Lifelines: The Martha Bowers Residency
When I first heard about the establishment of the Linden Center for Creativity & Aging at IC’s Gerontology Institute, I immediately thought of an artist I wanted to bring to campus to catalyze thinking about creativity and aging. It took some time and effort, but Martha Bowers of Brooklyn-based Dance, Theatre, Etc., came to campus in October 2009 and led a residency with Ithaca College students and community elders using movement and storytelling. Part creative performance project, part social science research project, the experience that came to be called “Lifelines,” set out to broaden concepts of performance and evaluation, as well as creativity and aging.
Interested students and elders gathered at Longview the evening of October 18th. Martha engaged the participants in exercises that allowed them to begin to tell stories of their lives. For the next four evenings, the group met at Ithaca College and, through movement and theatre exercises, told stories about trust, about the many things their hands have done, and about the ups and downs of their lives. Over the course of the week, Martha shaped this rich material into fragments that were spoken, danced and sung. She then began to place them in sequence; a performance piece began to emerge.
Friday night, the group met at Longview and rehearsed what started being called “Lifelines.” Magically, a piano accompanist appeared that night, too! The piece got tweaked and fine-tuned with input from just about everyone involved. Saturday afternoon was showtime. The players all arrived in colorful tops and ran through the material one last time. The auditorium of Longview started filling up with curious audience members, many of whom were Longview residents. IC students came to watch, as did the friends and family members of the performers. After the show, Martha led a “talk back” inviting audience members to ask questions of the performers about the process of coming together to create “Lifelines”.
Concurrent with the creation of the expressive part of “Lifelines” was a parallel activity; I was conducting a formative evaluation of the project. The question I was pursuing was: “How does participation in an intergenerational, community arts project build the participant’s awareness of her own attitudes toward creativity and aging?” Professor Mary Ann Erickson and I designed a qualitative research study using interviewing techniques to gauge the participants’ attitudes before and after the residency. Prof. Erickson focused on interviewing the elders, I interviewed the students. We asked questions about the participants’ previous experience with performance and the importance of creativity in their lives, for example. Though the results of that study are not yet available, I can give you a sneak preview of a response from one of the students, “the whole thing was really fun … I really enjoyed hearing all the stories from the older adults …I feel like I built relationships with every one there. That was probably my favorite part about it.”
The residency provided a unique opportunity to focus on the particular issues involving the evaluation of arts experiences, where notions of “impact,” “effectiveness,” and “success” tend to be subjective and difficult to assess. Evaluation of applied arts programs and experiences is debated territory and little practice has been captured of effective evaluation. I hope that our study will lead to other forays into the world of arts evaluation.
Many hands contributed to the success of “Lifelines.” As early as Spring 2007, students in Professor Pat Spencer’s “Grantwriting” class took the semester to develop a detailed proposal to fund the residency. Professor John Krout was a strong supporter of the project and put the resources of the Gerontology Institute behind it. Professor Chris Pogorzola was a valuable link to Longview for participants and space for rehearsal and performance.
