Episode 71
Is Creative Aging the Cutting Edge of Community Arts?
In this episode international arts and aging leader Dominic Campbell will share his thoughts about some intriguing questions: Can an active creative culture change the scary stories we tell ourselves about getting older? Can large scale festivals help communities find common ground in their work with older citizens? What is creative aging and why is it being embraced by gerontologists, and brain scientists across the planet?
BIO
Dominic Campbell is the originator and co-leader of Creative Aging International. As Ireland's Bealtaine Festival’s Director he steered the festivals growth and expansion over eight years. Formerly an Artistic Director of Ireland’s national celebration, St Patrick’s Festival, he transformed its three shows into ninety within four years growing production and managerial teams alongside the financial support required.
Dominic went on to design and produce national celebrations marking the expansion of European Union in 2004 and Centenary celebrations for James Joyce. For “The Day Of Welcomes” marking EU expansion, he devised and produced 12 simultaneous festivals pairing EU expansion countries with Irish towns and cities engaging 2,500 artists from 32 countries.
He mentored festivals in Wales (Gwanwynn), Scotland (Luminate), and has developed projects with partners in Australia and The Netherlands. In 2012 he established the first global conference on Creativity In Older Age opened by Irish President Michael D Higgins.
In 2016 he became an inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Equity and Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute a project between Trinity College Dublin and University College Southern California an ambitious worldwide program seeking social and public health solutions to reduce the scale and adverse impact of dementia.
Recognized by The Irish Times as one of the top ten key cultural influencers in Ireland he seeks strategic and business partners to develop Creative Aging International.
Notable Mentions
Global Brain Health Institute: The Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) is dedicated to protecting the world’s aging populations from threats to brain health. “We strive to improve brain health for populations across the world, reaching into local communities and across our global network. GBHI brings together a powerful mix of disciplines, professions, backgrounds, skills, perspectives, and approaches to develop new science-based solutions. “
The Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health: The Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health program at GBHI provides innovative training, networking, and support to emerging leaders focused on improving brain health and reducing the impact of dementia in their local communities and on a global scale. It is one of seven global Atlantic Fellows programs to advance fairer, healthier, and more inclusive societies.
Chuck Feeney is an American businessman and philanthropist who made his fortune as a co-founder of the Hong Kong based Duty Free Shoppers Group. He is the founder of The Atlantic Philanthropies, one of the largest private charitable foundations in the world. Feeney gave away his fortune in secret for many years, until a business dispute resulted in his identity being revealed in 1997.[2] Feeney has given away more than $8 billion.[3]
Veronica Rojas: Veronica was a guest on Change the Story / Change the World in April of 2023. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. She has been a Visual Aid Grant recipient and has been nominated to The Eureka Fellowship Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. In 2011 Veronica got the Jerome Caja Terrible Beauty Award. Veronicas’ paintings have been reviewed in Artweek Magazine, Bay Area Express, Metro Active and the TV program Latin Eyes. Currently, Veronica is an Atlantic Fellow for Brain Health and Equity at the Global Brain Health Institute.
Caribbean Carnival: is the term used in the English speaking world for a series of events, held annually throughout almost the whole year in many Caribbean islands and worldwide.[2]
The Caribbean's carnivals have several common themes, all originating from Trinidad and Tobago Carnival also known as the Mother of Carnival , whose popularity and appeal began well before 1846, and gained global recognition in 1881 with the Canboulay Riots in Port Of Spain.[3] #Trinidad Carnival is based on folklore, culture, religion, and tradition (thus relating to the European use of the word, not amusement rides, as the word "carnival" is often used to mean in American English.
St. Patrick's Festival parade in Dublin, Ireland: The iconic National St. Patrick’s Day Parade returns to the streets of Dublin every March 17, with pageants, marching bands and over a million participants. Through contemporary and traditional Irish arts, culture and heritage, the Festival connects families, friends and communities across Ireland, and Ireland’s global tribe of 80 million.
Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis: In economic theory, human decision-making is often modeled as being devoid of emotions, involving only logical reasoning based on cost-benefit calculations.[3] In contrast, the somatic marker hypothesis proposes that emotions play a critical role in the ability to make fast, rational decisions in complex and uncertain situations.[1]
Patients with frontal lobe damage, such as Phineas Gage, provided the first evidence that the frontal lobes were associated with decision-making. Frontal lobe damage, particularly to the vmPFC, results in impaired abilities to organize and plan behavior and learn from previous mistakes, without affecting intellect in terms of working memory, attention, and language comprehension and expression.[4][5]
Bealtaine Festival: Bealtaine is Ireland’s national festival which celebrates the arts and creativity as we age. The festival is run by Age & Opportunity, the leading national development organisation working to enable the best possible quality of life for us all as we age. Age & Opportunity Arts provides opportunities for older people to be more creative more often, to create meaningful participation and representation for all older people in cultural and creative life and to demonstrate and celebrate how our creative potential can improve with age.
Creative Aging International: “Creative Aging International works creatively with companies, organizations and individuals worldwide developing innovative programs tailored to place and bringing together best practice for thought leadership. Our work transforms for the better how we view and approach aging – as individuals, as artists, as companies, as governments and as societies.”
Joseph Beuys, Social Acupuncture/Social Sculpture: Social sculpture is a theory developed by the artist Joseph Beuys in the 1970s based on the concept that everything is art, that every aspect of life could be approached creatively and, as a result, everyone has the potential to be an artist. Social sculpture united Joseph Beuys’s idealistic ideas of a utopian society together with his aesthetic practice. He believed that life is a social sculpture that everyone helps to shape. Many of Beuys’s social sculptures had political and environmental concerns. 7000 Oaks began in 1982 as a five-year project to plant 7000 trees in Kassel in Germany. It raised many questions about city planning, the future of the environment and social structures.
David Slater, that was the founder of a company called Entelechy: David has over 30 years experience of working with arts practice and communities. In the late1970s he was supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation to develop a programme of participatory arts for Plymouth Arts Centre. In the 1980’s he was founder Director of the pioneering Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop developing a large estate based participatory theatre programme with young people and their families in north Southwark. Most recently as Director of Entelechy and guest artistic director of London’s Capital Age Festival he conceived and co-delivered The Big Chair Dance at Southbank Centre. David has considerable experience of working collaboratively with organisations in both the arts, social care and health sectors.
Entelechy Arts Ltd: We produce projects which powerfully test the boundaries between art, creativity, care, wellbeing and community. “We believe in the creative power of the individual, and that everyone should have the opportunity to contribute to the creative life of their local community. This richness in sharing stories and experiences of those who can often feel underrepresented, encourages stronger communities, changes perceptions, and ultimately helps people live healthier, happier and more connected lives.
Creative Brain Week: Creative Brain Week is a Global Brain Health Institute innovation at Trinity College Dublin, presented in association with the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and with support from Creative Ireland and the Atlantic Institute.
Creative Brain Week 2023 – online and in person events which explored and celebrated how brain science and creativity collide to seed new ideas in social development, technology, entrepreneurship, wellbeing and physical, mental and brain health across the life cycle. This annual pioneering event illustrates innovation at the intersection of arts and brain science, including creative approaches to health.
Transcript
Dominic Campbell
[:Why do big celebrations like this persist year after year after year around the world? Can a spectacle like the St. Patrick's Day parade and Festival be more than just a giant yearly party? Can an arts festival actually improve a town, a city, any community?
And more specifically, because we're in the middle of a Change the Story series on arts and aging, could community events like this improve how a community or even an entire country meets the challenges of its rapidly aging population?
Can community arts events and strategies help community clinics, hospitals, social service agencies, senior centers, neighborhood associations, and even funders find common ground in their work with older citizens?
And by the way; What is creative aging and why is it being studied and embraced by public health leaders, gerontologists, and brain scientists across the planet and by big research programs like the Global Brain Health Institute, or GBHI as it's called?
And finally, how is it that artists like our last episode’s guest, Veronica Rojas and this week's guest, Dominic Campbell, have a prominent place at GBHI as Institute fellows?
If these questions pique your interest, have a listen.
This is Change the Story, Change the World, my name is Bill Cleveland.
Part One: Making Things Happen
Dominic, Welcome to the show. Let me begin by asking you to describe what you do, your path in the world.
[:Other times I say, I am a cultural producer. I used to say I'm a creative producer because I produce creative work. But I think I do something a little bit different, partly because I produce many different creative works at one time. But also, it's about the. space between creative projects. So, it's more about the culture, so it's about creating the environment in which ideas can emerge, whether they are creative ideas or strategy ideas or something like a, a social development goal or a changing the perception of people, a reduction of trauma. They're about creating the culture from which things evolve.
[:[00:03:05] DC: So that's Carnival really. So, I, yeah. So how did I come to this work? It’s by a long and meandering road and without a clear plan. And if I think back to what was key one was launched to leave the town that I grew up in quite seriously. So that kind of helped trying to get out.
[:[00:03:24] DC: Uh, I'm born in northern England. I'm born in a place called Crewe, which is a railway town, as in it was built for the railway. So, it has the oldest railway hotel. and I'm built with the sound of trains in my background all the time, which probably explains a lot, but I wanted to leave there. I wanted to go and see the world, but I just wanted to get out of the town.
And that partly led to going to art college. So, I'm still the only person in my family, and there are two generations later to go to third level education. But what I also did was, work with companies who eventually led to me building carnival in London and then Notting Hill, but then also in the Caribbean. And carnival in the Caribbean was transformative. I think, because on the one hand there was this, thing that happens when you, you put on a mask or a hat or a fancy costume and you become something else you're allowed to become something else as an individual.
But there was also seeing what that did across a group of people or a society, and also what that had done over time. So, what I loved about being in the Caribbean, watching Carnival evolve over the weeks and months leading up to it, was that there was a place that you could get involved in this year's carnival, regardless of whether you're rich or poor.
If you wanted to join the fancy people, you could do that. If you were all about your neighborhood, you could do that. If you wanted to make some for your kids, you could do that. If you wanted to protest, you could do that. This extraordinary structure of creativity had evolved in a way that encompassed all of that. And it enabled people to maintain their own mental health. It enabled them to have a say about the world that they found themselves in. It had all sorts of elements of play, and profundity, and creativity and chaos within a very simple structure. And most of what I do in some way draws from Carnival the idea that transformation is possible.
That you can imagine a world that you want to move into, and that something seems to take time.
[:[00:05:58] DC: Yeah, I spend a lot of time watching the results of people hiding away from things they're frightened of, whether that's death, dying, greif and loss cuz of the work I'm doing in the Hospice Foundation, or Alzheimer's because of the work I do in that area, or old age, because of my work in that area. And what I realized was it's as true for adults as it is for small, terrified children.
If you don't look clearly at the thing under the bed or in the wardrobe, you become more frightened of it. So, how do you bring that into the center of your attention. And all of those self-made festivities --- that's what they enable people to do. They enable people to talk about the thing that they're not sure about. They enable them to bring it from the side of their eyes into the front, and they make fun of it, and they bring it down to size and they, it's lots of tricks, and there’s stuff going on in there, and you're doing it with a whole bunch of people at the same time.
So, I think what those type of celebrations can be, is prototypes are the way that people want to live. And you go to a festival to try new food, to try new music --- why not ways that you want to live? Why can't you make a little bit of a temporary utopia, in time, and place. And that's a thing worth getting out to bed to do every day.
[:[00:07:25] DC: Yeah, there's a thing in education that people they just turn away from, not even turn away, they've no interest in education. They're…, It's not even apathy, it's before apathy because there's no sense of what that feels like. No sense of what it feels like to learn. we are feeling machines that think, not thinking machines that feel, say the Damasios.
So, if we can't feel what it's like to flourish, we can't feel what it's like to learn a new thing. We can't feel that enriching. Why would we do that? And so, I think festivals at their best when you get it right. Celebrations --- it could be a bake sale, it could be any, tiny little thing, a birthday party. When they get it right, what they do is allow people to feel different, to feel differently, to sense make, and that plants a seed that you can know what it feels like, so you come back to it. It's a way to navigate where you go next.
[:As is your story, which has many chapters and a lot of interesting characters, but there's one that I think pretty much everyone knows, I believe his name is St. Patrick. My understanding is that there was a time in the 1990s when the St. Patrick's Festival parade in Dublin, Ireland was mainly comprised of Irish American marching bands. But that began to change in 1999 when you took over as the artistic director of the festival. Have I got that right?
[:But I could also commission artists that work with. Young people or old people or ranges of communities from difficult zip codes, and they could dress as kings and queens and they could walk down the street and go, “I have a sense of belonging,” a sense of taking over the city. So, in a way, what I was doing partly knowledgeably was playing with that tradition.
We would play with what the festival did in different parts of the city. So, it… What event would go where, cuz this is a city that's very storied. So, people would, uh, you know, they would talk about a certain part of the city, and you go, “You don't go there. It's a terrible place.” And they may never have been there. But you could put a different kind of event there, or a different kind of celebration, and it would layer story onto place, and it would transform place in exactly the same way as if you wear a mask or a hat, you can become someone else.
And the mental health benefits of that and the societal benefits of that led to all the things that I did consequently. That was St. Patrick's Festival at the time. There was 1.25 million people in a city of 4 million. There was 23 million people watching online before there was an online. So, it was. Broadcast by radio and television, but pre internet, and it was just very intense and extraordinarily exciting. But after a while it just began to feel like scale. And I'm not interested in scale. I'm interested in what that enabled to happen.
[:So, it sounds like you were done with that. So, what ensued post-St. Patrick.
[:So Bealtaine is the Irish word for spring, and it was a festival that was started by, a charity and NGO whose particular interest was, aging populations --- creating the opportunity for older people to be involved in all areas of social culture and political life. And they'd started a festival maybe five or six years before. And it was a little arts festival, and then over eight years I started to play with it and grew it so that by the time I left in 2014, it was three and a half thousand events each year during the month of May.
There would be 750 plus partners, and they would range from medical organizations, GP’s, hospitals, age sector, charities, NGOs, community groups, activists, artists, cultural sectors. So, a whole range of different kinds of organizations would fit within this one receptacle, which was a festival, and what happened between them was really significant. So, we used to think about it, and perhaps the easiest way of thinking about it is it was a festival that could cope with people's different geographies, so, so you could get involved if your geography was the table on your hospital bed, or if you could make it meeting room in the residential care center, or you could make it to the community center, or you were an artist on an international touring circuit.
[:[00:13:26] DC: All of those things would fit into a celebration of creativity as we age and all of those things collectively would be an inquiry or would ask questions about what aging was, who got to express themselves in bliss? Liz Lerman's quote phrase, “what, where, when, and why.” Yeah, how we envisioned a place where successful aging could take part, what that would look like. And from that Irish event there are now 14 similar festivals around the world, and I left that to form Creative Aging International. And, to explore the idea of celebration and strategy really.
But also, to revisit this idea of that, when I started with Bealtaine I fondly imagined that old age was a place of common ground. It was a place where we'd all meet as we got frail and older, we would all meet. And then, that doesn't happen I don't think. Now, I think we get old for different reasons, uh, become challenged by age, depending on how much of a comfort blanket we can make by wealth and by opportunity. And so, once again, I start to find myself thinking about these questions.
I'm really lucky in that what I do is I make things as a way of understanding the world, and I tend to work through celebration or festival or big complicated events. and I usually come back to the same kind of principles and the same kind of strategy.
[:And of course, we all live in societies in the West where the art part of our community life is often given short shrift. So, when the artist says, “I think we've got something quite extraordinary going here,” you get patted on the head and it occurs to me, particularly my interaction with GBHI is that there is now a growing, group of people in neuroscience who are saying, “Boy, are you right?”
The things that happen when we age are very complicated, and in many cases mysterious. But cause effect seems to tell us that what you've been involved in, Dominic, is not a sideshow. It's more and more a central, focus of people in neuroscience and in gerontology who are saying, “Yeah, we've got more and more people that are dealing with issues of aging, and this is a viable, powerful, central resource.” Could you say a bit about that?
[:I wandered in the door because they wanted somebody from the arts and cultural section, and I was really interested in that, and I needed a fellowship. Surprisingly, it was a very nice thing to be able to do, to spend a year or two years as it turned out, thinking.
What also happened was I got to interact with people who were very passionate and committed to their work and would've followed a particular route into a very narrow focus. So, they would be looking at not just the brain, but an area of the brain, and not just an area of brain, but a particular part of the brain and its function and the way that worked. And I got to understand a lot more about the biology and the chemistry and the, but also the tools that people have for making understanding.
So, the skull caps people are familiar with and the big roundie machines that look like Star Wars, but sound like a tractor, the MRI scanners. And to be able to sit in that company was a real privilege because what began to happen is I developed a better understanding of what and how they thought and what they were trying to do. And the pros and cons of that, and they got some sense of mine. So simply being in that kind of collegiate environment was really fantastic. And it did two things. It gave me a better understanding of the limitations of my own practice, but also on the potential of it.
And when you look at a global scale, you realize that in somewhere that doesn't have a high economy or, a highly developed public health service or whatever. Whether that's a market driven one or a state supported one, or an insurance one, those populations will be challenged if people are able to live longer by the diseases of older age or diseases associated with older age. And so, culture and its baby sister, creativity really are really vital, (that’s the) first one.
Second one is in higher income countries where there is such a service, but those services don't necessarily get to the heart of the matter. They are fantastic mending, broken bones. They are brilliant at fixing some things, but they're pretty rubbish at. addressing issues of the spirit and they're really rubbish at dealing with dying and things that can't be fixed. In fact, their whole framework, I'd argue their concepts of what dying is causes them to go into a kind of breakdown. So, an acute service system is all about fixing and maintaining people, keeping people alive.
When people get to the point where staying alive is not the optimal journey of the spirit, I suppose, to use that language, then that system really doesn't know what to do. And the people that are around that individual kind of thing go into shock. The whole system goes into shock. So, hanging out with scientists sent me into this interesting place where I'm now thinking about the life of the spirit, which, I wouldn't have used that language 10 years ago, but it has. And having a better sense of the need for intelligent and compassionate humans of all sorts to try and work together to solve or address or do something, to make better the complicated world in which we now live.
[:[00:21:45] DC: So, Chuck Feeney, who founded Duty Free Shops and whose money founded the Global Brain Health Institute and the Atlantic Fellowship, which is, it's the bigger fellowship. He said this really smart thing. He said, “It's always just people in the room.” Which is a really lovely way of thinking that everything is always just people in the room who gets into that room where the rooms is. That's a question to think about, but most things are sorted out by people.
One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of those scientists, artists, journalists, lawyers, whoever owns up on that fellowship, have some personal motivation. It's their dad who had Alzheimer's, it's their grandmother. It's somebody who's emotionally. It's important to them. And so that means that their emotional journeys are echoing each other. And that's no small thing to think about, what motivates people and what it is that's get them out of bed each morning. So that's a big part of what I think is happening.
Also. We are making things in:Then the third thing that I think is worth bringing into this is, one of the things that I love about working in the arts or being an artist, or whatever I might be at the moment, is that art evolves, it changes shape. The kind of artists that I would be interested in might not make objects. They might be playing with ideas or relationships, or they might be thinking about something like social acupuncture.
Joseph Beuys thought about social acupuncture. What's the thing that you can do that reorganizes the relationship between people or people on planet, or people on planet and place or, can be a mechanic for thinking about materiality and physical experience and spiritual experience and political experience all at the same time. And one of the lovely things about the label artist is it's a passport to go and think on your own.
Or think on your own with other people. I have a friend who's a war artist who was in Afghanistan and was stopped at a checkpoint by I think American or British soldiers. And they said, “What are you doing here?” And he said, “I'm the war artist.” And they went, “Oh, that's okay. Come in.” It's just, “Love the idea that, you're an artist.”
It's like a passport to be curious. it's a kind of permission and that role individually or collectively is really valuable, particularly perhaps at the moment when, you know, when other forms of communication and connection are not really doing their job of connecting, but more doing the job of disrupting and dividing.
[:[00:26:51] DC: And I think at the same time, it's also they are able to convene, so they're able to bring different kinds of people into conversation or into practice with each other.
BC: Yeah.
DC: Yeah,
[:[00:26:52] DC: Hmm. Yeah
[:[00:27:31] DC: We talked a lot about, David Slater, that was the founder of a company called Entelechy in the UK, used to talk about people taking off the suit of the uniform of their job, taking off the carapace of their organization, which is a beautiful way of putting it. And it relates to that observation about many of the artists and scientists that are involved in the Alzheimer's work, they have a personal motivation for it, which is somewhere underneath the organization or the way that they have for thinking. They have an emotional connection with it. So yes, all of those things, it's about not only the individual creative looking differently, but creating the possibility of other people to think and look differently or experience differently, or sensemake, I think is a useful phrase.
[:So, Dominic, what's next?
[:So, everybody's life will at some point have some grief. It's inevitable. there, there's being born and dying. So, at some point they all happen. So, what I've been exploring is what's the role of arts in creative practice within that? And that's taken me back to think about healthcare systems and acute systems.
It's taken me back to think about the long-term impact. I just made a new vehicle for thinking called Creative Brain Week, which brings. Neuroscientists and creatives and all sorts of other people together. We just did, a week where we asked people to think about conflict, imagination, and joy because we started with what we know in Ireland, which is the long term, 40 plus years impact of, of a conflict.
And we know that in terms of mental health, gender-based violence, physical and emotional difficulties. But we also know that in terms of what creative interventions can do or may be able to do. And we are now in a place where we connect both the creative interventions and the research with global communities where people are looking at the results of a hundred years of conflict or being conflicted because of the way that their story is visible or not visible within the environment that they live. So, I think that's beginning to be the next part what I do. and I'm also thinking about the tools. I love this idea where,… I'm very fond of this idea that the vehicle that got you this far might not be the vehicle that gets you to the next bit. And so, part of my answering what next is to think about what I do, and how I do things, and how I might change them. So, it's an interesting time to meet me.
[:[00:31:33] DC: Yeah,
[:[00:31:39] DC: What happens in our brain when we are blind and we can, we develop sensitivity through a stick. So where do we stop? Where does the world start? Um, yeah. And I think that's, it's partly my questions have changed shape because of six or seven years of hanging out with all of these people through this extraordinary and having my own kind of practice alongside it. So, so may we live in interesting times and continue to.
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