The Memory Hub welcomes Julia Becke, MD, as our first Artist in Residence. Dr. Becke is a board-certified internist at the UW Roosevelt General Internal Medicine Center and came to her medical training with a background in dance and dance education. Working at the crossroads of medicine and art, she brings a passion for offering dance-making workshops that are optimized for people living with memory loss or dementia.
“I am honored to be the first Artist in Residence,” says Dr. Becke. “It is a very special opportunity for me to work with people living with memory loss and use the arts and dance as a way of enhancing joy and creativity and improving life in the setting of a condition that can be stigmatizing and isolating. Finding ways to connect with our community feels important.”
In her 13 years of clinical work and previous work managing long-term care patients at the former Keiro Northwest skilled nursing facility on Cherry Hill, Dr. Becke has seen the benefits of ready access to dementia-specific programming and the negative effects of the absence of stimulation and connection to others.
Dance, with its fusion of movement, music, and self-expression within a group setting, increases social connection and physical activity. Dance, either seated or standing, shows promise in decreasing neuropsychiatric symptoms in people living with dementia. But Dr. Becke is most compelled by the benefits of dancing together that have been documented in interview-based studies. These benefits include the unexpected positive feelings that might come from trying something new, looking forward to a class, or discovering things about creativity by observing other people’s movements.
Over the next few months, Dr. Becke will hold weekly dance-making sessions at the Memory Hub, specifically in the Elderwise Adult Day program and the Frye Art Museum's Alzheimer's Café program. In the community, Dr. Becke will also work with residents in The Terraces at Skyline. This project will culminate in a final performance in December, in which participants will act as co-creators of the dance movements.
“I like to support my dancers in building comfort with what we're doing over time. We lay down these physical memories as we progress through our time together,” she says. “We also think about that sequential involvement of each body part and bringing warmth and fluidity into the movements.”
The approach that Dr. Becke teaches is based on the Sharing Dance for Older Adults program at Canada's National Ballet School, which is a community-oriented dance class intended to support social inclusion by making dance accessible to older adults with a range of physical and cognitive abilities, including dementia. After a visit with one of the psychologists who developed the program, Dr. Becke became inspired carry forward the idea and create new opportinites for people living with memory loss to engage in dance.
Now, Dr. Becke has the chance to put her own spin on these dance lessons here at the Memory Hub as the Artist in Residence.
“My colleagues in Canada found that creative and visual prompts were important to help people with dementia engage with the movements,” says Dr. Becke. “They couldn't just say, straighten your arm and have that be an interesting movement. Each piece of the class needs to have some kind of external creative idea along with it. So, we're not just going to twist our wrist. We might be reaching up to take an orange off a tree. Each of those things gets built into that dance over time. We're telling a story, which is what dance does.” In this area, Dr. Becke will leverage unique resources from our community and use art images from the Frye Art Museum collections to inspire movements.
Dr. Becke is looking forward to fun collaborations at the Memory Hub. She plans to work with musicians at the Alzheimer's Cafés to provide the live music for the dance session. And, Lynn Black, a Memory Hub front desk volunteer, is going to play her ukulele for some of the dance sessions in the Elderwise Adult Day program. She also hopes to have a UW dance major attend and act as volunteer teaching assistant.
“I’m also looking forward to offering something for caregivers to enjoy in this experience,” she says. “There's nothing like seeing your loved one try something new or seeing them in a new light.” • Genevieve Wanucha
