The Middletown-based theater company ARTFARM and Middlesex
Community College will be co-sponsoring a “Symposium on the Arts and Aging” on
Friday, November 7 at the Community College. The event, which will run 2:30 –
6:30 pm, is free and open to the public.
The keynote speaker at the Symposium is Dr. Bernie Siegel,
author of the best-selling book “Love, Medicine and Miracles”. His talk is
entitled “Grow Young With Me.” Bernie is globally influential on the use of
painting and visualization in the treatment of cancer patients. In 2011 he was
honored by the Watkins Review of London as one of the top twenty Spiritually
Influential Living People on the Planet. Bernie is an iconoclast who will be
certain to challenge the assumptions of everyone in the room about how the arts
can play a role in the lives of aging people and their caregivers.
Dr. Bernie Siegel
The afternoon will continue with a session of workshops,
followed by a Panel Discussion with artists and scientists on the effects of
aging on artists and the benefits of the arts to the aging.
Workshops will include “Memoir Writing” with writer and
teacher Sari Rosenblatt, and “Sharpening the Aging Brain” with actor,
storyteller and teacher John Basinger. Symposium participants will have the
choice of attending one of the two workshops.
Sari currently teaches fiction writing at the Educational
Center for the Arts in New Haven, CT.
Her work has been published in many literary journals and received many
prestigious fiction prizes. She has taught at the University of Iowa, Green
Street Arts Center, as well as memoir writing at the Continuing Studies Program
at Wesleyan.
John, who is eighty years old, played the title role in
ARTFARM’s production of King Lear this
summer. He is Professor Emeritus of Theater and Sign Language at Three Rivers
Community College, has appeared in many films and was a long-time performer
with the National Theater of the Deaf. John
has memorized and performs Milton’s Paradise
Lost in its entirety, and uses physical and mental memorization techniques to
keep his aging brain sharp.
The Panel, which will be moderated by Judith Felton, MxCC
Professor and Coordinator of the Human Services Program at the College, will
bring together artists, scholars and scientists to investigate the Arts and
Aging. The audience will be invited to engage in an active dialog with the
panelists, and the Symposium will culminate in a wide-ranging community
discussion on how aging effects artistic people, how creativity and artistic
expression can serve as antidotes to depression, loneliness, memory loss and
other challenges of aging, and how the arts can serve as tools for persons
working with aging populations.
Panelists include Neely Bruce, composer, pianist and
Wesleyan University Music Professor; Donna Fedus, Gerontologist and Coordinator of Elder Programs at The
Consultation Center, Yale University School of Medicine; Carolyn Kirsch, actor,
director and former Broadway performer; Carlos Hernandez-Chavez, a painter,
musician, and Arts and Humanities Policy Development Consultant; and Wendy
Black-Nasta, founder of Artists for World Peace
The afternoon will end with light refreshments and an
opportunity to network informally with panelists, presenters and other
attendees.
ARTFARM is a Middletown-based non-profit which cultivates
high-quality theater with a commitment to simple living, environmental
sustainability and social justice. Since 2006 ARTFARM has been presenting
professional Shakespeare in the Grove on
the MxCC campus each summer. The “Symposium on the Arts and Aging” is the
culminating event of “The Lear Project”, a series of public talks and events
around Aging held in association with this summer’s production of King Lear.
The Symposium will be held in Room 808 in Chapman Hall at
Middlesex Community College, 100 Training Hill Road, Middletown. The event is
free and open to the public, but participants are asked to pre-register by
emailing info@art-farm.org.
This Symposium is intended for artists,
students, caregivers and anyone coping with the challenges of getting older.
For more information, write info@art-farm.org, visit www.art-farm.org,
or call (860) 346-4390.
Photo below by Bill Dekine shows John Basinger as Lear and Marcella Trowbridge as Cordelia in ARTFARM's July, 2014 production of King Lear.
ArtFarm has put together an amazing opportunity. My suspicion is that this event will be filled to overflowing and will need to move to the largest space MXCC has. Sign up so they are prepared for the invasion of not only average citizens but also with professionals who work with the aging population and are alway on the look out for new and creative opportunities to bring joy into the lives of those who came before us.
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