What a relief it is when you find you actually get on with and feel excited and inspired by a whole creative team!
The four of us hadn’t been in a room together before Monday, but our paths kept crossing over the past 4 years, and with an ambitious idea to create an opera-ballet with and for people with Parkinson’s, it seemed to be the perfect time to get into the same room at the same time to see what might happen.
We knew from the very first conversations that something had drawn us together and quickly identified our shared values uniting us on this process, and the principles we envisage will form the bedrock for our collaborative and creative relationships with each other and the performers:
Challenge, Creativity, Collaboration, Quality, Artistry, Radical, Voice, Equality and Empathy.
My draw to this project was the vision, and the vision was to challenge; for me, that was to challenge my own artistic practice, to challenge the current methods in Dance for Parkinson’s which largely see benefits in being physical for the symptoms of Parkinson’s but are yet to acknowledge the benefits of creative empowerment and engagement through movement, and challenging expectations of what might be possible. So far, it seems the sky is not even our limit!
Sarah Lewis