Rosetta Life will present Stroke Odysseys, the culmination of a three-year arts and health research project involving choreographer Ben Duke, composer Orlando Gough, health professionals and survivors of traumatic brain injury.
The movement and song project will be performed by professional musicians, singers and dancers with stroke survivors, accompanied by a panel discussion with dancers, musicians, neurologists and neuroscientists to explore what impact the act of storytelling through dance and song may have on the brain’s ability to heal itself.
Following two performances at The Place in May, Stroke Odysseys will tour in October and November.
The project is a partnership between health professionals and artists to help people with an altered capacity to move, speak and express themselves, who often are suffering from severe depression or anxiety. The Place supported research and a pilot programme, Remembering Who I Am, at National Hospital for Neurology and Neurological Surgery in 2012. Stroke Odysseys is being developed to be widely replicated and used.
Lucinda Jarrett, who leads the project, said, "we are proud of the creative confidence and skills of our Stroke Ambassadors, who have been trained to become advocates for life after stroke through public performance.
"Drawn from their stories, this Stroke Odysseys show explores the brain's capacity to keep learning after stroke damage and challenges conventional wisdom about the lack of plasticity in adult and ageing brains."
Choreographer Ben Duke said, “as in all of my work I am interested in how to bring the stories of the people I am working with onto the stage. This may or may not involve a literal telling of their story, but it will involve a searching for what the stories are that define us, and how do we find a way to share those stories so that other people will really hear them.
"For people who have suffered a stroke, the process of absorbing that identity of stroke survivor into their existing sense of self is obviously a complicated one and my interest is in how to present this journey as a moving and entertaining piece of dance theatre.
"The piece will follow very loosely the idea of an odyssey and will look at how any sense of a destination, of arriving at an identity, is an illusion and that we are all constantly moving. The show is about the very human struggle to understand who we are, and whether as we lose bits of ourselves the answer to that questions seems closer or further away.”