Elevating arts in aged care

Aurelien Scannella has moved onto a new arts venture after his surprise exit from West Australian Ballet at the end of the 2023 season.

Mr Scannella, who was the ballet’s artistic director for more than 10 years, has joined forces with his wife, Sandy Delasalle, and Lisa Purchas to boost access to the arts for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Launched in early August, Ballet 4 Wellbeing aims to deliver ballet-inspired exercise programs using virtual reality to promote dance and movement for this cohort.

The initiative will also be open to residents in aged care facilities and other elderly people within the community.

Ms Purchas has been teaching ballet to people with Alzheimer’s since 2017.

Now, she has combined her experience with Mr Scannella and Ms Delasalle’s vast dance expertise to develop an extensive program incorporating the use of VR.

In conversation with Business News, Ms Purchas said she started investigating ways to mitigate against Alzheimer’s or delay its progression after her mother passed away from the disease in 2016.

From this research, Ms Purchas found that dance was one of the most effective exercise methods to lessen the chances of developing neurodegenerative diseases.

“I discovered there are all these things with what we know innately as dancers: how we’ve been trained to use the body, how we use the brain to keep us balanced, the strength in our upper leg muscles because there’s a direct correlation between upper muscular strength and cognitive health,” Ms Purchas said.

“You can have the APOE4 gene, which means you have a predisposition to get neurodegenerative diseases … but if you adopt these healthy lifestyle choices early enough, there’s a higher probability you won’t develop Alzheimer’s.”

After Ms Purchas joined forces with Mr Scannella and Ms Delasalle, they contacted Ralph Martins and Vicky Vass from the Australian Alzheimer’s Research Association to conduct research on the outcomes experienced by participants.

“That’s so we can do baseline research,” Ms Purchas said.

“[Engaging in arts] is a physical thing, emotional thing, wellbeing thing, but we also want to see if it’s possible to improve memory.”

Last year, Mr Scannella teamed up with Western Australia-based Your World VR, and has now partnered with the company to design virtual ballet classes for Ballet 4 Wellbeing.

Your World VR trialled its VR services over the past three years with palliative care patients at Bethesda Health Care and WA Country Health Service.

“We’ve found the people who had access to that technology were taking less morphine … the level of anxiety went down, everything,” Mr Scannella said.

“For our program, we’ve developed a special library for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

“It’s fifteen-minute experiences of one-on-one [sessions] with a teacher, teaching them … seated ballet movements with music.”

Ms Delasalle said there was a gap in high-quality arts programs for aging Western Australians, particularly in aged care facilities.

“[Arts] brings [residents] to another place and that’s why it’s so important for us to go to the facilities, because they don’t have so much of this experience any more,” she said.

“Dance companies are always looking at themselves performing in hospitals and taking dancers to venues, but they never really think of involving the older or sick people to have this experience.”

Ms Purchas echoed comments by Ms Delasalle, saying the quality of arts programs for older generations needed to be improved.

“The exercise programs they currently run in aged care are quite rudimentary. It’s not artistic,” Ms Purchas said.

Art workshops are held in the Makerspace at the Heritage Collective in Cottesloe. Photo: Jody D’arcy

Aged care provider Curtin Heritage Living is among those organisations to recognise the need for better arts offerings for aged care residents.

It established the Heritage Collective program in March to curate artistic opportunities for those living at its Cottesloe facility.

The program operates within the Makerspace arts building, which was constructed specifically to host visual arts workshops, musical performances and other arts activities.

Curtin Heritage Living general manager community and lifestyle, Pele Reeve, said research was undertaken to determine the best way to utilise the site prior to renovating the heritage-listed building.

“We did a massive amount of community consultation and when we asked, ‘What we can do to enrich your lives?’, they told us they wanted arts and culture programs,” Ms Reeve told Business News.

“In terms of adding to the quality of life for the people we care for, access to arts programs is really difficult in aged care.

“It’s not accessible for people to be part of high-quality workshops and meet great artists and listen to beautiful things.”

Ms Reeve said the Heritage Collective sought to create these opportunities.

“We don’t know anyone else that’s created built form around arts and culture spaces co-located with residential aged care,” she said.

“Just because you need support in your living situation, be it at home or in residential care and independent living community, you should still have access to everything.

“I hope it helps to show other providers it can be done and there’s no magic here, other than being inspired and persistent with it and getting the right team to bring it to fruition.”

Experienced arts professional Ricky Arnold was appointed to lead the Heritage Collective as arts and culture coordinator in February.

Throughout his career, Mr Arnold said, arts programs for people in aged care were often centred around providing arts and performance, rather than encouraging the residents’ participation.

“I think what tends to happen in the arts is people of this age get treated as ticket buyers and consumers only and don’t get included as actual artists,” Mr Arnold told Business News.

“People tend to treat this group as people who need to just be performed to, but not actually engaged in the active production of the work.

“Rather than assuming a workshop is just to have something tactile to do or some kind of entertainment, what we’re doing is approaching our audience knowing they probably have sixty to seventy years’ worth of cultural engagement already.

“What we’re trying to do is engage with the arts and cultural sector as it exists. Reaching out to great organisations like Perth Symphony Orchestra, Indian Ocean Craft Triennial, ARTRAGE, Fringe Festival, really looking at what exists that we can tap into and connect with, but also to [involve] artists people perhaps haven’t engaged with before.”