How dance is improving the lives of people with neurocognitive and movement disorders like Parkinson’s, MS and brain injury
BY Claire Sibonney
WEARING ALL BLACK and sitting on a tufted white ottoman in her sparse and sunlit living room, Toronto-based Sarah Robichaud is teaching a modern ballet-inspired routine to a group of 80 students on Zoom.
The Bolshoi-trained dancer spreads her arms wide in exaggerated movements to a slow cover version of the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” as her students replicate the routine. “We’re just going to start with a gentle sway, back and forth,” she tells them. “I want you to imagine that there’s a thread attached to your wrist and someone’s pulling that thread from side to side.”
Many of Robichaud’s students are seated, as well. More than half of them have Parkinson’s disease and typically move with difficulty, but when they try to mirror her fluid and graceful movements, a look of ease comes over them.
“It’s profound,” says Robichaud, the founder of Canada’s non-profit Dancing With Parkinson’s programme, which offers free daily dance classes online and in person. “I’ve been doing this for 16 years, and every week at some point while I’m teaching I’ll catch a glimpse of one of the dancers, and I literally have to choke back my tears.”
With growing evidence that dancing helps boost brain health and manage symptoms of neurocognitive and movement disorders, including Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s, dementia and even brain injury, accessible dance programmes and movement therapists around the world are helping improve the lives of millions.
Robichaud has seen the benefits first-hand. After she took an innovative teaching programme at the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York in 2007, she started Dancing With Parkinson’s to give back to her community in Toronto.
A few years later, her grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Sadly, he passed away in 2013 due to complications related to the disease, though Robichaud danced with him in his long-term care home until his final days. Those memories are reignited every time she teaches, says Robichaud. “The compassion and care that I have for our dancers is that they’re all my grandfather.”
Recently, one of Robichaud’s students, a man in his fifties who, before trying the programme, was adamant that dancing wasn’t for him, said that he now has more dexterity in his hands
