In the living room of the CHSLD Nicolet, a woman among others is prostrated in her wheelchair, motionless, her head frozen in a tilted position, her arms stiffly folded on themselves. The dancer Ariane Boulet approaches her, crouches down at her side to catch her gaze. Her fingers come to life in a tiny dance. The old lady’s eyes fill with joy and interest. A smile appears on her face. When the dancer moves away, the smile remains on her relaxed, peaceful features for a long time.
A little further on, Ariane Boulet responds to the disjointed speech of another woman with gestures, sounds, grimaces. The woman bursts out laughing and engages in this unusual conversation. For several minutes, the two women look at each other, in an exchange that only they seem to understand. “This woman often speaks very loudly and disturbs the others,” says Cynthia Martin, the establishment’s recreation technician. “Today, dancing makes her calmer.”
The Mouvement de passage team, a project created 10 years ago by Ariane Boulet to intervene through dance in CHSLDs, does not give a show. Through sounds and gestures, from the smallest to the largest, it tries to revive the essence of these people who are losing their autonomy or at the end of their life, to create contact. And the results, right away, on site, are impressive.
Looking for doors
These exchanges are made through non-verbal language, even if the team readily responds when residents speak to them. “We look for doors” in the body, explains Ariane Boulet, co-founder of the dance company Le Radeau. These doors on the other, they can be found in the eyes, in a hand.
As Ariane accompanies her, a resident tries many times to get up, in vain. Her body no longer supports her. “I crouched down, then I just held out my hand, which she put in her hand. Then we had a very subtle dance of micromovements.”
In a corridor, a man greets Ariane, Georges-Nicolas Tremblay, the dancer who accompanies her, and Marie Vallée, the musician. “You are the first people I have seen all day,” he exclaims enthusiastically. He joins the artists in a festive procession that other residents soon follow. “This lady loves to dance,” says Cynthia Martin of a resident who follows the procession energetically. “Her son told me she discovered dancing here. If I make her dance, she can go on for 20 minutes.”
Surprisingly, it is on the floors where people with the most neurocognitive disorders are gathered that the impact of dance is the most powerful, notes Georges-Nicolas. “Those who are still completely there, who are coherent, let themselves go less,” he notes.
“We are one of the only projects that reach non-verbal people, [qui ont des] major neurocognitive disorders,” continues Ariane.
For 10 years, with the Mouvement de passage project, Ariane Boulet and her team have been distributing their improvised gestures to very fragile seniors in Quebec’s CHSLDs. Although she has a master’s degree in creation in a care setting, Ariane Boulet does not consider herself an art therapist. Everything happens improvised, and the artists are not informed of the residents’ health records. However, the intervention is clearly powerfully positive.
“It’s better that we don’t know the diagnoses, that we don’t know the life stories. That’s great, because it really allows us to work in the invisible. In the present, now,” Ariane continues. The invisible is “this something that exists, but that we don’t necessarily see.” “It happens to us a lot. We see it: changes in posture, frank looks. Sometimes, it’s huge, a frank look. Limbs that unfold, and crying fits, often.”
From a scream
Among the most striking experiences of her interventions with Mouvement de passage, Ariane remembers a woman who had been screaming non-stop for two days, she had been told. “One of the original dancers, David Rancourt, began to embody the woman’s scream physically. I thought it was magnificent, but part of me was very scared; we didn’t want to increase the discomfort. A few minutes later, I saw Marie arrive, take the scream as a tone, then start to harmonize by singing. It lasted 20, 25 minutes and it was long — the person continued to scream, it had been two days. After 25 minutes, her screams turned into laughter. The next day, the staff called me to tell me that she had stopped screaming after our intervention. It was a very touching moment for us.”
Georges-Nicolas Tremblay recalls this moment spent in silence with a woman who was very nervous. “She was sitting, all alone. I started by reproducing the nervous movements of her wriggling hands. Then, I did the opposite, quietly. We started dancing together, and her nervousness slowly became a calming sensation throughout her body,” he says.
One day, Marie Vallée brought her kalimba close to a lady. “She closed her eyes and it became a dance. I started from the inside. She followed each note and was in total symbiosis with the music. It was very touching, because it came from her. Something emerged,” she says.
“The whole practice revolves around listening to the resident,” explains Ariane Boulet. Over the years, Mouvement de passage has spawned offshoots. “I received a lot of requests from CHSLDs and I decided to honour that,” she says. The team therefore developed an educational guide and a 15-hour training course that it gives throughout the province.
During these training sessions, “we obviously talk about the artistic approach, but also about ethics, the ethics of vulnerability,” she explains. “We also address the whole issue of dementia symptoms, the health issues of CHSLDs, the issues related to falls. We work on the approach, posture, tone of voice, gaze, touch. Then questions of consent are addressed. Marie also teaches the new musicians elements on the approach, on how to work with the sounds made by the residents.”
When the team leaves the CHSLD Nicolet, something has changed behind them: a smile floating on a face, a soul relaxed after dancing, a body grateful to have been touched, for a moment.