Care to Dance: Listening, Watching, Dancing and Reflecting the Practice of a Community Arts and Health Dance Artist working with Older People M. Horne PhD 2016 Care to Dance: Listening, Watching, Dancing and Reflecting the Practice of a Community Arts and Health Dance Artist working with Older People Maxine Horne A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre of Social Change and Community Well-being February 2016 Abstract The focus of this thesis is community arts and health provision for older people. It presents an ethnography of two community dance for older people groups in North West England, UK. It explores the experience of being a participant in the groups, of facilitating the groups and, additionally, of researching with the groups. I acted as both the researcher and the dance artist facilitating the sessions. Much of the existing arts and health literature focuses on the outcome of an intervention. This thesis instead turns its attention to the processes of community arts, seeking to understand more about the mechanisms that might lead to the studied health and well-being outcomes. The data were collected over a period of 13 months and includes session plans, videos of sessions, recorded conversations with dancers (participants) and reflections of the dance artist/researcher in both text and movement. The findings chapters reflect the modality of collection: Listening to the dancers talk about the sessions, Watching video recordings of the sessions, Dancing a response to the sessions and the process of researching and Reflecting through writing on the process of being a researcher. Using thematic analysis, both the dancers’ and the dance artist’s experiences were interpreted through a framework highlighting the physical, psychological and dimensions of participation. The dance artist’s experience was additionally organised with respect to the session planning. The use of the creative movement as a thinking process further revealed that there is much in community dance that does not translate to text; bodily held knowledge and experiences do not transpose to language easily. My thesis contributes to the arts and health and gerontology literatures by revealing the care flowing between the participants and the artist in the sessions and the work required of all members of the group to facilitate that 3 care. It also contributes methodologically through the richness uncovered by the multi-sensory methods employed. 4 Acknowledgements The last three years have been an amazing, exciting and emotional journey. I wish to thank anyone and everyone who played a part and, when you treat everything as data, that means I thank everyone I have interacted with in some way in the last three years: you have been the source of something in the pages that follow. I would like to thank my wonderful team of supervisors: Rebecca Lawthom, Laura Brown, Jenny Fisher and Rachel Swindells. You expertly midwifed this research from start to finish and your confidence in me sustained me more than you can ever know. I am forever grateful to all of you. I only made it this far because of my friends and family, both on line and IRL. You encouraged, cajoled and, when required, roughly shoved me through the whole PhD process. Cheers mate, I owe you one. For my husband and my daughters, I am sorry it took so long, yes, we can go out as a family now. Thank you for waiting. I love you. Finally for all my dancers. Thank you for your generosity, your curiosity and indulging all my questions and experiments. You are every page. 5 LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................................... 10 GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................................................. 11 CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................13 1.1 MY STORY ........................................................................................................................................... 13 1.2 BACKGROUND ...................................................................................................................................... 13 1.2.1 Arts funding in the UK .............................................................................................................. 13 1.2.2 Local Authority funding in the UK ............................................................................................ 14 1.3 BEGINNINGS ........................................................................................................................................ 14 1.4 INTRODUCTION TO THE THESIS ................................................................................................................. 16 1.5 BOUNDARIES OF SCOPE .......................................................................................................................... 17 1.6 END NOTES .......................................................................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER 2 - LITERATURE REVIEW .........................................................................................................19 2.1.1 Note about language ............................................................................................................... 19 2.2 AGEING AND FEMINISM.......................................................................................................................... 20 2.3 EMBODIMENT ...................................................................................................................................... 23 2.4 WELL-BEING........................................................................................................................................ 25 2.5 COMMUNITY ....................................................................................................................................... 26 2.5.1 Community arts ....................................................................................................................... 28 2.6 PERFORMATIVITY .................................................................................................................................. 29 2.7 CREATIVITY .......................................................................................................................................... 29 2.8 FACILITATION ....................................................................................................................................... 31 2.8.1 Person Centred Practice ....................................................................................................... 31 2.8.2 Reflective practice ................................................................................................................ 34 2.8.3 Somatic practice ...................................................................................................................... 37 2.9 ARTS AND HEALTH ................................................................................................................................ 37 2.10 RESEARCH AIMS ................................................................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 3 - METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................................43 3.1 EMERGENCE OF A QUESTION, EMERGENCE OF A METHODOLOGY .................................................................... 43 3.2 ETHNOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................... 44 3.3 METHODS ........................................................................................................................................... 50 3.3.1 Performance ethnography ................................................................................................... 50 3.3.2 Institutional ethnography .................................................................................................... 52 3.3.3 Autoethnography ................................................................................................................. 53 3.3.4 Practice led research ............................................................................................................ 54 3.3.5 Entrechat ................................................................................................................................. 54 3.3.5.a Process ..............................................................................................................................................56 6 3.3.6 Matching ways of knowing with findings ................................................................................ 57 3.4 PROCESSES .......................................................................................................................................... 57 3.4.1 Involvement / Contact ............................................................................................................. 58 3.4.2 Recruitment ............................................................................................................................. 58 3.4.3 Running the sessions ...........................................................................................................