Don’t Stop Me Now!
Made By Mortals helps their community support people to live positively with dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairments.
Last year we coproduced an immersive audio case study called ‘Ruby and Dennis’ Story’ as part of our award-winning Hidden programme. Working in partnership with Together Dementia Support and Dementia United we also coproduced a resource with/for people living with dementia and their carers aimed at empowering services, groups, organisations and venues to become more dementia friendly.
“The darkness, the noise, so many steps. The surround sound makes you feel uneasy and claustrophobic.” – One of the group talking about a cinema trip.
A behind-the-scenes video of our over 65s group dancing to the music they coproduced.
Now, in partnership with Guide Bridge Theatre and with generous support from players of The National Lottery we have developed an Immersive Learning Experience that has toured to local venues providing members, volunteers, students, and staff with the information and space they need to make their community more dementia-friendly and most importantly, to actively reach out to more local people living with dementia.
Each Immersive Learning Experience session offered space for people to reflect, improve communication, and build compassion. The workshops challenged participants to consider the thoughts, opinions and experiences of people with lived experience. They also offered people space to test out theory in simulated ‘real-life’ situations. The sessions were facilitated by our specialist facilitators.
Our CEO Paul Hine said-
“For Ruby and Denis episode, we had this starting point of it being a love story about a couple going through a journey that led to them falling back in love post-diagnosis and with the dynamic having changed between them. Like all our work we delivered a series of creative writing/drama and music-making activities that led to a body of experience and imaginative ideas. We used this body of work to cocreate the script and the music with the group- the music plays the role of dementia and love in the piece. In the dementia bits, it cuts out for brief moments representing the gaps in people’s neurological functioning when experiencing dementia. That idea came from someone with dementia (who also loves Oasis)”.
“The generous support of national lottery players has helped more people experience this important piece and has led to people making real changes to support people living with dementia- thank you.”
Our ‘Hidden’ is a series of immersive case studies that challenge the listener to take a walk in someone else’s shoes using their own homes and lives as a theatrical set. Each is coproduced by groups of underserved people using their imaginations and lived experience. Each group collaborate with professional writers, directors, actors and sound engineers to produce their episode. Within each episode the listener meets a fictional character (devised by the group) at a point of crisis and/or transition. Through listening to each episode the listener gets to understand the makers lives as well as the fictional character. The listener is also challenged to reflect on their own situation in relation to the character as well moving around their own homes and speaking out loud. The listener’s experience is heightened further using music and sounds also coproduced by the group. The aim of each piece is to move the listener into a place of compassion, connection and openness and then challenge them to help the character.
