Memory Arts Cafe

Memory Arts Café is a new series of free art events for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, their caregivers and the general public and is co-produced by New York Memory Center and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. The series, which takes place on the 2nd Wednesday of each month, includes light refreshments and the opportunity to chat with the guest artists.

This Memory Arts Café event will feature dancer Heidi Latsky in performance and she will lead the audience in the creation of a new dance. Poet Gary Glazner will host the event.

Wednesday, July 11 at 6 pm New York Memory Center 199 14th Street at 4th Avenue • Brooklyn, NY 11215 (Take the R to Prospect Ave.) For info: call (718) 499-7701 or visit alzpoetry.com

"Latsky asks us to look at people for what they are capable of, rather than what they can't do." - The Washington Post

"Latsky…diminutive vessel of energy, concentration, and passion- personifies that state every dancer aspires to-in which intent and execution are one." -The Village Voice

About the performer: HEIDI LATSKY the Artistic Director of Heidi Latsky Dance has been a moving force in the dance world for many years, as a choreographer for stage, theater and film. Latsky initially received recognition as a celebrated principal dancer for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance. In addition to creating more than fifteen works for Heidi Latsky Dance, Latsky has been commissioned to create new work by the Cannes International Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, the Joyce Theater: Altogether Different Festival, Performance Space 122, 92nd Street Y, Alvin Ailey Dance Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Heidi Latsky Dance was a recipient of a 2006 rehearsal residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and a residency at the Abrons Arts Center, 2009 where GIMP premiered. Latsky is an innovator in disability arts. Her piece GIMP features four trained dancers and four performers who have physical disabilities. It turns on its head accepted notions of dance, performance and body image. Latsky and company have created a piece of work that is a natural and completely unique vehicle for dialogue, increased understanding and civic engagement.

Faulty Wiring

Faulty Wiring
Bob MacLaughlin

Their smiles shatter
and they utter that pitying "ohhh..."
when I tell them

Pop has Alzheimer's
as if he's afflicted with tragedy
not just faulty wiring

as if there's no way he and I
could have laughed our guts out
the other day when we heard

that giant clunking noise
and he jammed the brakes on,
bellowing,

"What the hell was that?!"
and I got out to look up and down
the street but found nothing

until I caught his cane in the act
of running away again, it having slid
down from moon roof

and hooked itself around the ham radio
antenna on the trunk, wagging
like the tail of a mischievous dog.

More info on Faulty Wiring at Moon Pie Press

Link to an interview with MacLaughlin on WABI

MacLaughlin wrote Faulty Wiring in tribute to his father Wilson Furness "Bud" MacLaughlin.

In addition to writing poetry, MacLaughlin has been a newspaper sportswriter, magazine editor, and advertising copywriter for print and broadcast. He once wrote a column decrying the outrageously high price of ringside Ali-Frazier tickets ($25). He likes writing poems because you can make up whatever you want, and you don't have to worry about deadlines (unless you agree to a book) or pleasing your client's relatives. Bob has lived fulltime in midcoast Maine since 1979 and aspires to be a native.

Memory Arts Café

New York Memory Center & Alzheimer’s Poetry Project Launch

New York State’s First Memory Arts Café

Memory Arts Café is a new series of free art events for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, their caregivers and the general public, and is co-produced by New York Memory Center and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. The series takes place on the 2nd Wednesday of each month and includes light refreshments and the opportunity to chat with the guest artists. 

Wednesday, June 13 at 6 pm

New York Memory Center

199 14th Street at 4^th Avenue • Brooklyn, NY 11215

(Take the R to Prospect Ave.)

For info: call (718) 499-7701 or visit alzpoetry.com

About the performers:

Legendary jazz critic, Nat Hentoff, has praised Roger’s work as "the most joyously encouraging way of expanding the audience for jazz."  In partnership with the NYC Alzheimer Association Chapter and jazz singer, Peter Eldridge, Ms. Rogers has produced two Alzheimer's benefit concerts entitled “For Those We Love.” (louiserogers.org)

The Boston Globe wrote of pianist, composer, educator, and bandleader Mark Kross "Kross digs hard with a bright contemporary piano style with Monkish bop influences.” He is the Head of the Music Department at the Middlesex School, an independent high school in Concord, MA and has released five CD’s with his band, The Mark Kross Five-Piece Trio.

About the producers:
Founded in 1983, the mission of New York Memory Center is to help older adults who have cognitive, physical, and emotional limitations, to maintain or improve their level of functioning so that they may enjoy their later years at home and within the community. Through an innovative wellness center, New York Memory Center meets the needs of individuals living with Alzheimer’s and related dementia disorders and their Caregivers. NYMC offers two primary programs: Lotus Club, an early intervention and support program for those experiencing the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s and related dementias; and Memory Life Services, a program which provides more extensive services suitable for adults in the community with middle to later stage memory loss. For additional information, please visit nymemorycenter.org.

Gary Glazner founded the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (APP) in 2004. The APP was awarded the 2012 MetLife Foundation Creativity and Aging in America Leadership Award in the category of Community Engagement. The National Endowment for the Arts listed the APP as a “best practice” for their Arts and Aging initiative. NBC's “Today” show, NPR's “All Things Considered” and Voice of America have featured segments on the APP.

New York Times on Frontotemporal Dementia

Powerful article in the New York Times by Denise Grady on Frontotemporal Dementia. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/health/a-rare-form-of-dementia-tests-a-vow-of-for-better-for-worse.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp.

The photograph is by Béatrice de Géa.
The video that accompanies the writing is amazing, with strong graphic shots of the couple featured in the article. Hearing their voices is heartbreaking.
The harrowing piece ends with an ee cummings  poem that the couple shares:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

The Thing About Life

The Thing About Life

Elizabeth Raby

 

It's a strange thing about life--

how we want it, no matter what--

the cane, the hearing aid,

the oxygen pulled along behind us

like a grocery cart, which, of course,

it sort of is, feeding us our necessaries.

For the fortunate, the brain continues to function

at more or less its accustomed pace--

a little clog, a blockage here and there,

but we manage to work around them,

process and produce.  Through

my thicker lenses, around my

growing cataracts, I still am able to see

the hummingbird, iridescent green speck

riding purple-leaved branch of the plum tree

in early morning breeze. Behind them
 once again the sun clears the mountain.

Elizabeth Raby has been a poet in the schools for the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the New Jersey Council of the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She taught poetry writing at Muhlenberg College.  Raby represented the Teachers for Tomorrow program as an English Teacher in Deva, Romania.  Her publications include The Hard Scent of Peonies, Jasper Press, Camphorwood, Nightshade Press, and Ten Degrees Above Zero, Jasper Press. She has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2001 where she and her husband run a monthly open poetry reading.  Raby is a member of the board of New Mexico Literary Arts and a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
More on Raby's books and poetry from Visual Artists Collective

Poetry at MoMA

Picasso! Rousseau! Van Gogh! This "art cheer," celebrates the 3 artists highlighted during the Dec. 13th, 2011, session of Meet Me at MoMA. The session was co-lead by Francesca Rosenberg, Director of Community and Access Programs and APP director Gary Glazner. More on Meet Me at MoMA at: http://www.moma.org/meetme/index

APP in the News