Youth Theatre Journal

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Who dis ... new phone: Considering engaged

intergenerational storytelling: partnership,
participation and pandemic

Benedicta Akley-Quarshie, Jamal Brooks-Hawkins, Stephani Etheridge

Woodson & Angela Pinholster

To cite this article: Benedicta Akley-Quarshie, Jamal Brooks-Hawkins, Stephani Etheridge

Woodson & Angela Pinholster (2020) Who dis ... new phone: Considering engaged
intergenerational storytelling: partnership, participation and pandemic, Youth Theatre Journal,
34:2, 118-126, DOI: 10.1080/08929092.2020.1842829

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YOUTH THEATRE JOURNAL
2020, VOL. 34, NO. 2, 118–126
https://doi.org/10.1080/08929092.2020.1842829

Who dis ... new phone: Considering engaged intergenerational

storytelling: partnership, participation and pandemic
Benedicta Akley-Quarshiea, Jamal Brooks-Hawkinsb, Stephani Etheridge Woodsonc,
and Angela Pinholstera
a
Theatre for Youth and Community, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, School of Music, Dance and
Theatre, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA; bSchool of Social Transformation, Gender Studies, the
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA; cHerberger Institute for
Design and the Arts, School of Music, Dance and Theatre, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

ABSTRACT
This essay takes as its starting point a creative aging project in partner­
ship with the Mesa Arts Center’s, Art in Mind Program; TimeSlips
(founded by MacArthur Fellow Ann Basting); and a Projects in
Community-Based Theatre graduate course at Arizona State
University within the Theatre for Youth and Community MFA and
PhD programs. This non-memory-based storytelling collaboration
focused on elders living with memory loss and/or dementia and
centered a core theatre for youth value — all humans deserve to
participate in creative and cultural life no matter their age, neuro-
cognitive or physical abilities. A parallel focus of the collaboration
was the belief that such creative engagements also allow elder-care
systems and families to benefit from participating with their residents
and loved-ones — impacting adaptive and expressive creativity, emo­
tional connections, and joyful participation in imaginative life.

This essay takes as its starting point a creative aging project in partnership with the Mesa
Arts Center’s Art in Mind Program; TimeSlips (founded by MacArthur Fellow Ann
Basting); and a Projects in Community-Based Theatre graduate course at Arizona State
University within the Theatre for Youth and Community MFA and PhD programs. Mesa
Arts Center is a visual and performing arts complex, and their Arts in Mind program offers
creative aging opportunities specifically for elders living with mild to moderate dementia
and their caretakers. This non-memory-based storytelling collaboration focused on elders
living with memory loss and/or dementia and centered a core theatre for youth value – all
humans have the fundamental right to participate in creative and cultural life no matter
their age, neuro-cognitive or physical abilities. A parallel focus of the collaboration was the
belief that such creative engagements also allow elder-care systems and families to benefit
from participating with their residents and loved-ones – impacting adaptive and expressive
creativity, emotional connections, and joyful participation in imaginative life.
A couple on vacation in Arizona came to participate in our first creative collaborative
session. They were seeking to learn more about participatory storytelling with elders living
with dementia, so that the gentleman could learn techniques to better interact with his

CONTACT Stephani Etheridge Woodson [email protected] School of Music, Dance and Theatre, Arizona State
University, POBOX872002, Tempe, AZ 85287-2002
Authorial Team: (PhD students + one professor at ASU in Theatre for Youth and Community, Gender Studies Programs)
© 2020 American Alliance for Theatre and Education
 YOUTH THEATRE JOURNAL 119

mother. He disclosed how his mother’s body is strong and healthy, but her mind “is gone.”
We were struck that they took time away from their vacation to participate in our story­
telling session, and their presence highlighted the need that caregivers and family have to
creatively and joyfully interact with their elders. They expressed frustration with how
limited their interactions with their mother had become. This family had to reintroduce
themselves to their mother, every single day and they shared how the elder’s sundowning
behaviors (a state of confusion, aggression and anxiety occurring from late afternoon to
evening) created frustrating relational patterns that they could not seem to escape. This
adult son actively sought unique interventions that would promote new ways of showing
love and being in community with his mother. Additionally, this couple taught us a more
profound understanding in how physical abilities and cognitive functions are not linear.
A few weeks into launching our residency, the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-
19, forced international social distancing, heavily impacting our ability to engage with older
adults in person. Classes shut down, our participating community centers locked their
doors to all visitors and everyone sheltered in place. We shifted our efforts in the Projects in
Community-Based Theatre graduate course then to build virtual creative prompts and
artistic expressions which could be used in dyads through social media for a time of
imposed physical isolation, and building physically distantanced performances/interactions
(park and window dancing, chalk drawings, et cetera). This essay then, is less a case study as
originally intended and more an articulation of the central methodologies we explored and
then deployed connecting theatre for youth (particularly immersive theatre and theatre for
the very young practices) and creative aging as articulated by our partnering organizations.
We also reflect on where we were successful in adapting to physical distancing and where we
failed to account for how complex ethical intergenerational engagements really are. We
explore then methodological alignments within our central frame of reference – human’s
basic right to creative expression and artistic engagement.
Theatre for Youth (TFY) has many practices that align easily to work with older adults.
Like young children, older adults living with dementia are a particularly vulnerable and
powerless group who deserve to be agents of their own creative pursuits. Agency and choice
can be challenging however given the specialized needs of this population. In our process we
discovered that the engagement exercises TimeSlips uses in their work with older adults fit
into our project goals and parallel theatre for youth practices (particularly creative drama
and immersive theatre for the very young). TimeSlips begins most exercises with a physical
item (a photograph generally) and then focuses on asking what they call “beautiful ques­
tions” to build out a participatory story sparked by the physical prompt. TimeSlips creates
creative engagement opportunities that bring joy and meaning to older adults in collabora­
tive frames. We found that their model created robust opportunities for self-efficacy and
collective agency (TimeSlips 2020). But, as partnering artists we discovered that we had still
not fully parsed the justice-oriented and ethical implications of participatory theatre at
either end of the age spectrum. We believe humans at any stage of life have a right to
experience joyful play, but what “joy” and “play” mean in specialized contexts, and how we
frame and understand experiential participation need to be considered in building just,
playful, and ethical intergenerational practices. (And, all theatre for youth is at heart an
intergenerational practice). And then, our in-person and collaborative explorations were
derailed by the global pandemic which uniquely targets elders and is especially dangerous in
elder care centers. We return to these concerns later.
120 B. AKLEY-QUARSHIE ET AL.

Dementia is a general term for the deterioration of cognitive functioning including

memory, thought processing, and decision making in day-to-day life (CDC 2019; Chester
Evan 2018). In 2018, nearly 80% of dementia cases in the United States were people living
with Alzheimer’s disease (CDC 2019). A report by the Alzheimer’s Association revealed
that:

An estimated 5.8 million Americans of all ages are living with Alzheimer’s dementia in 2019.
This number includes an estimated 5.6 million people age 65 and older and approximately
200,000 individuals under age 65 who have younger-onset Alzheimer’s, though there is greater
uncertainty about the younger-onset estimate. Of the 5.8 million people who have Alzheimer’s
dementia, 81% are age 75 or older. (Alzheimer’s Association 2019, 17)

The World Health Organization (2019) defines dementia as a chronic and progressive
syndrome that leads to deterioration in cognitive functions in the areas of memory,
thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judg­
ment. Pharmacological studies on dementia indicate its irreversibility as there are currently
no known cures for the condition (Alzheimer’s Association 2019; Schneider 2018). There
are multiple risk factors for dementia and neurocognitive declines, but to date, we do not
understand the direct causes for most types of dementia. Two clear risk factors increasing
the likelihood of dementia-related illnesses for individuals include: age, and a family history
of the disease (Alzheimer’s Association 2019). Additionally, studies have linked occurrences
of accelerated Alzheimer’s dementia and other cognitive decline disorders to dental health,
hypertension, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease (Ide et al. 2016; Walker, Power,
and Gottesman 2017).
Additionally and like most adverse health conditions in the United States, dementia
overburdens women and people of color. African Americans and Latinos are more likely
than their White counterparts to have Alzheimer’s (Brooks 2019), and women are twice as
likely as men to be living with dementia (Podcasy and Epperson 2016). As can be seen in the
US COVID 19 morbidity data, the stresses related to systems of oppression interconnect
with systems of care and disparities in health outcomes (Chrisler, Barney, and Palatino
2016). According to minority stress theory then, age-related social pressures compound in
those with multi-marginalized identities (Choi, Rose, and Friedman 2018; Chrisler, Barney,
and Palatino 2016). As Chrisler, Barney, and Palatino (2016, 88–89) note, “older women of
color have a lifetime of experience with racism, older sexual minority women have long
experience with homophobia, and transgender elders have experience with transphobia.”
There is an emotional, physical and financial cost to being an older adult, and this cost
increases when people experience both marginalized intersectional social/identity locations
and health conditions such as dementia.
Both research and our personal experiences teach us the multiple ways that dementia
impacts quality of life (QOL) for the person living with dementia, as well as for their
caregivers (Barnes et al. 2015) and families. The decline in QOL can be demonstrated not
only in social isolation, but also cultural exclusion. One of the author’s friends shared her
experience with her mother’s Alzheimer’s journey:

My mother was diagnosed six or seven years ago. [. . .] It is like going through stages of grief,
only your loved one is still here. The best way I can describe it is watching your parents die, but
they aren’t dying. They are physically not dying but they are mentally dying. So, you have to at
 YOUTH THEATRE JOURNAL 121

some point you have to acknowledge the loss of memory, the loss of their recognition of you. –
Personal Communication (March 10, 2020)

In 2017, Peter Mittler, an 86-year-old British psychologist – diagnosed with Alzheimer’s –

addressed a global audience of Alzheimer’s disease researchers and advocates on the
indignities that people with dementia undergo. Speaking on behalf of Dementia Alliance
International, a global organization run by/for people with dementia, Mittler said:
“Everybody thinks that we are just a medical problem, people underestimate us, they
write us off; they don’t think we’re capable of making decisions” (Graham 2017). One of
the primary goals of the Dementia Alliance International, in fact, is for people living with
dementia to be included in conversations about their future, and to participate in commu­
nity activities, rather than being secluded in institutions. Organizations like this one high­
light not only QOL issues but also the ways in which people living with dementia deserve
the chance to weigh in at the public policy level, and be treated with respect as humans
(Graham). And these concerns are key frames the TimeSlips model addresses through their
creative engagement programs. Additionally, we found that families providing care to their
loved ones with dementia suffer social exclusion in the similar manner as their unique needs
often remain unmet at the policy and social/cultural level.
To be fair, at the advanced stages of dementia, concepts of quality of life may change, but
elders can still experience a full range of emotions – including joy, creative flow, and
participatory playfulness, although their affect may not reflect these emotional experiences
and they may lose the linguistic capacity to express them. The above quotes also demonstrate
though, how traditional patterns of care (parent to child, adult to young person) transform,
and demand new ways of being. Who dis, new phone becomes – not a joke – but a way of life.
Instead of depending on a lifetime of shared memories to anchor familial relationships,
families caretaking an elder with dementia must continually build new frames for being
together. Storytelling, music, and creative expression not only can help caregivers reimagine
quality of life, but also can deepen relationships with their loved ones, albeit in new frames.
Well after one author’s grandmother had lost her capacity to verbally communicate, she could
still play and sing fully realized musical compositions on the piano. Music then, became one
of the few ways for the family to be in community with her. She no longer recognized her
grandchildren, but everyone took pleasure in gathering around the piano and singing big
band tunes. And this collaborative joy is in fact, the deep strength of the TimeSlips model.
TimeSlips focuses on play, on “yes, and,” and on asking “beautiful questions” built of sense
data and imagination where every suggestion is met with acceptance.
In our program planning phase we depended on multiple theatres for youth practices to
craft our methods for older adults. Each of the partnering artists also went through the
extensive TimeSlips training process as well as training conducted by Mesa Arts Center on
their structures. Methodologically, we found participatory, improvisational, and immersive
theatre combined exceptionally well to build joyful and engaging experiences with, and for,
older adults and their caregivers. We also used modified devising practices within the
TimeSlips storytelling framework. For example, in one of our only in-person workshops
we used an image of a boy playing with a dog in a park or yard pulled from the extensive
TimeSlips Creativity Center (https://www.timeslips.org/resources/creativity-center). We
collaboratively built a story together around this image that ultimately had the boy’s new
dog burying the boy’s grandmother, because she wouldn’t give the dog any bacon. The
122 B. AKLEY-QUARSHIE ET AL.

workshop participants built the story including the relationships between the characters,
and then facilitators performed that story, acting out various parts while others narrated
and engaged elders in performative feedback. You would not be surprised to learn that the
action, movement, and sound of performance created an engaging and fun performance
that participants rated as enjoyable. The performative retelling of the participant sugges­
tions built a theatrical frame around seemingly disparate offerings and honored all story
suggestions as equally legitimate. Our other in-person workshop used chocolate, the smell
of microwave popcorn, and flour dusted on a table top for finger play to build
a participatory story around a photograph of a large outdoor meal. These elements were
chosen carefully to provide a robust sensorial environment and were sparked by a weeklong
workshop British Theatre Company Oily Cart’s Tim Webb had given us a year prior on
crafting performance work for profoundly disabled communities. Although the majority of
USAmerican Theatre for Youth performance material depends heavily on causal, time-
based narrative, Webb’s work suggested to us diverse ways of inviting participants/audi­
ences into a theatrical experience that fully engage all the senses while also not prioritizing
causality logics, thinking, and comprehension. In our methodological approach we tried to
center diverse entry points into the creative process and practiced improvisational fluidity
to honor all participant suggestions.
We were also inspired by Dr. Elinor Fuchs, the celebrated theatre professor, playwright
and dramaturg, who wrote a memoir called Making an Exit, about caring for her mother,
who had been living with Alzheimer’s Disease (Fuchs 2005). In a 2018 article for the Journal
of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Fuchs describes visiting a nursing home and discovering life
stations:

The “life stations” were little environmental theatre sets, one might say, at which residents
could repeat in miniature the motions of familiar daily activities. At one spot there was a wood-
working bench for a male resident who had been a cabinet maker, at another a table with
a basket of fresh laundry waiting to be folded, at another a mock country store with boxes of
cereal. At each of these stations, a resident could reenact familiar actions from his or her earlier
life. (Fuchs 2018)

Much like immersive youth environments (children’s museums, creche programs, early
childhood learning centers) Fuchs aligns these stations to immersive theatre environments
where older adults can perform using props, their imaginations and embodied memory.
Some elder care facilities, in fact, design their entire architecture using immersive imagined
space (two of the most famous of these include the Lantern of Chagrin senior living facility
in Ohio – https://lanternlifestyle.com/chagrinvalley/—and the village of Hogewey outside of
Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
So, in our in-person workshops, we found deep parallels in our intergenerational work
with elders to our work with very young audiences (TVY). From a human rights perspective
though, Scottish researcher, and ASSITEJ Next Generation Artist, Ben Fletcher-Watson’s
delineates a critical link between contemporary practices in TVY and tyranny: “Tyranny can
be defined as the illegitimate or unjust exercise of dominance; the members of society most
vulnerable to tyranny must then be those least able to exert power themselves against
institutionalized hierarchies: the elderly, ill and very young” (Fletcher-Watson 2015, 27).
We note that elders living with dementia comprise two of the most vulnerable populations
and therefore are doubly powerless: the elderly and the ill. Fletcher-Watson suggests that we
 YOUTH THEATRE JOURNAL 123

fight tyranny with agency: “theatrical power structures can be created which grant agency to
their participants to engage on their own terms . . . [which] includes the ability to withdraw
from participation at will [and] to take control of the theatrical event if desired” (Fletcher-
Watson 2015, 35). Neither young people nor elders with dementia are able to participate in
traditional state structures of power including leadership, governmental/civic frames, nor
fiscal policies. Both populations are considered as “needing” particular oversight. We
suggest that this fact says more about how power is constituted in neoliberal societies
than it does about the intrinsic capacities of children and elders with dementia. Our
discovery here then is both the limits of the parallels in theatre for the very young and
those with adults with dementia AND in our very understandings of identity, agency, and
representational artistic practices. What does “consent” mean in these locations and
methodologies?
The Timeslips model provided a useful frame for building inclusive and creative methods
to ethically work with people living with dementia. And, we thoughtfully considered how to
build agentic structures for our elders living with dementia participants while collabora­
tively making theatre and telling communal stories. But, ultimately we failed – particularly
in our hurried and difficult response to COVID 19 and social distancing/lock down
requirements. The pandemic exposed failures in the structures of engagement themselves.
For example our partner, Mesa Arts Center, immediately shut down all of their creative
aging programming as did other municipalities including the Tempe Memory Cafe (who we
were scheduled to provide a workshop for in April of 2020). While safety concerns for elders
led the shut down charge, liability frames ultimately confined thinking. Additionally, the
longitudinal concerns of a multi-year need to maintain physical distancing have hardly
entered into USAmerican discourse. We keep pretending that a vaccine will be a silver bullet
while doing nothing to support families living with elders with dementia. In Arizona, we
also have not particularly solved how to continue to offer structured civic engagements like
schools, preschools, and daycare centers. In other words, our frame has prioritized neolib­
eral “choice” understandings while minimizing collectivist understandings of common
welfare not to mention the specialized needs of particular populations.
In our move to an online artistic engagement we privileged certain kinds of individuals
and locations over others. To do a collaborative poem writing exercise through zoom, for
example, meant that both parties needed access to the internet, the machines necessary to
connect, and caretakers willing and able to help with the connections. Although, several
student artists used postcards instead, sending them to care facilities that had signed up to
receive them through the TimeSlips website, and while another student created chalk
drawings in public places so that anyone could participate; we did not fully consider or
prepare to address the multiple ways the United States maintains systems of power that
privilege white wealth and able minds and bodies. As we have continued to work within our
new realities, we have built further frames that center asynchronous participatory structures
(like poetic prompts via postcards, care packages, and video/sound recordings) that do not
demand advanced skills in creativity nor specialized understandings.
So our investigations into intergenerational theatre, immersive theatre, and creative
aging with persons living with dementia ultimately exposed gaps in ethics and justice that
we participated in maintaining. This is of course not unique to the arts as medical and
dementia care researchers point to issues with informed consent, human rights violations,
and inhumane treatment by care partners as some of the leading ethical challenges in the
124 B. AKLEY-QUARSHIE ET AL.

field. At the moment of our authorship, the USAmerican COVID death count stands at
200,000 with over 6.7 million cases. Some at-risk individuals have been sheltering in place
for over six months while others agitate against cloth masks or infection precautions at all.
This polarized frame has particularly impacted elders. The World Health Organization
(WHO) notes that people living with dementia are prone to abuses not in small part because
some dementia symptoms present as difficult or stubborn behavior (e.g., Sundowner Effect).
They therefore suggest that a human rights approach be adopted in dementia care work,
and we would add intergenerational artistic practices. In order to provide an easily diges­
tible organizational structure for person-centric and human-rights-centric dementia care
they developed the acronym, PANEL, which stands for:

● Free and fair practices of Participation

● Accountability (organizations and individuals who are responsible for the care of
people living with dementia should be held accountable for the respect and protection
of their care recipients)
● Nondiscrimination
● Empowerment
● Legality (that all policy, health, and legal frameworks should draw from the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments.

The WHO notes: “There should be increased education about dementia to change
attitudes of society and reduce stigma. Lastly, people living with dementia should be
empowered to participate in decision making processes and to maintain their legal capacity”
(World Health Organization n.d., 4). In many ways, the TimeSlips process opened the
possibility for agency amongst the older adults. Their focus on “beautiful questions” and
acceptance of all suggestions foregrounds participatory structures based in care rather than
causality. However, there are still many ways in which the seniors do not have control over
their experiences. For instance, all of the planning is done prior to the session, without input
from the seniors. The photo or other prompts are chosen by the facilitators. Yet, in
considering the needs of older adults living with dementia, too many choices or options
can be overwhelming and cause disengagement (Hamdy et al. 2017). TimeSlips accounts for
this by suggesting that facilitators provide a limited number of prompt options for parti­
cipants. In this way, the program meets the needs of the participants by giving them some
agency while being respectful and aware of typical neurological abilities. Nevertheless, we
submit that we could do a better job of building environments for agentic collaborative
storytelling particularly for the next several years until COVID 19 treatments become wide-
spread. In fact, we imagine that social distancing protocols will exacerbate social isolation
and cultural exclusion and we challenge our colleagues to imagine and enact ethically
sound, imaginative, and healthy human-rights-centric engagements for humans at all stages
of their life cycle.
This work as partial and fraught as it has been has served as a learning space for the
authors as they embark on a physically distanced esthetic and scientific research project
further exploring how families cope with complex medical needs in their loved ones. Like
our previous work, the next iteration of this project focuses on joyful opportunities for
family caregivers and their charges to connect through artistic and creative processes. While
TimeSlips has begun further experimentation with using telephonic storytelling
 YOUTH THEATRE JOURNAL 125

engagements, ASU teams will use what they learned in this partnership with families who
have medically fragile and/or medically complex children. But, key in both are the very
questions at the heart of our work to date and this essay: Who leads? How does this
leadership happen? How do we successfully adapt processes based on causal narrative to
serve individuals who either do not care about causality or do not process time and
consequence in the same way as others? How can creative artists nurture relationships
through joyful experiential engagement? And, how does an art form based in liveness adapt
to pandemic requirements that limit physical proximity for high-risk populations. Lastly,
how do artists of all stripes address White Supremacy structures that invade all aspects of
political and civic life and action to address collective human thriving? We do not yet have
answers to these questions, but we commit to furthering our understanding within an
antiracist, anti-ableist, and anti-adultist practice.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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