I am heading to London this afternoon, to spend a couple of days checking out galleries and having a bit of a mooch. I will be taking things steady given that yesterday afternoon found me at the hospital having a small cervical biopsy due to some dodgy looking cells that the doctors have found. The procedure is a total trauma that leaves me feeling faint and delicate. None the less when I wondered out of the hospital after treatment yesterday I had to stop and think…… what would I do if the worst happened and these dodgy cells did become cancerous? Suddenly life seems a little more urgent and a lot more precious.
I met an amazing artist on Friday who felt like a real embodiment of some kind of wonderful life force and someone I could instantly admire. Being somewhere over 50 (!) Bisakha Sarker of dance company Chaturangan http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ef/Bisakha/ is still dancing, programming and cooking with a fervor would put most of us younger artists to shame! She has proposed to host an event at the Bluecoat in December called Memory and Meaning : On Dance and Dementia. Dementia is a subject that sits very close to my heart, given that both of my Grandmothers developed it in the latter years of life. What I remember from that period of time was the strain not only on my Grandmothers but on the families around them: on my parents and even on myself at a small age. Bisakha’s conference programming seems progressive and interesting both in it’s structure and content and in the way that she wants to consider how the arts might be used to offer support to the families of dementia suffers as well as the patients directly.
I am hoping to work with her quite closely on the conference as I believe it will help invigorate this Group Therapy project, which I have not really got my teeth into as quickly as I would have liked! A period of intensive research and consideration of a strategy for approaching a couple of mental health charities is needed when I return from my London trip. HOWEVER…. today is my birthday and I am off to pack my case and go outside into the sunshine. Maybe with a slightly new outlook on life……
