Location: PNX140
Abstract:
Over the past decade, participatory arts initiatives involving people with dementia have grown significantly across North America and Europe. Recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of involving people living with dementia as active, creative consultants and co-creators, rather than positioning them as passive recipients of arts-based programming. In this workshop, Dr. Heunjung Lee and Dr. Julia Henderson will introduce the co-creation methods they employ in their respective theatre and dance projects with community partners living with dementia.
Dr. Lee will demonstrate culturally inclusive approaches to collaborative movement-making drawn from her SSHRC-funded postdoctoral project, Cultural Dance for Dementia (2025–2027). Participants will explore failure-free movement activities grounded in cultural inheritance, traditional practices, ethnic music, and meaningful objects. In this workshop, she invites participants to consider how participatory research can be made more culturally inclusive and physically accessible for ethnoculturally diverse communities.
Dr. Henderson will then share co-creative practices developed through the Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experience of Dementia project. Participants will engage in theatre-based collaborative activities using theatrical techniques, reflecting on how such methods can empower community partners and redistribute creative agencies within research projects.
By engaging directly with these co-creation processes, workshop participants will have the opportunity to critically examine both the potential and the institutional constraints of sharing agency and ownership in participatory performing arts research.
Biographies:
Heunjung Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary. She is a dramatist, dancer, and a performance studies scholar, whose research intervenes in age-inclusive and dementia-friendly discourse through both critical analyses of cultural representations and arts-based participatory research. Her SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research, “Moving through Dementia” (2025-2027), further explores concepts of creative care, inclusivity, and accessibility.
Dr. Julia Henderson is assistant professor in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD in theatre.