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WWe see a frail, elderly woman on a chair, with her eyes downcast. He gestures for the music to be turned up, a swollen melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and with a little encouragement his hands begin to flutter. Then suddenly her eyes flash and she is Odette the swan queen on the misty shore of the lake, with her arms raised. He leans forward, wrists crossed in the classic swan pose; his chin lifts as if he is dominating the stage once again, his face lost in reverie.
The woman in the film is Marta Cinta González Saldaña, a former dancer who died in 2019, the year the video was shot. But the clip has gone viral since it was recently released by the Spanish organization Música Para Despertar (Music to Awaken), which promotes the value of music for those living with Alzheimer’s. Many of the details that accompany the video on its Internet journey were wrong. Marta Cinta was not a member of the “New York Ballet” (there is no such company) or the current New York City Ballet, but it seems she ran her own dance company in the city; the dancer who performs in the intercut video is not her but Ulyana Lopatkina, who does not even dance Swan Lake but Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan. Yet none of this takes away the impact of watching someone seemingly light up and have their memories unlocked by the power of the melody. It is as if I saw Saldaña inhabiting her real self.
Music’s unique ability to connect with people living with even severe dementia is becoming well known. Former pianist and music teacher Paul Harvey recently landed a number 1 with Four Notes – Paul’s Tune, a song he improvised on the piano despite his memory loss.
Auditory memory may be the last thing that leaves us because it’s one of the first things we develop, at around 18 weeks in the womb, says Grace Meadows, program director at Music for Dementia. “They are some of the deeper neural pathways that are established,” he says. Our first language, the babble and cooing of children and their carers, is a form of musical exchange. “That’s why it’s so deep and why we’re so sensitive to it, why it’s so primal.”
This remains true when people have cognitive impairments, partly because music is processed in so many different parts of the brain. If there is something blocking his neural path, find another path. And the music of the formative stages of our lives tends to have the strongest hold, especially around the teens and 20s, the “memory blow” as it is called, when so many intense social bonds and new emotions and experiences occur. : first loves, commotion in new cities, or perhaps dancing your first lead role on stage.
For Saldaña, strong muscle memory is tied to those musical instincts, but you don’t have to be a professional dancer for music to elicit a physical response. Fergus Early has been working in community dance for more than 30 years with his company Green Candle and has been organizing specific seminars for people with dementia for the past decade (including, at present, a weekly online dance class).
She always works with live music, but sees even more advantages when she is allied with dance. “Sometimes it’s pure extraordinary magic,” he says. “People are transformed before your eyes, they become what they were. I met someone who came and sat in a wheelchair week after week, and I once played a particular piece of music, the Keel Row, a popular Northumbrian tune, and suddenly his feet were dancing very fast. Then at the end of the class he starts talking – he has never talked to anyone before, the staff at home say they never say anything. This kind of thing is not uncommon. “
Physical expression and the connection between body and mind are important for those who often have very little to do. “The mind works best when the body is working rather than when it is very passive,” says Early. Dance also has enormous social benefits for those who feel isolated, and its seminars give attendees a much needed sense of agency. “What’s critical for people with dementia in order to contradict a lot of the things that come out of society is that they have some control,” he says. “So if they’re improvising, they can make decisions about what to do next. It seems very simple, but it is very important to give people a sense of their own identity “.
The sense of identity is what is so powerful in Saldaña’s video. “You see her as an expert,” says Meadows. “You have an idea of what it was like as a dancer and that’s what it always will be. And I think it’s really comforting for the person and those around them to see who they are beyond their dementia. “
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