DANCE FOR CONNECTION
Dance for Connection facilitates joyous expressive dance groups for people with dementia at memory care residences and memory cafés and individual hourly sessions in people’s homes in the Greater Boston area. With decades of experience, our teacher trainings, workshops, keynote addresses, and professional articles refute the tragic perspective of a dementia diagnosis, replacing it instead with a story of beauty, joy, and love - the gifts shared in a spontaneously created community.
As we move to irresistible music, in our seats and on our feet, our hour-long dance programs inspire vitality, while also enhancing neuroplasticity, even in people who appear apathetic and disengaged.
It was to reduce the feeling of isolation and loneliness that people with dementia experience, replacing it with a sense of belonging that motivated Donna Newman-Bluestein to create the Octaband®. It turns out to do the same for people of all ages and abilities.
Dementia Spring interview of Featured Artist Dec 2, 2021
Donna Shares why dance is so important for people with dementiA...
"Dance/movement therapy is primarily about forging a healing relationship where movement and dance are the media, just as words are the medium in verbal psychotherapy... We pay honor when we dance with {people with dementia], when we relate to them in an embodied way, when we attempt to understand their nonverbal communication. When we dance with them, we invite them to be in their bodies, to savor the sensations and experience of vitality, now, in their last days, while they still have bodies."
- Donna Newman-Bluestein