‘Dancer Not Dementia’: Annual Creamer lecture at STU
On Monday, Oct. 19, the greater Fredericton community gathered in the Kinsella Auditorium at St. Thomas University (STU) for the annual Thomas LeRoy Creamer lecture in gerontology.
This year's guest lecturer was Pia Kontos, a senior scientist at the Kite Research Institute - University Health Network and a Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. The topic was Dancing and Dementia.
Kim Fenwick, Provost and Vice-President of Academics and Research at STU opened the evening with the historical context of the annual Creamer Lecture.
“This annual lecture honours an alumnus of our university and a pioneer in geriatric medicine,” said Fenwick.
She also mentioned that Leroy Creamer graduated from STU in 1945. He went on to earn further degrees at St. Francis Xavier University and the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University before establishing his practice in Saint John, where he began putting new approaches to geriatric medicine into action.
Kontos focused her talk on how dance can humanize dementia and break down the stigma surrounding it. She said that dementia, is “a much-feared stigmatizing label that carries with it a sentence of social death.”
She described a tragedy narrative that assumes people living with dementia cannot grow, build meaningful relationships, or pursue activities that matter to them and said she is deeply concerned about its impact.
The cost of that stigma is high, Kontos explained. It fuels social exclusion, strips people of their dignity and limits their access to meaningful, enriching recreation and leisure activities.
Kontos elaborated that “so many residential long-term settings” focus on “biomedicalization and the pharmaceuticalization of neuropsychiatric symptoms, despite serious adverse drug reactions, increased mortality, and impaired quality of life.”
She said about the care part often revolves around eating and toileting, with few enriching activities beyond a handful of exceptions.
Dance in her view “[has] enormous potential to reduce the stigma associated with dementia by promoting, preserving and sustaining human flourishing.”
The lecture also included viewing the 20-minute documentary “Dancer not Dementia,” which Kontos co-produced. The documentary is used to focus on the voices of persons living with dementia, to challenge stigma and support creativity through dance.
In “dementia care settings, the dances are offered from a seated position, and social inclusion is further supported by prioritizing expressive capacities and social interaction. Each dance is guided by both physical and artistic goals, with a focus on narrative.”
Benjamin McLaughlin, a third-year student majoring in gerontology said, “This isn't just about receiving a program or some type of intervention or some type of therapy, but this is about having fun. This is about connecting with other people and it’s clear from the documentary that the program achieves just that.”
Ella Black, a first-year student sampling different courses, discovered gerontology, saying she’s never heard of the field before.
She sees dance as a “universal way to meet people,” since it requires no shared language or prior knowledge of one another. Dancing, she added, doesn’t have to mean spins and big movements; it can be as simple as moving your arms.
That sense of connection through movement is exactly what Kontos hopes audiences take away from her work.
“I hope that people see that people living with dementia have to be creative, imaginative, be funny and playful.”
She added that she wants audiences to recognize the power of dance to sustain connection to life itself.
For those who want to see Kontos’s work in action, the short film Dancer Not Dementia is available at the link below.
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