S5E5
· 42:58
Hello everyone and welcome to season five of Public Health Disrupted. I'm Rochelle Burgess and my regular co host in Awesomeness Zand is not with us today. So I will go ahead and say a lot more than I usually do to kick us off. I'm a community health psychologist and professor of global mental health and social justice at the UCL Institute for Global Health. This podcast is about public health, but more importantly, it's about the systems that need disrupting to make public health better.
Rochelle:Join us each month as we challenge the status quo of the public health field, asking what needs to change, why and how to get there. And in this episode we'll be exploring what it means to age playfully and why that is so important. And I'm really looking forward to this as sort of the resident hippie in charge in the podcast. Very much feel that you know, play and joy and creativity is so important to everything we do. So really looking forward to this conversation today where both our guests will help us challenge the dominant narratives of aging and think about creativity, joy and connection and how crucial they are in later life.
Rochelle:We'll delve into the power of play as a public health intervention, one that is often overlooked but can be deeply transformative. From the research behind aging well to clowning in care homes, this episode invites us all to rethink what it means to grow older. Our first guest today is Rachel Cullars. Rachel is a professional performer and works as an elderflower for the charity Hearts and Minds. The elderflowers are an extended family of healthcare clowns who visit people living with dementia in hospitals and care homes across Scotland.
Rochelle:Healthcare clowns are experts in interaction. Elderflowers work in partnership with healthcare staff and visit people with an early onset dementia diagnosis through to people in end of life care. And our guests from UCL this episode, we are so delighted to welcome Doctor. Kerry Ryan, who I know from another life in our editorial life. Kerry is a lecturer in creative health in the UCL Department of Arts and Sciences.
Rochelle:She's a fantastic anthropologist whose work focuses on the broad themes of aging, care and play. Her academic research is inspired by her experience working as an activity director in US retirement communities and nursing homes, where she discovered the importance and power of bingo and other forms of play in older people's lives. To inspire future research on the neglected topic of play in old age, in 2021, Keri founded the global cross sector multidisciplinary network, Aging Playfully. Keri is currently writing a book about her experience living in a Los Angeles continuing care retirement community for a year as part of her PhD research. Welcome Rachel and Carrie, and thank you both so much for joining us on Public Health Disrupted.
Rochelle:Carrie, I wanna start with you. Do you think you could start us off by helping us understand why we tend to
Carrie:only associate play with childhood and what sort of happens when we lose that sense of playfulness as we age. This is the question that really motivated a lot of our early research in the Aging Playfully Network. Why is it that we associate play with childhood and not associate play with old age? This really was a question that emerged out of our early findings when we were going around and trying to find research as well as publications on play in old age, we found very little. Of all the research projects and the publications we did find on play, most of it was as it related to childhood.
Carrie:That provoked this question for us, why is it that especially in the West, because the association of play with childhood is not a universal association, but it is a profound one here in the West, why we associate play with childhood. We did a sociohistorical analysis and we found that there are really two important historical junctures that help explain this. The first is really the development of industrial capitalism and the spread and emergence of the Protestant work ethic. And it was really during this time that there became a really firm juxtaposition and binary that really drove this division between work and play. And where work was this activity that had seriousness, was completely socially productive, it was at the heart of the kind of progress of community and society, it was that activity that was going to bring you closer to God, Play was everything that was in juxtaposition to that.
Carrie:Play was frivolous. It was seen as a waste of time. It was unimportant and unserious. It was also seen to be a kind of threat to the industriousness that you needed to be a moral adult and to be hardworking. A lot of Protestants at the time started referring to play as the devil's handiwork, as something that kind of drew you away from God.
Carrie:And it's really interesting because this binary has stuck with us since. And the kind of next historical juncture that we were really interested in was a kind of academic understanding of play through developmental psychology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And developmental psychologists were really interested in thinking about how, across the life course, we move through different stages as we develop and mature. Some early developmental psychologists, most especially Eric Erickson and Vygotsky, believed that play was a distinct stage of childhood. In this stage, children, imagined and they mimicked adult behaviour, but largely it was a stage where things were free of consequence, real consequence.
Carrie:But most importantly for these developmental psychologists, they believed that for children to mature, they had to leave the play stage behind. For them to become adolescents, for them to become adults, they could no longer play. This is really evident in the way that we think about play amongst adults and older people today. One of the things that we found really exciting with our ECL network is that it's really useful to bring old age and play together because the associations that we have of play, which is that it's frivolous, it's immature and childish, really juxtapose nicely with what we think old age is, which is this very serious grave time of life and a place full of wisdom. When we bring these two concepts together, what we realize is that they help us rethink both concepts.
Carrie:When I was working with older people and they were playing, they believed play to be really serious. They believed it to be deeply meaningful and exciting. It wasn't a waste of time. It was the way they wanted to spend their time. They also saw it as a place full of wisdom.
Carrie:Really thinking about play in relation to old age helps us rethink what play could be, but it also helps us rethink what old age is. Bringing them together really disrupts our thinking, I think, of both old age and play together.
Rochelle:Feels like a really necessary disruption. Rachel, you've been nodding very deeply. I wondered if you could please jump in and let's hear what your thoughts are on some of this.
Rachel:Well, I think it's interesting to examine what we mean by play or being playful. Me, playing it's about being open and it's about being curious and it's about finding connections and finding a game or a rhythm together and it's exploring. So it's not associated with childhood in terms of a game that you're playing, but it's what you find together. In our work, we don't bring anything that we've prepared. It's always exploring something with the participant that's in the room and created through whatever's happening at that time.
Rachel:It allows people to express themselves. It's freedom.
Rochelle:It reminds me of some of the other themes we've explored in earlier episodes and seasons of the podcast around creativity and also in education. It's sort of, I'm thinking about my son's home for the summer and people are very much in this phase of, oh, we've to put them in camps here and do this and do that and structure all their time. And you know, my husband who is infinitely wise and I hope that gets in so he knows I publicly said that, said, no, we should create as much space for him as possible to just like be a child, just to be. And then actually you're saying something that's like, well actually the things about childhood are the things we should be holding on to as long as possible. That openness, that freedom, just like being able to wander around in the garden aimlessly without a particular direction and just see what comes of it.
Rochelle:And that is something in and of itself that's valuable.
Rachel:Without having to achieve. Yes. It's being not doing.
Rochelle:I wonder if both of you could reflect on why this is so powerful for ageing. Like why is this kind of disruption so necessary in how we engage with ageing as a process?
Rachel:Well I was thinking about because we work primarily with adults with dementia and people need to find ways to express themselves, particularly if you're an adult living with dementia, you need to be able to give as well as receive. You are often in a position where you are receiving all the time, you're receiving care and play or having a meaningful connection, we might call it, allows that possibility because there's openness around that. And that's really vital because you need to be able to connect and you need to be able to have status and you also need to reconnect with your own personhood. Like, play is bringing yourself and your own ideas and your own creativity. And that's a really important part of how we work is trying celebrate the humanity of the people that we visit through exploring and playfully doing things together alongside.
Rochelle:I mean, it sounds so important. Kerry, what would you like to say?
Carrie:Yeah. So when I was at the retirement community, it was often said by both the residents and also the staff that worked there that the key to successful aging was to learn how to embrace change. It's funny that we think about older people as stuck in their ways because old age forces you to change all the time and often change against your will. You're changing in directions that you might not like to change. A lot of the older people that I worked with said that in order to embrace that change, you had to learn to see the change of aging, not just as a loss, because there is loss to some of the change that happens in old age, but also as a site of new possibilities.
Carrie:I think this actually is what is so exciting to me about play, is that play is all exploring possibilities. It's generating possibilities. A lot of the way that they thought about aging well was learning how to playfully engage with this change. Okay, now that I can no longer walk, what can I do in this wheelchair that I couldn't do before? What new opportunities does it allow for me?
Carrie:And it was precisely that kind of openness, what Rachel was saying earlier, that openness, that curiosity of what new horizon has just opened up for you that they thought was essential for aging well. And the people that seemed to do the most well were not the healthiest ones. They were the ones that learned how to shift when they needed to, how to playfully approach the horizon.
Rochelle:A couple of things that I just keep thinking about, and obviously I do lots of work in mental health, is how it resonates so strongly with how important sort of like hope is to good mental health. And so this idea that you can reframe something that has historically been structured as problematic into an opportunity. So Rachel, I'd love for you to talk to us a bit more about your work as an elderflower. You know, you've sort of touched on it a bit and I wondered if you could describe what an interaction sort of looks like.
Rachel:The elderflowers is a family. So we come as a family. So I am Blossom Elderflower, and I might be visiting with my sister Petal. So that's a very important thing as a starting point, because again, that's an immediate thing that people understand. Somebody might say: Who are you?
Rachel:I'm Blossom. I'm here with my sister. Instantly, people understand that. That also allows for family relations, so sibling relations. So we try to facilitate the ladies and gentlemen being able to give, whether it's a compliment, whether it's some type of eye contact, movement, physical, or whether it's advice and help, and to give them status within their situation.
Rachel:They are always the experts of their situation. We try and connect with them in the here and now. So I smile when I think about a typical interaction, because we co create with the ladies and gentlemen interactions. So it's very much co created. We don't have a plan, But often, we might start with introductions.
Rachel:We obviously we have been in units over many, many years, but we always reintroduce ourselves. Might be that, you know, it was my sister's turn to make the tea, or it's my sister's turn to bring the sandwiches and she's forgotten them, what are going to do now? But also, we work with a lot of people who are non verbal, a lot of people who have limited physicality. So, we use a lot of sound, a lot of words. I have words that I love, like kerfuffle or promenade.
Rachel:I'm just saying, me and my sister, we're just going to promenade around the room and let people see us. And we have interesting and eccentric costumes and a nose. The red nose is very important. When the programme was developed with the University of the West of Scotland, they initially tried it without a nose, but it didn't work. The nose is something that makes us extraordinary.
Rachel:So if you're extraordinary, it helps people relax because they know that you're not family, you're not staff. There's a sort of an invitation to play. So often we will walk in and we will just get a response of 'who's this?' So one of the examples I was going to give about working with a gentleman at Findlay House in Edinburgh, which is a continuing care NHS unit, is he would always greet us with the word howdy. And that was an instant gift for communication. This gentleman, he couldn't have a conversation, he couldn't have sentences, but he would see us and he'd go howdy.
Rachel:And instantly, we would have a game, we would be like, oh, you know, howdy partner. And we would have lesseeing competition, or we would have a shoot off, and he would be the sheriff. We would create these scenarios without needing words or conversation, using physicality, using just sort of what was there. I really think it's important to bring what you love. So if you go into a room and you sit next to somebody and there's a beautiful bouquet of flowers on the table, and you say, oh, do you like the flowers?
Rachel:That's very different coming in and sitting next to somebody and saying, oh, I love those flowers. I wonder what they smell like. Oh, look, they match the color on this. You're opening a conversation rather than demanding a response. So it's about allowing people to enter in a way that's possible for them, which can be the tiniest thing.
Rachel:We may just sit next to somebody and mirror their breathing, or we may mirror their movement. People think because we're clowns, we're there to make people laugh or we're there to make people happy. We're not. We're there to make a human connection and validate whatever emotion. So you ask how people respond, curiosity, eye contact, physicality, because obviously people present in a huge range.
Rachel:It's But people can also respond with suspicion or irritation or anger or there was a wonderful woman that we visited for a long time and we would maybe come in and we have instruments and maybe there's all that thing about working out the lie of the land, know, who's interested, who's curious, who maybe needs a bit of time, because it's about choice, people choosing to interact with us. But this lady, she would pass us in the corridor and she'd be like, look at you stupid people with your red noses, what are you doing? Get out of my face! And she would get to the end of the corridor and then she would turn around and she would come back and she'd be like, my friends, you're here. And we would have a dance.
Rochelle:I feel like you transported us into this sort of magical world where, you've said it before, anything is possible, isn't it? I sort of felt like these kinds of openings that you're trying to create are universal in the way that we should be engaging with each other all the time. Like sort of, you know, like how do we converse with people in ways that are open rather than closed and productive rather than demanding. Was absolutely beautiful. I thought it was so cool.
Rochelle:I mean, Kerry, do you think any of this sort of resonates with some of the stuff that you were engaging with and how you were working in the field when you were doing your doctoral work?
Carrie:Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that I've been obsessed with what Rachel has been doing and what the elderflowers are all about for quite some time. I was reflecting on why that's the case. One of the things that occurred to me as Rachel was talking was that all of the things that clowns do, kind of introducing elements of surprise and wonder, they're so profound precisely because a lot of these institutional contexts really are absent of that. You know, I think it's so important to lay the groundwork of this context. When I was living in a retirement community, I experienced profoundly the boredom of institutional rhythms.
Carrie:Everything in this institution was predictable. You knew exactly when breakfast, lunch and dinner were going to be. You knew exactly when the air conditioner was going to turn on at certain points of the day. And the beautiful thing to me about clowning, for example, is that it injects this wonder, this surprise, these beautiful moments in what could otherwise be an incredibly boring territory. And I think I found this a lot in the activities that we did as activity directors.
Carrie:You know, we were tasked with this kind of impossible task of trying to keep older people in an institutional context engaged, alive, full of wonder. And this is so hard to do, especially because you're working with a very diverse group of people. I had 40 people I'd be responsible for in a day. Some were nonverbal, some were totally verbal, but had Parkinson's and couldn't move. And there is something so beautiful and skillful about what it is that Rachel can do and what it is that people like activity directors do every day of trying to bring wonder into these people's lives.
Carrie:I can't underline what an achievement that is. And I think this is precisely why I'm so excited by the idea of clowning as a skill, Rachel's background in theater. I talk about this all the time, that these kinds of carers, especially activity directors who are seen as just mere entertainers, they're really not seen as important carers in these spaces, which is shocking to me. I always try to underline the brilliance of being able to turn a moment into magic in a place like this. It's brilliant.
Rachel:I think there's something really important about what Carrie says about what the activities coordinators they have an expected output and so much of things are about not the output, it is about the process. It's not about what you create at the end. And a small interaction, a small five minute interaction in a corridor can have as much value as twenty minutes, thirty minutes doing something else. It's about how what energy you bring to that.
Carrie:And we've talked all about this, Rachel. How do we capture this magic? And I think this is one of the things that's very hard, and is, you know, the big question of creative health. Like, what does it look like to capture the uncapturable? To capture like, you know, things that give you goosebumps, like you said, Rochelle, like something where you only know the profundity of it because you were right there in And the I think this is where anthropology is really important, really trying to make these moments come to life and to try to argue for the importance of a different way of seeing and measuring what is of value in these spaces.
Carrie:Most people aren't going to have been in a care home situation to know how brilliant what Rachel does is, you know? And so how do you bring that to life for somebody? How do you make it something that is more powerful than these kind of aggregated metrics that seem to be more compelling to people? And that's kind of the mission that I've been on, the mission that we've been on collectively in the Ageing Playfully project.
Rachel:We talk about having something called a happy hangover, that you can have a really lovely, joyful interaction and engagement with somebody. And those chemical responses in your body when you have a sense of well-being and you've been creative and you've had a human connection will stay in your body. If you don't, even if half an hour later, you don't actually remember what that interaction is, you still got that happy hangover, that sense of well-being, which can obviously also work in the opposite way, that if you've had a very distressing or challenging or upsetting thing happen, that can still remain, in your sense of how you are, even if you can't really remember what it was that happened. Which is one of the reasons as well, I think that it's very important when we're working that you know, we work with all emotions. So if someone is very distressed or very agitated or very upset, we try and find a way to validate that emotion and maybe try and move them away to somewhere where they're feeling more settled.
Rachel:But we would never dismiss it or say, oh, no, no, no, you don't need to worry about that or anything like that. It's finding ways again, trying to find that connection gift that help sort of change the scenarios. And with clowns, the person that we are interacting with, they are always the experts. They're the expert of their situation. They're the expert of their environment.
Rachel:You know, we are always needing their help or their advice and thanking them for what they've given to us. I think that's really key.
Rochelle:I mean, you're both really pointing to two different and very important types of disruption, think. Kerry, when you're reflecting there, you're bringing us and drawing our attention to the need to sort of disrupt the way that metrics can oftentimes drive or overpower our ability to actually see what's happening. An obsession with metrics of how many people did you see today, what did you do, what activities, have X amount of people done this, when actually this obsession with metrics in that regard is losing what's actually happening and what is for people. Rachel, when you say sort of like you've got this happiness hangover, you know, you talk about it and I can almost instantly feel it. And I mean, that's a huge challenge for public health to be able to kind of shift our thinking to sort of being like actually, you know, public health is about populations, but populations are still people.
Rochelle:So that means that we have to shift the way we think about them, the language we use and where we situate power. I wondered if we could talk a little bit about this piece around public health because I feel like I just want everybody to do this now. How might we embody or embed a playful approach to public health?
Carrie:One of the beautiful things about playfulness and play is that it's non instrumental. John Dewey said that like the beauty of play is that you do it for its own sake and you don't know what's going to come from it. Think public health could learn a lot from that. I think a more playful approach to public health of aging is one that needs to be more non instrumental. Let me give you an example.
Carrie:One of the things that I really issue with of a public approach to aging is that active aging discourse, which is trying to constantly get older people to do activities to improve their future health and to make their aging futures more manageable. So getting older people to take a walk so that their physical mobility is better. Getting them to talk to family, so that they can stave off loneliness and anxiety and depression. Getting them to read a book so that they can be more cognitively fluid and alive. I've been really interested by this trend in public health where there's this fascination to get older people to play memory games like crossword puzzles to try to stave off dementia.
Carrie:There is so much research money going to this, and there are so many public health scholars calling for older people to play these games. I find this interesting because, first of all, the research shows that these games are not actually that effective in staving off dementia. Secondly, and most importantly, when I talked to older people who had been prescribed crossword puzzles to try to stave off dementia, they said they hated it. They loved playing crossword games before they had been prescribed them, but the moment they had been prescribed them, they lost all their inherent joy and fun. One of the things that I would say is that I think public health needs to turn more towards encouraging people to engage in activities because they are fun, because they are enjoyable, because they are pleasurable, and not just because they're going to bring in health.
Carrie:And in fact, instrumentalizing activities for health often kills the effect, the potential health effect. And that's one of the things I found is that when older people were having the most fun, all wonderful things flowed from that. Like they started developing social relationships, their mental well-being became better, but it would only happen if they had fun. And really trying to think about, okay, what would public health look like of encouraging people to experience pleasure, joy, fun? The second thing that I would say and that play has taught me quite a lot about and has reinforced a lot of my own anthropological approach is that a playful approach, as Rachel was saying earlier, is one that's open and curious.
Carrie:One of the things that I would say, this really comes back to my research. When I was in this retirement community for a year, I found that bingo was one of the most important activities in the home. It was the center of social life. I was fascinated by this. Why was it that these older people love to play bingo?
Carrie:I wanted to write about the power of bingo in my dissertation. I went to go find what people had written Bingo as this beloved game. First of all, I didn't find much literature, which I thought was shocking because this is a game that is beloved by many older people. Shocking that we haven't written about it yet. And the next thing that I found was that when bingo had been written about, it was problematized and denigrated.
Carrie:And a lot of public health scholars in particular were like, no, no, don't let the old people play bingo because they're going to get addicted. And all of these bad behaviors are going to come from it. And they really saw it as this potential threat of a healthy aging financial future. They saw it as people getting into these mindless trance that weren't going to be good for their well-being. They really just prejudged the game.
Carrie:But a playful approach would say, Okay, older people, why do you love this game so much? That's exactly what I asked them. Why do you love this game? Why do you come every single Wednesday and schedule all of your doctor's appointments around this game? And the two things that I found was first, bingo is a game of electric intensity and rhythm.
Carrie:As the game is played, there is an anticipation that builds, like who is going to get the next ball that will allow them to call bingo. And that intensity, as well as the surprise and wonder that comes with the kind of element of chance was so cathartic and allowed such a flow experience in these older people that they just couldn't find elsewhere. And the second thing that was really profound about bingo was that it's a game of chance. And the beautiful thing about bingo is that everyone is leveled and rendered equal under the cage. No one can bring their skills to try to divine a kind of bingo win over somebody else.
Carrie:People with dementia, very advanced dementia, could win just as much as somebody who was fully alert. This beautiful, profound sense of community developed that transgressed a lot of the social divisions and hierarchies in the home. So one of the things I would say for public health is don't write off activities that you think are bad. Go and ask people, older people, why they like doing what they like doing. It will tell you a lot.
Carrie:It will tell you a lot about what their pleasures are, what they enjoy, but it'll also tell you what they think healthy aging means. And I think if public health was more playful, it would have this open disposition and start asking really important questions and shift the expertise and think about how much we could learn if we did This
Rochelle:narrative of lived experience, what does it mean to actually hold true to that and to respect that? It actually means the complete transfer of like setting the boundaries and driving funding and making decisions should come from the people who are actually living through that moment. And what a radical shift that would be. Rachel, how do we bring playfulness into public health?
Rachel:Yeah, I loved everything that you said there, Carrie. But gosh, I mean, time, actually. One of the things I think about a lot of the people that we work with in terms of staff, activities coordinators, they are jealous because we have time. All we're there to do is to connect. That's all we're there And to that is a huge privilege and incredibly joyous for us.
Rachel:So allowing time, being comfortable in the not knowing. Spend a lot of time trying to know everything or be in control, being comfortable in the not knowing. I don't know how that reflects into public health, but I think that we should be more comfortable in all realms of life, and they're just like, I don't know. Actually, I don't know how to connect with this person. I don't like you do with like Carrie was saying, I don't know why bingo is so great.
Rachel:Let's find out. So much of it is critical mass. I've been in so many different kinds of units where there's a critical mass of people who are prepared to give it a go, then that can flow. So, some way of creating atmospheres where, you know, there are things that are very important to be done properly within all the health realms that we work in. But where are those little bits?
Rachel:Where are those moments where you can be vulnerable? Can you, you know, have odd socks? Can you, you know, have a button missing? Can you tell somebody that, oh yeah, I put the, milk in the cupboard this morning instead of the fridge, what a thaw. None of those things matter, but they are making you vulnerable.
Rachel:Nobody can connect to the perfect. That's the thing. No one can make a human connection to something that's everything's perfect. We have to be vulnerable to be able to have that sort of playful connection. So it's finding those ways for yourself and bringing what you love in your work, in your world, always bringing what you love.
Rochelle:You also managed to describe everything I did today. I wore odd socks to take my kids to the park. I definitely put the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge. The other day I put my phone in the cupboard instead of the fridge and clearly I should just be telling more people that all the time. You should because
Rachel:we're human, right? And everyone does those things And you should be telling people that because then it's, you know, your status can level and because we're all humans, you know?
Rochelle:Yeah. Oh, I love that. I mean, that's so lovely. And I think a really nice way to sort of move us into the way we wrap up every episode. So we are interested in disrupting thinking everywhere, not just in public health, which I hope will be disrupted to a place of joy and play after your fantastic pleas, but also in other aspects of our life.
Rochelle:So we ask every guest who comes on the podcast, what piece of art or music or poetry has disrupted their perspective? So if you guys wouldn't mind sharing that with us, Rachel, why don't we start with you and then we'll finish with Kerry.
Rachel:This is such an interesting question. And I spent the weekend with my family, aunties and cousins, and I was asking all of them, you know, what piece of art disrupted your thinking and what does know disrupt it was great. So the example that I came up with was that when I had my second son, when he was about a month old, we took him to an exhibition at Edinburgh's National Gallery by a sculptor called Ronald Muick. Loads of really interesting different sort of waxwork sculptures. And so I had Sam in, you know, tiny wee Sam in a little papoose as we went into the entrance of this exhibition.
Rachel:And right there in the entrance gallery was statue, his creation of an enormous newborn baby. And I had this visceral response of like, that is what it feels like to be a parent. I have this tiny baby that's this size, but that is what it feels like. It's huge, it's all encompassing, it takes over your world. And it was a huge physical response.
Rachel:And obviously, was very related to myself at that time in that moment. But then when encounter art, it is how we are in that moment and at that time and how we're feeling and our age and what's been happening. So I suppose I don't know about it. It just disrupted my perspective in terms of like, yes, that is visualizing everything that I feel in a giant baby.
Rochelle:That is fantastic. And I can totally resonate with that. I guess I'm sort of imagining I've not seen the sculpture, but I can just imagine sort of and also how like nice it feels to be seen by art like you know, like I mean like you sort of see a piece and you're like, God, somebody finally has seen me. Yeah, Fantastic. Yeah.
Rochelle:Fantastic. Thanks Rachel. Kerry, what's yours?
Carrie:Yeah, I also loved this question. And the first thing that popped into my mind was a video that Phoebe Davies, who's a London based artist who works with moving image and portraiture, that she created in 2014. I've watched this film so much and it's called Act one Astoria. It was part of her project called Extravagant Acts for Mature People, where she brought in London based DJs to a senior center in London and worked on a collaboration. It is the most amazing video.
Carrie:So these London based DJs had created this kind of drum and bass track that moved into this remix of the song I Feel Good. Phoebe got these older people in a senior center who were wearing cute pink little sweaters and had slow movement to dance with total reckless abandon. And it was so cool because the way that they were moving their bodies was a kind of movement that you just don't expect for older people to do. And she was also getting them to play with their expressions on their face, like shock and horror and disgust and surprise and joy. And one of the things that excited me and the reason why it has stuck with me is because it felt like such a fresh, important representation of old age.
Carrie:You know, there's often this kind of like binary way that we think about older people. It's either like they're decrepit and at the end of life, or they're independent and like happy riding a bike down the beach. But of course, like it's so much more complicated than that. She was able to capture the range of human emotion and experience and complicate these images that we have of what older people are and what they can do and the music they can listen to. I thought that is what I want to do.
Carrie:I want to take and kind of produce a fresh image of aging, one that is playful, one that is unexpected, but one that is real. And to really kind of capture that because it's the kind of aging I've experienced, and I want other people to as well.
Rochelle:Oh, I love that so much. What a gift you both have been. I mean, this is just such a lovely episode, such a lovely way to finish the season. Think, look, I'm not gonna cry. It is usually within my miete that I cry at least once or twice a day.
Rochelle:I'll try and not. But I just think that the image that you have both have given us of what aging could be is so beautiful and so hopeful and so powerful. And I think exactly what the discourse of public health needs, which is just sort of really bound up by this sort of fear of an aging population and what we do with it and how we manage it and the managing and the it's such a heavy, hard discourse. And yeah, I'm going to spend the summer with my mother who to me has always felt like she has defied age, looks better than me in her 70s. And she's struggling at the moment because she sort of had a little wobble with some of her health and she's really struggling and I just feel like I can go to her now with sort of a fresh bit of hope for a reminder of like what journey she's on and will be on.
Rochelle:I'm really grateful to you both and I'm sure our listeners are all super grateful. Thank you.
Carrie:Thank you for
Rachel:having Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.
Rochelle:You've been listening to Public Health Disrupted. This episode was presented by me, Rochelle Burgess, who was very much missing Xand Vantelekin, who's usually with us. Produced by UCL Health of the Public and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibel Creative. Our huge thanks again to today's brilliant guests, Rachel Koles and Carrie Ryan. If you'd like to hear more about these fascinating discussions from UCL Health of the Public, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes.
Rochelle:Search for UCL Health of the Public to discover the latest events, news and research. This podcast is brought to you by UCL Minds, bringing together UCL knowledge, insights and expertise through events, digital content and activities that are open to everyone.
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