On Thursday, Sept. 26th at 6:30 the Forest Lodge Library and presenter Sarah Boles invite you to attend a screening of the 2014 documentary, Capturing Grace.
“There are no patients. There are only dancers.” Back in 2001 in Brooklyn, NY a team of professional dancers from the Mark Morris Group teamed up with a group of people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and began to work on developing a program that would integrate movement and cognitive strategies, improve balance, restore confidence in motion and also be fun! This evolved into Dance for PD®. The Mark Morris Dance Group created a training program for teachers and took the idea with them to the cities they toured. The program has served as a model and inspiration for others all over the world and has demonstrated that it offers benefits to anyone who may be experiencing limited mobility.
Filmmaker Dave Iverson, himself diagnosed with Parkinson’s, first learned about this intersectionality of dance and infirmity when he was creating a film about Parkinson’s for the PBS Frontline program. He felt it was an important story that needed to be told and Capturing Grace is the result. The filmmaker says, on the website capturinggracefilm.com, “This is a film about rediscovery, the rediscovery of a lighter step and the sweetness of motion. Ant it’s a story about a remarkable community of dancers—some professional, some not—but all coming together to move in space…and in doing so, rediscovering grace. And it is in that rediscovery that each becomes whole.”
After seeing this film, Chequamegon Bay’s Mary Rewalt was inspired to start a dance group called “Rhythm and Moves.” Cable/Namakagon’s Sarah Boles is part of this group and wants to bring the inspirational message of this film and this program to our community. This evening will be to share information and gauge interest, but, it is hoped that we may be able to establish a group to practice this program in Cable/Namakagon. On 9/26 we will view the documentary and Sarah will lead those in attendance through a seated exercise called Brain Dance. The Brain Dance is a series of exercises, comprised of eight developmental movement patterns that healthy human beings naturally move through in the first year of life. Repeating these patterns over time may help us fill in any missing gaps in our neurological system. It is a centering body/brain movement tool for brain reorganization.
