The initial icebreaker I have the participants do some of the “
Asobi-litation
” (recreation (
asobi
in Japanese) that can have a rehabilitative effect). One of these is a kind of recreation called “The Shogun Game.” In it, we give the numbers 1, 2 and 3 to different parts of the body, and when the leader, the Shogun, calls out a number, you quickly point to that part of your body. First, we have them point to the parts of their own body, but then, next we have them point to the same part on another person’s body, and when it changes like that they start to make mistakes in their pointing rather frequently. The game is fun because you make mistakes, and when someone makes a mistake everyone laughs or calls out, so everyone begins to get involved in the fun. In other words, not being able to do something properly can then become fun and something positive instead of negative. In the society we live in, when someone can’t do something properly they have to feel bad about it and feel that they must make the effort to learn to do it right. But in recreation we are freed from that pressure, and because of our human nature we can laugh at ourselves and enjoy mistakes.
The elderly with dementia or with disabilities are people who gradually become incapable of doing a lot of things. But I believe that the way a person ages will be very different depending on whether they despise their own growing disabilities or whether they laugh and accept them as inevitable results of being human. Of course, I also believe that the atmosphere of the caregiving workplace can depend greatly on the values and approach that the caregivers bring to their interaction with the elderly. So, this icebreaker that I use in my workshops is intended to give the participants an experience of not worrying what a person can and can’t do and to focus on enjoying the moment fully in the spirit of recreation.
After that, we next do a theater game using physical movement to communicate with others. Often when we are doing when we are doing ‘
Asobilitation
’ games, the families of the elderly will say they don’t want us to treat their grandfathers like a child, but even with simple games, changing the rules will increase the difficulty and the elderly will really begin to enjoy being involved in the lively interaction. Even some of them who say they won’t do such a game, eventually get into it and become absorbed in the game and enjoy it. In short, physical recreation isn’t a privilege of children only, it is something that adults can enjoy too. The essence of theater is using the body with enjoyment to communicate with others, so that is what I want our workshop participants to experience.
Finally, I get them to think about “Senility and Acting.” Most of the participants are people with no experience in theater-making, but everyone has experience of acting in daily life. That form of acting that everyone experiences is, in short, ‘telling lies.’ For example, you may come home after buying something expensive and you are criticized for it, so you tell a little lie: “I bought it because it was on sale, so it was not expensive at all. This is a form of acting. Also, police have to act like police and parents like parents, etc., and these are cases where our social status can require an ability to ‘act’ appropriately. So, in our daily lives we are in fact playing several roles.
Now, how does this reflect in the caregiving workplace? In the hallways of a home for the elderly, you may pass an elderly woman with dementia and she will say something to you like, “Oh, the glasses shop man.” Normally, you would reply, “No, I’m not the glasses shop man, I’m staff member of this home.” But, I think it can also be important at a moment like this for you to become an actor instead of a caregiver, so you can avoid negating the old woman’s statement and play the role: “Yes, it’s me, the glasses shop man.” So, I have the workshop participants break up into pairs, with one playing the caregiver and the other playing the elderly person, and then have them act out a scene in which the caregiver doesn’t negate a statement that comes out of context but instead accepts it and plays (acts) along to see how well they can carry on a conversation from there.
I watched one of your workshops and I saw that it takes quite a bit of imagination to carry on a conversation after accepting (instead of negating) the disoriented (out of context) statement by the elderly person, and it made me wonder if it is really OK to accept it.
In fact, when I was in high school, my grandmother was living with us, and that was a problem I actually had to deal with. My grandfather had died and she had lived alone for about seven or eight years, but when she got too old to live alone she came to live with us. One day, there was a croquette on the table and when I ate it, my grandmother said, “Oh, too bad, I was going to give it to the person living in the chest of drawers.” It was a moment caused by dementia. At that moment, I struggled with the question of whether I should correct her and say, “No one could be living in the chest of drawers,” or to go along with her and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I ate it. Let’s give something else to the person in the chest of drawers.” I wondered whether I should correct her in hopes that she would return to her normal sound self, and if I accepted what she had said then might encourage her to keep going off into that disoriented world. In the end I decided to correct her, and I didn’t know if I had done the right thing.
When I began working as a professional caregiver and was constantly involved with many elderly people, I found that it seemed better to accept their dementia. I felt that if you keep correcting their dementia-based mistakes and conduct, it will never be a happy situation for either the caregiver or the senile. If you try to win the argument, neither of you will feel good about the exchange, but if you accept the statement that there is someone living in the chest of drawers it may develop into a scene where you have to go together to look in the chest of drawers. If we wanted to have my grandmother keep her happy attitude, perhaps the people around her had to think some more about the kind of environment they created for her. Thinking back now, I feel that we should have done a bit more to change the environment for her.
So, being able to play a role at times like an actor could have changed the environment in a way that made it easier for her to live in comfort, is it?
Perhaps it would have. When you study about dementia, you learn that there are a set of unavoidable central symptoms in Alzheimer type dementia (memory disturbance, orientation disturbance, disturbance in reasoning capacity) that make the gradual increase in the number of strange statements or actions and small mistakes unavoidable. And if you keep trying to correct these each time, you are going to hurt the feelings of the person with dementia. Because even if they don’t respond to theory or reason, their feelings are still in tact and vulnerable.
This is why it is often said that when dealing with elderly people suffering from dementia it is unproductive to resort to theory or reason in the things you say to them but rather to try to communicate on an emotional level with positive feelings. This means that we have to accept things that are considered wrong in terms of normal common sense, and at times we have to pretend to see things that aren’t there. In other words we should respect the world that they see. And to do that, I realized, we have to be able to act [in the way an actor does].
After encountering the theme of “Aging and Dementia” and your worldview changed with the experience of working at a home for the elderly, what kind of theater do you want to make now with the elderly?
The strongest feeling I had after encountering this theme of Aging and Dementia was the change in my view of uphill climbs and downhill descents. I feel that until now, through school and then as working people in society, there has been a demand for us to keep growing. We are all living amid the pressure to grow and improve what we do to today compared to yesterday and the seek higher achievement tomorrow than what we did today. But when you are at a home for the elderly, you are freed of that value system. The elderly continue the descent of the aging process, and that becomes the norm. It was a refreshingly new system of values for me. When I began working at a home for the elderly where there was no pressure to keep growing and improving, I felt something very comfortable about it.
The caregivers are bustling about doing their jobs, but the elderly are at ease and relaxed living the ‘slow life.’ They wake up in the morning and eat their meals and take their baths and then go to sleep at night, and that is repeated day after day. At first I wonder if it was alright for things to simply go on like that day after day, but soon I realized that there were good aspects to it as well. You can find joy in these simple aspects of daily life like eating meals and taking baths and enjoy living for the moment. When I was involved in theater-making in Tokyo, I didn’t even want to spend time cooking meals, so I just ate whatever was at hand, so I had no sense of enjoying aspects of daily life. But at the home for the elderly, there are people there who can’t even have meals without someone there to help them. In that situation, the important thing becomes how to make the mealtime experience as enjoyable as possible for them, and for me this brought a big realization about the importance of these basic acts of daily life and doing them properly. And it is these joys of daily life that I want to express in theater now.
Oriza [Hirata] san taught me that you can bring more out of individuals by improving the environment they are surrounded with and acting in, and another valuable lesson I learn was the importance of valuing the individual’s personal history. If there is a person who has always spoken in a quiet voice, there is no need at all to use theater workshops to get them to speak in a loud voice. If they have always lived using a small voice until now, we can think of a dramatic context that skillfully makes use of that small voice. This valuing of the individual’s personal history is an important part of my Aging and Theater program for me. So, next I want to make a play based on the life experiences of my friend Oka-jii (laughs).
Profile
Naoki Sugawara
Born 1983. Actor, certified welfare caregiver. After attending a workshop sponsored by Oriza Hirata during high school, Sugawara continued on to Obirin University where Hirata was professor. A member of Hirata’s Seinendan Theater Company since 2010, Sugawara pursued a career in theater while working as a certified caregiver at a special-needs nursing home for the elderly. He moved to Wake city, Okayama Prefecture, in September of 2013 following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. There, he found a natural affinity between acting and caregiving and founded the theater unit OiBokkeShi and began a “Aging and Theater Workshop” program. With one of his workshop participants, an 88-year-old man named Tadao Okada, as the lead actor, OiBokkeShi held its first performance in 2015 with a self-termed “Wandering Senility Theater” play titled “ Yomichi ni Hi wa Kurenai ” (The day never ends on a nighttime road) set in the street of shops in front of Wake city train station. Since then Sugawara has held his Aging and Theater Workshops around the country promoting the concept of “bringing the knowledge of theater to care-giving, bringing the depth of caregiving knowledge to theater studio.” The works that OiBokkeShi has presented on the stage until now include Rojin High School (High School for the Elderly) (2015), BPSD: Boku no Papa wa Samurai Dakara (BPSD: Since my father is a Samurai) (2016), and Cameraman no Hentai (Perverted photographer) (2017). In 2017, Sugawara moved his base of operations to the town of Nagicho, Okayama Prefecture and began activities with the town to connect theater-making to the issues of the community as the Nagicho Art Design Director. A television documentary program focusing on his activities titled “ Yomichi ni Hi wa Kurenai : the challenge of a young actor/caregiver” won the 24th FNS Documentary Award for Best Documentary.
OiBokkeShi site (Japanese only)
http://oibokkeshi.net/
(*) Haruki Miyoshi
Born 1950. President of the Life and Rehabilitation Research Institute. An expert in the field of caregiving and rehabilitation. An advocate of placing importance on basic human values in the work of caregiving, Miyoshi gives “Life and Rehabilitation” lectures around the country to communicate the importance of bringing imagination to the work of caregiving for the elderly. He has pioneered a new wave of welfare caregiving by starting such programs as The Society for the Study of Removing [elderly] Diapers and The Society for the Study of Removing [intravenous, urinal] Tubes. Author of numerous book such as Kaigo no Susume! – Kibo to Sozo no Rojin Care no Nyumon (2016).
Cameraman no Hentai
(performance at Mimasaka Town, Okayama pref)
(Jan. 2018 at special-needs nursing home Keiryuso)
Photo: hi foo farm
“Wandering Senility Theater”
Yomichi ni Hi wa Kurenai
(Jan. – Mar. 2015 at Wake town eki-mae shōtengai)