Dancing with dementia: citizenship, embodiment and everyday life in the context of long-term care
Despite the critical knowledge base on dance from phenomenological analyses and somatic studies, dance scholarship and practice in the dementia field largely represents a movement towards cognitive science with an emphasis on embodied cognition and psychotherapeutic use of dance. This chapter argues that understanding and fully supporting dance, not as a therapeutic, but rather as a dimension of everyday life, requires a turn to citizenship, specifically to a model that emphasises both embodied selfhood and relationality. The chapter articulates this argument by analysing findings of an ethnographic study of selfhood in Alzheimer’s disease in a Canadian long-term care facility in the context of the relational model of citizenship. Relational citizenship brings a new and critical dimension to understanding self-expression through dance by persons with dementia, while also addressing broader issues of inclusivity and the ethical imperative to fully support dance through institutional policies, structures and practices.