Making Home Work: Theatre-making with Older Adults in Residential Care

Abstract

The paper reflects on the significance of artistic practice with older adults in residential care settings, asking what ‘home’ means to residents living with dementia. To consider how cultural stereotypes of ageing as narratives of loss and decline might be challenged, this paper draws on a recent production On Ageing that was staged at the Young Vic Theatre in London. This play dramatised gerontologist Tom Kirkwood's view that ageing is not a process of deterioration but accumulation, which determines how the body ages physically. Socially, we also accumulate ‘stuff’ as we grow older and home is often defined by the emotional significance of possessions. So what happens when, in old age, people's physical space shrinks?. The research draws on the principles of person-centred care and non-humanist theories of materiality to debate how home is constructed through the imagination and in the material, spatial and temporal practices of everyday life. In considering how and why creative activity with older adults can help to change a residential care home from an institution to a domestic space, it suggests that the arts have a significant role to play in end of life care.