With dance, a world of possibilities
Hamilton driving force behind program for Parkinson’s
If you’ve ever been immobilized by what Parkinson’s can do to one you love (my late dad), you cannot help but be moved by what love, with dance, can do to Parkinson’s.
It can help push the debilitating disease back, if only by small degrees (and maybe much more than that; research is still being done). If nothing else, dancing (including dancing in one’s chair) can release those who have Parkinson’s from the sense that it has them.
“Sometimes when I can’t walk, I can still dance.” “When I’m in dance class, I feel like I don’t have Parkinson’s any more.” Just two testimonials from Hamiton City Ballet’s Dance For Parkinson’s website.
Hamilton, as it turns out, is at the forefront of a worldwide initiative to recognize the importance of dance — and our growing understanding of it — as a way to alleviate symptoms of Parkinson’s.
This Saturday is World Dance For Parkinson’s Day (timed to coincide with International Dance Day and April as Parkinson’s month worldwide).
It will be celebrated with, among other things, global online streaming of videos, pictures and interviews of Dance For Parkinson’s classes throughout the world. From New York City and Queensland, Australia to the Netherlands, England (through the English National Ballet) and, of course, Hamilton, where Dance for Parkinson’s operates out of St. Paul’s United Church in Dundas.
And the idea for World Dance For Parkinson’s Day began right here with the impressive people who put it on (volunteer dancers, musicians, researchers) and the equally impressive people who participate.
“I saw that World Ballet Day (Oct. 4 — different from International Dance Day) had an online platform,” says Jody White Van De Klippe, Hamilton Dance For Parkinson’s research co-ordinator.
“Why don’t we consider something like that for Dance For Parkinson’s,” she thought. They got talking on and off and piggybacking onto International Dance Day and Parkinson’s month seemed to make sense.
Jody broached the subject with David Leventhal. Dave, celebrated dancer with Mark Morris Dance Group in New York City, became program director and a founding teacher of MMDG’s Dance for Parkinson’s Disease program, which pioneered weekly classes for people with Parkinson’s throughout New York City, fostering similar classes in 17 countries around the world. He received the 2016 World Parkinson Congress Award.
Jody knows Dave because she, along with Melania Pawliw and Max Ratevosian of Hamilton City Ballet, studied under him in the U.S. in 2011, to learn D for PD.
Jody and Dave bandied the idea of World Dance For Parkinson’s Day around but it sat in limbo until she got a call from him in December saying, “Are you up for this?”
After doing a story on the class last year, I caught up with Hamilton’s D for PD a few weeks ago, while Tom Omoreon did video, photography and interviews for streaming on Saturday. The class is growing, its physical poetry, the sometimes halting, trembling grace, as moving as ever, moving in every sense of the word.
Max and Melania led them in gracefully sculptural motions of their hands and arms, sometimes like wings gently fluttering, to such music as “Edelweiss” and “Poinciana.”
There that day was Dr. Matthew Woolhouse, McMaster music professor and founder of the university’s digital music lab.
He and researchers, using lowcost motion-sensing devices, graph participants’ individualized movements into a computer system so that progress can be calculated. Participants can practise at home, with the help of onscreen avatars, which duplicate the things the teachers do in the gym at St. Paul’s.
“It combines music and movement into a metrical framework, a production framework,” says Matthew, “important for initiating movements. I’m happy to assist in a community effort like this.” And it’s also producing invaluable research data.
Jody says there are about 10,000 subscribers to the online streaming but one doesn’t have to subscribe. Simply go to the portal www.danceforparkinsons.online
It’s hard to say enough about this wonderful project.