 seniors engaging in a variety of arts and crafts and cultural pursuits that include African drumming, choral music, chime choir, clay work, quilting, collage making, writing and poetry workshops and a “Music and Memory” program using personalized iPods.
Rice, a freelance teacher and teaching artist since graduating from Sarah Lawrence, is directing his third puppetry program at Wartburg in twice-weekly classes this spring. He works with seven nursing home residents in advanced stages of Alzheimer”™s and dementia. They have shown more memory recall than previous groups with less advanced symptoms, he said. Rice thinks that might be due to the twice-a-week schedule he adopted after holding once-a-week sessions with previous groups and the morning hour for classes, when the Alzheimer”™s and dementia patients are “very chipper.”
“We get them to start building right away,” using a prototype design to make puppets on rods and exercise fine motor skills as they sculpt, paint and dress their head-and-torso creations. “From its very inception of crumpling papers, they have a say in every decision,” he said.
Next Rice engages the novice puppeteers in “creative play.” They bestow names, personalities and voices and create storylines ”” some grounded in memories summoned from their own lives and others shaped entirely by fantasy and fiction ”” for their puppets. One woman named a puppet after her brother. Another named her puppet after the son with whom she had a difficult relationship.
“Some of them are a little reticent and some of them are very eager to play,” said Rice. The creative play “is something that happens sometimes without my prompting. That innate ability to play, I don”™t think we ever lose that.”
“A puppet forces you to be present with this object, and bring it to life and bring life into it,” said Rice. “The patients have really responded to it well in that way.”
“A puppet allows them to be free with their imagination and to engage. The theater concept creates community because it”™s collaborative and interactive. People laugh and work together, helping each other make choices about their puppets.”
- Puppetry teacher Josh Rice with Wartburg puppeteers.
Dubious initially, Frey soon saw the healthy effects the puppetry sessions had on seniors. “They engage with each other,” she said. “That”™s a big part of the creative aging program.”
“We immediately saw that this program had great potential. We were just as curious as Josh to see how the people would react to it” as it moved from the adult day services center to the memory care facility and finally to the nursing home on campus.
“To hear what comes out of their mouth through the puppet is very, very funny,” she said.
For a woman in Wartburg”™s memory care facility, the channeled voice was operatically uplifting
“We were able to get her to sing an aria in the show,” said Rice.
“She knew all the words,” said Frey. “It was all in Italian. It all came out through the puppet.”
For the puppeteers”™ teacher, “It”™s just been so rewarding, to have that sense of accomplishment at the end of the performance.”
“The laughter and the applause and the smiles on their faces were enough to know that this was a great success,” said Frey.
