TimeSlips: Creative Engagement in Dementia Care
A Workshop with Anne Basting
Saturday, February 23, 2019, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

ADMISSION:
Admission is free. Reservations required. RSVP beginning Friday, January 25, at 9 a.m.

USC Students, Staff, and Faculty: RSVP
USC Alumni: RSVP
General Public: RSVP

DESCRIPTION:
Consider age and memory loss in a new light in an interactive workshop with MacArthur Fellow Anne Basting, a theatre artist and educator who has developed an alternative concept of aging, one that focuses on its possibilities as well as its challenges, and that understands art and emotional connection as critical to our well-being as we age. Basting's workshop offers ways to engage meaningfully with family, friends, neighbors, and others experiencing memory loss. Our impulse is to repair memory. But if we can learn to shift slightly, from the pressure to remember toward the freedom of imagination, we can find meaningful connection through shared imagination.

Anne Basting is the author of Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia and The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Basting has written and/or produced nearly a dozen plays and public performances, including Slightly Bigger Women and Finding Penelope, a play inspired by a year of intergenerational conversations about the myth of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, and professionally staged at a long-term-care facility. Her latest book, The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care, co-edited with Maureen Towey and Ellie Rose, tells the story of that remarkable collaboration. Basting is also the founder and president of the award-winning nonprofit TimeSlips Creative Storytelling, which brings meaning back into the lives of elders with dementia. 

Additional Links:
Anne Basting | MacArthur Fellow profile, Wikipedia
NPR: “Theater Artist Anne Basting Named MacArthur Fellow” (Audio)

Related Event:
Enchanting Aging: Inspiring Awe and Meaning in Late Life
An Evening with Anne Basting
Wednesday, February 27, 2019, at 7 p.m.
Gerontology 124
For more info, click here.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Organized by the USC School of Dramatic Arts. Co-sponsored by the USC School of Gerontology.