Re-imagining ‘how’ community dance affects the health and wellbeing of older adults

Abstract

We are currently experiencing unprecedented population aging worldwide, with people over 65 projected to outnumber youth for the first time in human history. As such, the need to support this demographic’s health and wellbeing has never been more acute. There is a growing recognition that engagement with dance and arts provides numerous benefits for the health of older people, with existing research existing primarily within a biomedical model of efficacy. Driven by the primary research question “how does dance affect the health and wellbeing of older adults”, we reflect on the potential insights gained by returning to the root of research aims and methodologies. Sitting in conversation with dance and health scholarship and leaning into critical gerontology debate, this article broadens discourse to consider not only how evidence is articulated, but as importantly, how it is being asked. Through a series of exploratory “how” questions that critically engage with literature from practitioner, participant, and sector perspectives, we consider elucidating the origins of research enquiry as fundamental to broadening and deepening our understandings of the benefits of community dance for the health and wellbeing of older adults.

Beyond Utterances: Embodied Creativity and Compliance in Dance and Dementia

“…There is keen interest in the community conditions for sharing arts and technologies into existing arrangements of care (Jones et al 2021;Peine et al 2021;Skinner et al 2018). Hills et al (2022) proposed a methodological expansion to look more closely at the "how" of practice mechanisms, how the various components of an artistic activity are understood, interpreted, and incorporated into activity structures (Hills et al 2022). Situating our study within these interdisciplinary discussions, our focus is on such mechanisms, in situated interactions of older people, including people living with dementia (PLWD) and their carers, as they participate in dance class through technology.…”