ABSTRACT
Mrs. Rosen [the pianist] started playing the piano once all of the residents were settled. Edna was singing along very loudly, holding onto a rolled up magazine and using it to hit the arm of her chair to the beat of the music. This ethnographic observation of residents of a nursing home attending a piano concert is rich with expressions of their creativity. The dominant model of dementia care is the ‘acute cure’ model of biomedicine, which emphasizes pharmacological treatment of the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this approach, the person living with dementia is reduced to his/her neuropathology, and care practices are restricted to attending to bodily needs within a unidirectional, provider-as-expert model of care. Dance is similarly implemented in long-term care homes as a therapeutic, specifically in that it combines the physical benefits of exercise with psychosocial therapeutic benefits.
