The Article

Assistant Professor Laura Apol and choreographer Tina Kabour describe in this article a 12-week program they developed together that involved senior adults and high school students.  They received a grant from the Oklahoma Arts Council to promote personal expression involving physical, cognitive and emotional aspects of the participants by integrating the disciplines of creative writing and movement/dance.

Discussion

The project consisted of eleven participants, all female, with six senior adults and five high school students. Their first assignment was to make an acrostic poem (with the letters of their name) that they then shared as a way to introduce themselves. They also did an activity in which each person made up a “signature movement”—a gesture that showed how they were feeling at that moment. As the classes progressed, both the writing and movement activities became more expressive and involved greater interaction between the two age groups.  One activity involved participants writing about personal objects that they were either carrying or wearing. The women described objects like keys or a purse, but in a way that often represented something deeper in their lives. In a later class, the participants "walked in each others' shoes" by first sharing a piece they had written about their shoes and then by doing an exercise with one person following and copying the movements of a partner. At the end of the program, Apol and Kambour found that class members had learned to work with increasing ease on both individual and partnered projects, and in their final performance, they combined quite naturally the texts they produced through their writing and the texts they produced through their dance. It was evident to Apol and Kambour that the program had given these two generations of women an opportunity to share and to see different worlds through each other's eyes. “The women listened with rapt attention to each other's stories—stories filled with joy and pain, anticipation and uncertainty—and with great concentration they fit their bodies to one another's gestures and motions.” Apol and Kambour concluded that both the young people and the senior adults in the group were able to grow as artists, to learn to be comfortable in each other's environments, and to pay attention to each other's lives.

What It Means To You

Although this project involved high school students, the writing and dance activities also have been successfully used by Apol and Kabour across age ranges. As a result, Apol and Kambour believe the project has much wider implications for collaboration, intergenerational work, and the linking of art forms. They found that bringing the two generations together allowed the students to experience the senior citizens as positive role models who could share wisdom and experience, while the students provided the seniors with the benefit of interacting with enthusiastic and vibrant young people.

For More Information

Apol, L. & Kabour, T. (1999).Telling stories through writing and dance: An intergenerational project. Language Arts, 77(2), 106-117.

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