ANNE BASTING's work at the crossroads of Arts and Aging has allowed her to pioneer new approaches to the challenges faced by our aging population. In this episode we learn how her efforts have helped advance the creative aging approach as a powerful and effective prescription for reducing isolation, promoting social connections, and mitigating a the symptoms of dementia.

BIO

Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to transform our lives. She is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which trains, inspires, and supports caregivers to infuse creativity into care. Her writing and large-scale public performances have helped shape an international movement to extend creative and meaningful expression from childhood, where it is expected, through to late life, where it has been too long withheld.

Her books include Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Elder and Dementia Care (Harper), Penelope: An Arts-based Odyssey to Transform Eldercare (U of Iowa), and Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia (Johns Hopkins). Internationally recognized for her speaking and her innovative work, Anne is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and numerous major awards and grants. She believes that creative engagement can and should be infused into every aging care system and has trained/consulted with Meals on Wheels, libraries, home care companies, senior centers, memory cafes, museums, adult day programs, and every level of long-term care.

In 2019, Anne collaborated with a team of artists, elders, and caregivers on her largest project yet – a reimagining of the story of Peter Pan with 12 rural Kentucky nursing homes. She is currently obsessed with growing the memory cafe infrastructure across the United States.

Change the Story Collections: Connecting the Dots

Arts-based community development comes in many flavors: dancers, and painters working with children and youth; poets and potters collaborating with incarcerated artists: cultural organizers in service to communities addressing racial injustice, and in this episode related to arts and aging.

Many of our listeners have told us they would like to dig deeper into art and change stories that focus on specific issues, constituencies, or disciplines. For anyone who is interested here are links to other Change the Story Episode episodes related to this episode’s subject. 

• Change the Story Collection: Arts and Healing
• Episode 63 and Episode 64: A Conversation with Liz Lerman

Notable Mentions

The following are links to more information about notable programs, people, and issues mentioned in this episode.

Creative Care, a Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care: In Creative Care, Anne Basting lays the groundwork for a widespread transformation in our approach to elder care and uses compelling, touching stories to inspire and guide us all—family, friends, and health professionals—in how to connect and interact with those living with dementia.

TimeSlips: Founded by MacArthur Fellow Anne Basting, in 1998 TimeSlips is an “international network of artists and caregivers committed to bringing joy to late life. As our bodies and minds change with age, people ask – “How can I connect with my mom? My clients? My neighbor?” TimeSlips says try imagination.”

Kazuo Ohno, was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in the dance form known as Butoh.[2] He is the author of several books on Butoh, including The Palace Soars through the Sky, Dessin, Words of Workshop, and Food for the Soul. The latter two were published in English as Kazuo Ohno's World: From Without & Within (2004).

The Penelope Project: At Milwaukee’s Luther Manor, a team of artists from the University of Wisconsin’s theatre department led by Anne Basting, and Sojourn Theatre Company, university students, staff, residents, and volunteers traded their bingo cards for copies of The Odyssey. They embarked on a two-year project to examine this ancient story from the perspective of the hero who never left home: Penelope, wife of Odysseus. Together, the team staged a play that engaged everyone and transcended the limits not just of old age and disability but also youth, institutional regulations, and disciplinary boundaries.

Sojourn Theatre Is A Program Of The Center For Performance And Civic Practice. Its mission is “to design bold opportunities for participation and unforgettable experience, with rigor and striking physicality.” Sojourn collaborates towards a vision of healthy communities and functional democracy.

Nicole Garneau is an interdisciplinary artist making site-specific performance and project art that is directly political, critically conscious, and community building. Her book Performing Revolutionary: Art, Action, Activism was published in print in Spring 2018 by Intellect. In 2022, a fully accessible audiobook version of Performing Revolutionary was released, narrated by Nicole Garneau.

Beautiful Questions: As part of the TimeSlips Beautiful Question project, family members, volunteers and professionals who work with older adults invite elders to consider a series of Beautiful Questions. We invite you to use the questions simply to deepen your exchanges but you may also choose to capture responses in written form, photographs, or audio recording and share them with us. If you choose to share, TimeSlips’ artists may shape your responses into works to be shared.

Pillsbury House + Theater: A cultural landmark at the crossroads of four historic and diverse Minneapolis neighborhoods, Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T) unites innovative human services with professional arts experiences for 30,000 residents who call the area home. 

Islands of Milwaukee: The Islands of Milwaukee (IoM) (2012-2014) project aimed to create a sustainable network to bring meaningful engagement to older adults living alone or under-connected to community and to use art to catalyze a community-wide conversation about the importance of connecting to community as we age.

Memory Café: A Memory Cafe is a wonderfully welcoming place for individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease or any other form of dementia, or other brain disorders. They are designed to include the care partner as well, for a shared experience. Additionally, it is helpful for people with all forms of mild cognitive impairment (MCI.)

The Percolator, The Jewish Family &Child Services  Memory Café Percolator shares information and tools to make it easier for organizations and individuals to start and sustain their own memory café.

Social Prescription: In Social Prescribing practice, trained workers "prescribe" holistic health resources to primary care patients by connecting them to personalized social services and local communities. Providers work to improve patient nutrition, physical activity, and mental health by centering patient interests and needs.

Kevin Iega Jeff:  is an award-winning choreographer, accomplished dancer, renowned director, and respected and devoted dance educator. Iega creates transcendent works while inspiring those around him to foster extraordinary lives through dance. "The foundation of my practice is to examine the histories, cultures, and aesthetics of the African inspired human diaspora: how the histories of people throughout the diaspora speak to universal experiences and how we can translate those experiences into dance."

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction: A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects—anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics, culture, and art. Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love.

Liz Lerman's Wicked Bodies: Inspired by powerful and grotesque images of women’s bodies over multiple historic periods, Liz Lerman’s new work Wicked Bodies premiered Thursday April 14, 2022, at the Green Music Center. It toured to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival August 10-13, Arizona State University’s ASU Gammage on September 24, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts October 28-30. 

• Liz Lerman discusses  Wicked Bodies and other matters of the heart, mind, dance, and the future of the planet in Change the Story / Change the World Episode 63 and Episode 64.

Creative Care, a Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care: In Creative Care, Anne Basting lays the groundwork for a widespread transformation in our approach to elder care and uses compelling, touching stories to inspire and guide us all—family, friends, and health professionals—in how to connect and interact with those living with dementia.

Anne Basting

In the rapidly growing creative care field, the arts are increasingly seen as a powerful and effective prescription for reducing isolation, healing, trauma, promoting vital and essential social connections, mitigating and delaying the symptoms of dementia, and also changing the way we all think about aging.

That's the path that's been forged by this episode's guest artist, educator researcher, and MacArthur Fellow Anne Basting through her study and practice at the crossroads of Arts and Aging --- a journey that has allowed her to pioneer new approaches to the challenges and opportunities facing societies whose populations are living longer and, surprise, surprise, getting older.

This is Change the Story, change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland,

Part One: A Life's Mission.

Anne Basting, welcome to the show. Let's begin with the Beguine, which today is, where are you calling from?

Mm-hmm. . And that is the traditional homelands of the Potawatomi, the Ho-Chunk, and the Menominee. And we are on what they call the southwest shores of Michi gami. That beautiful lake. It's actually the largest freshwater system of lakes in North America. And there's also three rivers that come together here, the Milwaukee, the Menominee, and the Kinnikinnick and the people here of Wisconsin's, Anishinabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations are vibrantly and vitally present.

So Anne, now that we've placed ourselves geographically, why don't we start by defining the landscape of your work. Do you have a, a name or a word that comes to mind when you think about your journey on this planet?

[00:03:31] BC: There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. It's a vintage street name. Mm-hmm. . . Right. So what is, what did you describe to the guy sitting on the airplane next to you who says, Hey, hey, what do you do?

And I try to hold those two things simultaneously as much as I can without exploding. But I think the whole thing of, uh, focusing on reinvigorating the human capacity for creativity. Some people have had it stripped away or their confidence in their capacity, stripped away, and some people's creativity, even if it hasn't been stripped away, it's discounted or devalued.

So I think I try to invite people to access their creativity, and then I work with them to feel it and shape it and direct its power.

[00:05:12] AB: I grew up in a town called Janesville, Wisconsin, which is about 90 minutes from here. And I grew up in the triangle between Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago, and my parents. Had theater tickets to stages in all three cities. Mm-hmm. . So, I grew up in the arts even though nobody in my immediate family was in the arts. I'm the child of lawyers and teachers. So, I came to this work out of a deep love of what creativity did for me personally, which was enabled me to create worlds in which I felt accepted and empowered.

Because as a kid, I, I spent a lot of time alone. I, I loved being in the world of the imagination. I did visual art, I did writing, I did acting through the four H Club, I was in athree girl band where we played guitars and wrote our own songs and sang pretty badly. And yeah, I just, I loved every aspect of it and I went on and did in undergrad a English major with creative writing as my thesis. And also did a lot of visual art, a lot of photography, a little bit of a jack of all arts. Mm-hmm. And wanted to keep doing it, but also as, as the child of lawyers and teachers of very practical streak said, I probably need a, a support mechanism for that, and that was to get, get a PhD. And so I was doing the creative work, writing plays, shaping plays and ensemble, and simultaneously doing the critical thinking and scholarly work from the academic side.

[00:07:14] AB: That is so sweet of you to ask. I promise not to bore you. It was about, Representations of aging in everyday life and in more theatricalize representation. So I, I followed around the senior theater groups across the country and did a lot of interviews and saw some really magnificent work.

I wrote about Kazuo Ohno, the Butoh dancer, who was in his late eighties at the time when I saw him. Carol Channing, who performed in Hello Dolly in her seventies and all about trying to exactly reproduce the role that she premiered in her forties, which was already considered old. That's what I wrote about, and essentially boiling it down to the theory that performance, the literal taking on of a new role can change the way, in this country, we think about aging. Because it was regarded at the time as increasing rigidity and decline. I think those narratives are still underneath our views. We tend toward these bifurcated, exceptionalism, water skiing, grandmas, you know, and yes, and then the assumption that everyone is, has dementia and the jokes are rampant now with mm-hmm. Biden and the politicization of aging. So,

[00:08:50] AB: I, I always have two responses to that question. The first is it's totally normal. That's my life's mission. To have that be the actual answer. It's totally normal, yes, for a person at 25 to want to look at representations of aging. The other answer to that is back to the kid who was doing the arts. My mother put me in art classes with people two and maybe three generations older than myself. So they were my creative peers, and I just, I don't remember there being a moment when I felt uncomfortable around older people.

I didn't have that same thing that drives people to say, you know, isn't that depressing work? You know, I just never had that.

So Anne, there's so many stories I know that you could tell, and what I'm interested in is whichever one you pick is really knowing the once upon a time version of the story.

The reason for this is often people cut to the chase. You know, I won an Academy Award. That's what it was. No, I wish that was the story. Yes. Well, uh, MacArthur is no small thing, so you've had close to the equivalent and actually maybe something more valuable and I tip my hats to you for that.

[00:10:23] BC: Yeah, and it. Really has to do with what personifies the path you described as an enchanter.

And that is what these moments signify. I think is just how far you can take that from interpersonal work into systems work. Like putting improvisation into systems and getting people who are running the systems to realize that they also have this capacity. Actually, I haven't told this story in a long time, so it's a delight to do it.

So it's a story of the generative moment of letting go of the expectation of memory. The very first time I came upon the improvisational technique, which was volunteering in a locked Alzheimer's unit, A absolutely no expectation of even. expression, let alone imagination.

So, mm-hmm. I wanted to go test it and to test it. I found myself on that locked unit of, of a nursing home that was pretty bleak and week after week, my hardy little band of four men and women. Gathered around the table in the common room, barely able to lift their heads and look at me. And I was trying the techniques of the time, which were very focused on memory, and it just never worked.

Nothing. I couldn't spark a connection. Nothing was coming of it. I mean, I was doing the acting thing of like trees, you know, wind and memories of holidays and pets and all, all kinds of stuff. Then I just brought an image in one day and said, we're done with memory. It's mean to ask you to remember things.

Actually, let's just make something up together. Absolutely. Anything you say to me, I am going to write down an echo. And I just said that over, and over, and over, and, and they responded to the image. It happened to be at the Marlborough Man, a picture from a magazine and. Asked them for a name, and it was Fred.

Fred who? Fred Astair. Where? Where do you wanna say he lives? Oklahoma. We sang Oklahoma. It went on for 45 minutes and it was a beautiful, poignant, funny, joyful, sad, all of it in a big soup. Some of it didn't make sense, but I repeated it anyway. Just to show them that I was serious about writing down anything that they said and repeating anything they said.

So, two years later, I got a fellowship to test and replicate that and see if, was that just a freak thing that I could do that week after week at volunteering? I mean, I got about two dozen stories out of it and I wanted to see if we could do it. I, I set up the fellowship for two places in Milwaukee and two in New York, and then I would take the stories that came out because they were magical and turn them into plays and an art exhibit and round table discussions in the field to try to get people to say, oh my God, how, how do we do this?

I remember really clearly, it felt for a while, like there were two broken parts. That the stories and the story sessions were these magical places with the people with dementia and, and the staff who was learning this. You know, they were totally enthralled with the ability just to, to make magic out of nothing.

Literally. Literally nothing. And then the plays, which were these wild flights of Imagination. And, it felt like they were two separate pieces and I, I really wanted to see if you could bring those two things together. And that became the Penelope project, which we, we just staged the workshops inside the care community, and then took all of the creative things that happened over the year of those creative sessions and built it into a play.

And it was performed with and by the staff, the residents, a absolute radical concept of chorus, which was no rehearsal. Anyone who wants to perform in it can come in and be there and perform, play the, the part of Penelope welcoming Odysseus home. And in the final piece, yeah, I think. To me, seeing that final moment with the chorus of staff, family members, residents, a, a woman who was totally visually impaired, a gentleman with a stroke who could not lift his hands above his head, his wife, who was an independent living and never got to participate with him.

Staff members, and then the professional artists who were with Sojourn Theater doing the call and. Of the hand motions that had been choreographed by the elders themselves.

If the Gods will grant us a happier old age will be free from our trials at last.

It was, uh, it was a really profound moment for me in the, the bringing together of all the levels of the work that I do.

All those things just caught up in one powerful moment. You know, one of the things about the Penelope Project that particularly rose up for me, and there's actually a quote from you, said, "that it sailed directly against the prevailing wins in long-term care. Which is activities that are one-off, you know. And, this is my soapbox, which is from my background, we call it institutionalization, the good kind, which is building it into the regular practice of a place. And, your approach, which is not just a common, do a song and a dance, but actually to say, "Oh, these are communities, we're gonna try and influence them all to acknowledge and embrace this as a powerful resource for what they're up to." Not some extra added entertainment, but actually a direct path to outcomes that many of the staff there probably couldn't even imagine.

Could you talk about that idea of really taking on a system rather than just bringing a resource?

And there was another moment in the Penelope project where, and some of my, uh, collaborators will remember, so we finally got this CEO, and the head of the nursing home, all the heads of all the areas of care. Cuz they all, they're all budgeted separately and managed separately; so assisted living, skilled care, adult day, and independent living, and we are all sitting in the same room.

And the CEO said, "What's the goal of this project?" And I said, "It's to improve the quality of life of everyone who lives, works and visits Luther Manor." And he reached into his briefcase, and he pulled out this purple piece of paper. He goes, "That's funny, that's our mission, I said, "Oh my goodness, perfect alignment."

So, uh, we started from there, and I've now come to see this as a long period of asset mapping where you actually ask people how they're creative in their everyday life. And places that aren't built with creativity in mind are sitting on mounds and mounds of creative capacity. They just have no idea cuz they don't ask anybody.

It's really funny. We did this in the 12 nursing homes in rural Kentucky. And one of my collaborators, Nicole Garneau, came back from leading an asset mapping group and said, Um, you know what? The entire building maintenance team has a heavy metal bluegrass band.

I was like, that's awesome. They had no, nobody knew. And even the residents, you know, one of the residents in one of the Kentucky homes had been a theater director, like totally pulling on your skillset, you know. So, um, I, you can tell, I just, I love this part of it, of surprising the system to see itself differently and to to enable it to, to build into the creative project itself, the next phase. So it's like you're, you're hooking it into the forward momentum. In the Kentucky project, we staged a re-imagining of Peter Pan. Penelope was, of course, Homer's Odyssey. I've done, mm-hmm. Little Win Women Beautiful Questions, projects.

And then this one was Peter Pan. And, at the end, we said, what story do you all wanna tell next? And then as, as Wendy and the crocodile were flying away at the end of the piece, oh yes, of course. Of course, they were, because the final number is I'll fly away with all the, the local musicians. And you know, Wendy was on hospice, so we're bidding her farewell.

A new character comes in from this next story and is checking in to, to the nursing home and it was Dorothy from Wizard of Oz. It was Huck Finn. It, who were the other ones? Oh, and then the final one was Abraham Lincoln, because Hodgenville, Kentucky was the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, so they wanted to tell his story.

So, it takes all the creative capacity also to identify the creative strengths, and then to figure out where and how to lock it in.

[00:24:23] AB: Here is a little video if I can make it work.

It can be hard to know how. When we do try to connect, our impulse is to draw on the past. But, for people with memory loss, this approach can lead to shame and embarrassment, focusing on who the person was rather than accepting and valuing who they are now.

TimeSlips offers another approach to shift expectation of memory to the freedom of imagination. In the emotional and symbolic language of the arts there are no wrong answers. People we thought might be lost to us, we can reach with sound and movement with words and images.

Obviously, one of the important aspects of your work as an improviser is "yes/and," and it, it just occurs that, that's what you are saying to this organization. It's not, "Oh, we have a, a completely new retrofit we're gonna do and change your culture completely. No, we're gonna build right on top of it." And these assets are bountiful, and plentiful and not all that expensive.

Often, they'll bring in visitors and family members and volunteers, but there really isn't, a deeper connectivity even to the block that they're on. It's bizarre. And if they can conceptualize themselves as a, a cultural center where if you're doing a really interesting project, family members will wanna come in and actually co-create with you.

And the same thing with volunteers. They're not, they're not coming in and dropping off their fabulousness and then leaving. They're co-learning and co-creating with you. And also, to connect that system to existing rituals of celebration within the larger community. Mm-hmm, so that, you know, one example is this great care home system on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, which got itself on the gallery walk so that it would be perceived differently. And then they co-create with professional artists and they're, they're legit on the gallery tour,

There's another organization and there's a two-part episode that we have about an organization in the Twin Cities not too far from you called Pillsbury House. Have you heard of Pillsbury House? Oh, sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Their model as a social service agency is to be a, a community creative center as a permanent fixture that people go, "Let's go over to Pillsbury house. You know, we don't have anything wrong with us we have something we'd like to do that might be fun, you know?"

[00:28:34] BC: Well, and its full circle too, because our part of human history is a little drop, and for most of human history, the things you're talking about were absolutely connected. Nobody would think of, you know, of separating the spirit, the culture, no, the healing or any of that stuff.

[00:29:07] BC: And it looks the same.

[00:29:20] BC: Absolutely. So one of the things that really jumped out at me that's been a real touchstone for me is the arts as research.

You work in the academy and the academy is, is typically not particularly partial to creative based research. But that is at the heart of what you're up to. Not just research to another end, but unto itself as well. Could you talk about that idea of how art making, and exploration, and curiosity all combined in, in a creative research.

And, you know, TimeSlips, the nonprofit, is now doing a 10- city, pilot. Ten program, cuz sometimes they're beyond cities with National Meals on Wheels America to infuse creative engagement practices into their well- check phone calls, and their driver delivery systems based on the Islands of Milwaukee work that we did in collaboration with Sojourn.

And that that's. research question: "Can you infuse meaningful meaning making and enhance connectivity by infusing creativity into delivery systems for social care? "And you know, the, the question is: Are you always gonna be stuck in pilot mode with this?" Or "Because these tend to be so organically structured, is generalizable knowledge even possible from it?"

That's a big question. I'm really thankful right now for the deep research in social isolation because that research, which is pretty, you know, traditionally gold standard structured is s generalizable across almost all populations now. As I was just talking to somebody, I said, we do need more research, but I equate it with food.

Food is now really widely recognized as a social determinant of health. Do you have a, a stable food source? Those are integrated into across social care and healthcare, and we know that people die without food. We can do a lot of research on the nut... exact nutrients for the different kinds of food, or some food better than other food, but we know we're gonna die without it.

Yes. And I, that's where I am right now with the social connectivity and meaning making. Is, we know from the pandemic we're gonna die without meaningful social connection and joy. We'll wither, and there's not thriving, and then there's literally just letting go. And we can do a lot more research and we should on the nuances.

Is it dance? Is it music? is, you know, these nuances of how it's going into the brain and what it's doing. But like food, we just need it. We have to get it into the systems. And I, I feel like that's where I am with the research now. We, we should keep doing it, but we should also really just be working on getting it into the systems now at this point.

If, if, cuz this is the way I, I thought about, I've thought about almost all my inter institutional interventions is that the community is the delivery system, as you say, in your senior center. It's all your staff. It's all the family of the people who live there, obviously the people who live there and the neighbors that are around that. That's an ecosystem.

Part Four: Social Prescriptions

So I, I'm assuming that you're already investigating ways of, of training up, engaging, influencing, and collaborating with these people on the front lines, in the trenches of these delivery systems. How does that, how does that go? How does that work?

So I, I've shifted my focus, like TimeSlips is still training and trying to help as many institutions, like that, as they can, cuz they, that's exactly what they need. It's just they have to be able to take it in. I'm turning toward people, allowing that sector to recover a little bit and then turning toward the, the people living at home, which is the vast majority, like 85% of older adults and even people with cognitive challenges are living at home and trying to help simultaneously build and nurture and foster the creative capacity of what's called the memory cafe structure, which are these just informal gatherings that can happen in libraries or cultural institutions or just programming where. Hang on. Can you hear that ?

A real dog..

[00:36:41] BC: Could you, could you describe a memory cafe? If I were to come and be a part of one, what would it be like?

Um, somebody facilitates. In our village, it's someone from the senior center services. And people wear name tags. It's a place where they can talk and have some coffee for about 20 minutes. It opens up into some kind of programming, oftentimes creative, something of interest that they could share in, and then it closes out with a little more social time.

It's a place where people feel. Comfortable not stigmatized. So oftentimes it's outside of the senior services kind of locations. Um, they used to be in our British pub down the street, but it got a little loud, so they moved it to grocery store ---libraries, botanic gardens, all kinds of different organizations host them.

There's about 900 of them across the United States right now.

Last summer, WKBW T V paid a visit to a memory cafe at the West Falls Center for the Arts in Buffalo, New York. Here's a bit of what they found.

They touch my heart.

The Memory Cafe is a free, uh, music concert and lunch for caregivers and their loved ones with dementia and Alzheimer's. A traditionally, a respite program is sort of a drop off and you go get some shopping done or some chores. This is, uh, something you experience together.

It's the feel, it's the rhythm. I think they, they feel the rhythm, which brings the words back because they're all kind of connected and you know, the lyrics have a rhythm to them, a cadence and the, the rhythm of the guitar or whatever the instrument is going on. Um, you know, I think they just, they just remember it's in them and I think that's really special.

When you were coming here with your wife, how did it help her? How did it help you?

Well, we're six years into, uh, her dementia diagnosis. She knows all the songs still, and we still sing all the oldies together in the car, and so this was a real outlet for us and a chance to kind of like live almost normal for those that hour, ....Sorry

But the rising social prescribing movement is what I'm obsessed with trying to raise the memory cafe structure system as the social prescribing movement is rising so they could meet each other as they both continue to grow.

The memory cafes are one of those assets. The social prescription movement is another powerful one that both identifies assets and connects the dots, you know, through curative pathfinder. People who are trained to listen and learn and then point people and communities to resources that the folks need, like legal advice or volunteer help, or a food pantry or a senior theater group.

Now is definitely the time for this to happen. It's just so obvious that a condition which was hidden in senior centers or whatever, I. And is now a national epidemic based on our recent experience. And one of the things that, that you described the arts as very simply and basically is a way of bringing people into relationships with each other and not as a, a nice to have, but as an essential.

And so, c, could you just talk a little bit about how you think, what you know helps us meet where we are in the transition from pandemic into what's next?

I think we're in a situation where all imagination on deck for the current and future. For land, water, animals, humans, the dynamics between and across them. We need all the imagination we can get. Um, there's the fostering of imagination for social connectivity and wellbeing that then improves the polis, you know, it's not just the individual. So, I think it's an investment in mobilizing the creativity on an individual basis with benefit for health, but also, benefit for the community at large.

[00:42:58] AB: I am falling down the rabbit hole with some collaborators on.... we don't wanna call it the Little Prince, but their ideas inspired by it about learning to see the inside. We're calling it Within a Single Rose. And, I just haven't felt that creative inspiration like that for a while. So Jeff Becker, my, one of my collaborators in Iega Jeff, who's a choreographer, Jeff's a mm-hmm site specific set designer. Just really a joy.

And I play music and listen to a lot of music. And I've become obsessed with the song. Who Knows Where the Time Goes, for many reasons you can imagine. And as I tend to do, when I get obsessed with a song, I listen to many versions of it. And right now, the Judy Collins version is my, my go-to If, if you ever drive past me and you see me just weeping and singing simultaneously, that's what's happening.

Um, and then. I've been reading my mother's letters. My mother was, was, I have to say was. She's still with us, but she was a prolific letter writer. And I just found another stash of them that, um, A a, a colleague of mine approached me a coup maybe seven years ago saying his mother, Carolyn, was really lonely and she was living in a care community, and she wanted to start a theater company.

So, could I talk with her? And so, I did, and it became clear to me that her loneliness was a level that I, I could not address. And I said, mom, would you, would you take on a pen pal? And she did. And now, then when Carolyn passed, my colleague just asked me, do you want those letters? I have them all. And so I've been reading them and she wrote every week for a couple of years, and it's just amazing.

So that's been really inspiring me in multiple ways.

AB: No, uh?

BC: The subtitle is Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, and it's a comprehensive theory of story, and one of his case studies on the Origin of Stories is The Odyssey, and another one is Horton Hears a Who.

[00:45:49] BC: Absolutely. Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to share with you is Liz Lerman's new piece called Wicked Bodies that she talked about a few weeks ago in episode 64. It is actually about the criminalization of the feminine.

Yeah. And the celebration of this incredible deep abiding wisdom that we need desperately now, . And in many ways that's what you're calling up this kind of thing into a world that that really sorely needs it. Anne, thank you so much.

[00:46:21] BC: For the good work,

[00:46:23] BC: And to your listeners, thanks again for tuning in and if you're interested in grabbing a copy of Anne's newest book called Creative Care, a Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care, we'll be sharing a link for that book in our show notes.

On a personal note, I'd like to let you know that after a couple years here, blathering away, we're happy to say that we have a pretty solid audience, which is both gratifying and encouraging. So much so that we're keen to expand it. So if you'd like to help us do that, there are a few things you might do.

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