Speaker 1: 0:04

We are never alone. How do you get the care that you need? Creativity and caretaking is messy. Does art make us better people? Is empathy, creative. We pretend creativity isn't all that we've got.

Speaker 2: 0:15

Hello, this is Sophie Herxheimer and I'm Dan Sheffrin. We are the people behind art and other people.

Speaker 1: 0:24

Our guest today is Rowena Ritchie. Ritchie's work draws from her eclectic background in modern dance, improvisation, music, drawing and writing. She has won numerous awards as a performer and theater maker in San Francisco and is a founding member of the Erica Chong Shook Performance Project, as well as For you, a program bringing artists and elders together around the world. She teaches movement at the City College of San Francisco and is a fellow at the Atlantic Foundation's Global Health Brain Institute. Rowena welcome.

Speaker 3: 0:57

Thank you so much, Dan. It's an honor to be here. I'm very excited to speak with you an honor to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:07

I'm very excited to speak with you. When I was invited to participate in this For you project, which was during COVID, you and two colleagues were getting artists together to create gifts to make gifts to give to elders who were isolated and or sick and I thought it was the most beautiful idea I'd ever heard about and I was able to make a map for this wonderful person who died recently, marvis Phillips, and Marvis was somebody who was involved with all kinds of kind of housing equity and I created a map that showed the influence that he had had, and it was a gift for me to be able to learn about it and a gift for him to have this artwork and this process, and so that's how we met. It was amazing. Will you say more about this project and what it means to you and how you came to it?

Speaker 3: 1:51

The project is called Artists and Elders and, yes, it stemmed, as you say, from freaking out at the top of the pandemic about the older people in our lives, our parents, our older colleagues, who were, of course, targeted as the most vulnerable population to the coronavirus and were encouraged to lock themselves in away from the contamination of the outside world. Away from the contamination of the outside world and spinning social distancing into distant socializing that's the expression my colleague, ryan Takata, came up with, that we were like, yes, of course we have to keep socializing, like we have to find ways of being in each other's lives, and we were also despairing I don't just want to say Onus was all on the older people. We were also out of intimacy, out of touch, out of relationship. Okay, so we being myself and my colleagues, but also our broader population of artists, artist friends, our background is in performance making, so a lot of performance makers, in particular theater dancers, were really seeing all of their jobs eliminated immediately for the foreseeable future. So, out of work and wanting to give, wanting to give, wanting to help, wanting to know how to plug themselves into care, the care piece. These are people with a variety of skills, but certainly chief among them connecting, making connections, authentic connections, making eye contact, listening, dynamic listening skills. I feel like artists in general are a wonderful pool of carers for these skills that we cultivate presence, visceral responses to people, expressivity, la la la la. Visceral responses to people, expressivity, la-da-la-da-la.

Speaker 3: 3:45

And so we had this pool of folks and we initially asked them to work with somebody in their own life and we gave them a brief. We said yes, it's a gift. Initially, we sort of framed it as a gift that you're going to make for someone else and you're going to devise it as a bespoke or a customized gift. In response to some of the conversations you had, and we gave them a little bit of suggestions on the direction of the conversation, one thing we're really interested in is imagination and fantasy.

Speaker 3: 4:15

So, while a lot of the older people we know have these incredible histories and stories and are fonts of information and really could speak to the pandemic about some of the cholera outbreaks, wars, some of the lived experience, they had to sort of reassure us it was going to be okay and that was helpful and actually very dear to empower them, to help us calm down.

Speaker 3: 4:43

It was also really fun to not ask them to draw on that experience and to say what is your hope for the future when we come out of this, what do you want us to all know about something that brings you joy. So, looking at the gift as a bridge to bring one another joy and I'll just say that we started calling it a gift for them, but then really it became a gift with, a gift with, and, as Dan so perfectly articulated, it was this reciprocal thing. You got to spend time with Marvis, learn about his advocacy, community leadership, helping somebody have a baby, I think at one point, ways that he was sort of a presence in his neighborhood, and then Marvis's legacy of all of that community work got to exist in your beautiful map.

Speaker 2: 5:34

I loved when you said the artists are like a core bunch of caring people, because not everybody thinks of artists like that or knows that artists are people who do learn to listen and respond, because obviously not all artists do learn to listen and respond, but definitely people who are involved in live performance must, because otherwise what on earth are they doing? So it's a particular kind of demographic of artists, I think, who would be really interested in that kind of idea of exchange.

Speaker 1: 6:10

As you were talking, rowena, I was thinking about the opportunity for elders to, as you say like, think about the future and the quality of imagination that might have happened, and that there might've been the creative process that an artist, brought along with the gift, might have opened up a sphere of creativity for an elder that they may not have known that they had. I wonder if that's true.

Speaker 3: 6:39

It is. It's very true, Dan. You partnered with Marvis and Marvis came to us through this community befriending organization. So, after we sort of had made gifts for and with the people in our lives, we wanted to extend the model out to older people that we didn't know. And that's where LBFE Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly, which is an international service organization I think there's a chapter in France, there's one here in San Francisco, Chicago and so their main thing is companionship. So we partnered with them. We said we have people that want to make friends, make a new friend with an older person in San Francisco experiencing isolation and loneliness, sort of chronically meaning before and after the pandemic. A lot of the folks, like Marvis, are chronically isolated, meaning against their wishes, they're spending a lot of time alone.

Speaker 3: 7:36

And one of those LBFE constituents is a guy named Glenn who is very, very interesting but also very, very introverted and shy. And so there was this kind of beautiful process we paired our curator and woodworker and photographer friend, Deirdre Visser, with Glenn, knowing that she could maybe draw him out and get a portrait of him, maybe draw him out and curate something around learning about Glenn. But she said as soon as she saw that what he was doing was drawing and painting a little bit, drawing and painting sort of in this poignant way of seeing what was outside of his window, since that was the perspective that he lived day after day after day from the inside of his apartment that she knew. The gift for him was her sustained interest and cultivation of his creative practice. And I'm happy to say, like he's now had three public exhibitions, he's sold more work than some other accomplished painters that I know. He has the attention of the Marin Hedlund Center for the Arts. Accomplished painters that I know. He has the attention of the Moran Hedlund Center for the Arts. Looking at his work. He's just become more and more enlivened in his painting practice and taking himself more seriously and also seeing it, given his introversion and shyness, as a sort of extension of him, that people can get to know him through this object-based lens into Glenn and his works are very, I would say, like mystical. You can see that it's a landscape, but the colors and there's almost like a sacred geometry element to them are dynamic and do give you a little flavor of Glenn.

Speaker 3: 9:19

We partnered with a wonderfully talented Shakespearean actor that is the actor and she was paired with somebody who really loved performance, loved opera, loved theater, loved, loved, loved going to the theater and we were like perfect Lauren. But their conversation led them to sort of talk about something that the elder was missing in her life and that happened to be a childhood doll. And there's kind of a like sad story about that. This childhood doll was given to her and she loved it, loved it, loved it and she gave it to one of her relatives as a present for her, like great niece, and then it disappeared. So Lauren made her a doll.

Speaker 3: 10:03

Lauren made her not exactly the doll, but sort of pulled together some other interests of hers of Jean's was the elder's name. Jean called herself a hedonist. She loved wine and chocolate, she loved recycling, and so she pulled together wrappers and labels from things that Jean associated with, but then also was recycling and repurposing these materials into this childhood doll that christened Fuzzy 2 as the sort of descendant of this original childhood doll, and it was just this focal. It became a conversation piece and that was one of the great things that we loved about giving Marvis this map, because the hope is that now he has this map and he can talk about not only the experience of meeting you, Dan, but the experience of all of these significant landmarks in his life and why they ended up on the map and what happened there, and then trying to scale out more contact for Marvis through this object that could potentially pique the interest of other people in the community and his life so that the connections ripple out.

Speaker 2: 11:10

It's so resonant about attention, and we were talking with one of our other guests the other day about whether the word care really said very much, the fact that everybody needs attention and that sometimes they are almost dead with a lack of attention and that a little bit of attention, applied in a kind way, in an appropriate way, can lead to some extraordinary flowering. Because in a way, what you did with Glenn was allow him to just do what he needed to do paint out of the window but to just look at the paintings. And I'm a painter and I know that if nobody looks at my paintings they don't really exist, and it's sad. I'm a poet as well, and if nobody reads my poems, do they exist? I don't know.

Speaker 2: 12:02

So I think that this idea of attention, and especially the attention of somebody from a different generation, a stranger, somebody you don't know, who's got no reason to butter you up, pat you say, oh, what a lovely painting. Could really make a significant difference. In fact, dan and I were touching on this subject earlier about how strangers who don't have an agenda can be much more effective as a little dose of love that you never forget than somebody who's put there specially to take care of you, who might be part of an institution or have a lot of rules around the relationship, but somebody who casually helps you or notices you is often somebody you don't forget at all. They make a difference and they change things in a deeper way, and it's quite interesting because it can be quite light touch, can't it?

Speaker 1: 13:02

And we were wondering if there was a word for a person who comes into someone else's life for a moment, intentionally or unintentionally, and offers something, some moment of attention that helps that person see something about who they are. They take some compliment, some piece of that interaction that saves them for the rest of their life. We should create a word for that, if it doesn't exist.

Speaker 3: 13:24

Yes, yes, we learned through replicating this project. So we've done it. Artists and elders scaled to about 85 people before it sort of transformed into something else, and people all over the world, and some of them needed a light touch because it was overwhelming to have someone love bomb you. And love bomb, I would say, is on the other end of the spectrum, where you have somebody showering you with attention for a concentrated amount of time and then extracted because the project's over and they need to move on, or the pandemic lifted and their life has gotten back to normal, and that can also be a little bit devastating we're asking all our guests a little bit about how they came to care themselves.

Speaker 2: 14:31

Who cared for you when you were growing up? How did did it manifest itself? In what kind of form was the care? I mean, your work is obviously quite a caring type of work, but are there times in your work when you really enjoy being careless or carefree?

Speaker 3: 14:50

Oh, yes and yes and yes. My signature says core artist. But one of my friends was like and care artist and care artist, which I really love. I aspire to always be a care artist.

Speaker 3: 15:08

My care was pretty nuclear family. My parents, I would say, cared for me, my mom especially, although she worked, but worked while I was at school so that she magically was around to show for us. I have two brothers, older, younger. I'm the middle child and as an extension of that, my mom cared for me as an artist. My mom taught creative movement and that was sort of my childcare daycare when I was very young was going off to creative movement classes with her and she let me sort of have a voice very early on. So I'd say like one way my mom really cared for me was to cultivate my sense of creative capacity. I had ideas and she wasn't always asking me to save them for later. Sometimes she would incorporate them in real time and she just really appreciated that this lit me up.

Speaker 3: 16:09

This making up movement, making up poems, this creative movement sort of community that I was a part of was multidisciplinary, so we did a little bit of everything. I also played the flute and I won a Christmas card contest at one point for a sculpture that I made. So really just a flourishing creativity, and there was never like oh, but what are you really going to do? It was always oh, you like this too. We're going to keep. Yes, you want to study dance in college? Sounds good. I am now a parent of a young artist who is a freshman in college and is an art major. I'm very happy for them to be in college discovering all these amazing things, and I'm also conscious of how hard it is to be an artist. As we said at the beginning, like, art is a cornerstone of civilization, care is a cornerstone of civilization, and yet artists and care workers are some of the most underappreciated, marginalized, vulnerable people on our planet. So what do we do with that?

Speaker 1: 17:10

That's the question.

Speaker 2: 17:11

How old is your child 19.? That's the question how old is your child 19.? Okay, yes, it's an interesting moment in the path. Yeah, because we've got kids too, and my daughter is 27 and my son is 24. And trying to stand well back as well as encourage, but not encourage so much that they really put off your ideas. It's a bit of a delicate balance and again, it's a boundary push me, pull you type of time, isn't it? I completely identify with this thing about you model being an artist that believes wholeheartedly in what you're doing. How can one's kid resist such a thing? They think that's a practical and normal thing to do, and they're wrong.

Speaker 1: 18:01

I didn't think that's where you were going.

Speaker 2: 18:04

But if you tell them? But if you tell them they're wrong, they're like well, look at you.

Speaker 1: 18:11

I'm curious about the things that you maybe took into your parenting and creative life as an adult, that you learned as a child, and whether you see any connections between those two things, whether you've thought explicitly about, huh, I'm going to parent and I'm going to care in this way because of things that happened to me when I was younger. Or is it more just a kind of an organic flow?

Speaker 3: 18:41

Gosh, I don't know if I have objectivity to that, but I do feel most in my element as a parent when the playing field is level. As a parent, when the playing field is level, in other words, when whatever we're doing together does not distinguish by age or skillset or experience, we can all equally be an awesome puppet, we can all equally make. I love, like failure-free activity and failure-free art, and I'm so blown away by the innovation and creativity of younger people. It's so exciting, and I think I would say like I intentionally did not send either of our kids to preschool. They started school in kindergarten and that's because I needed my fix of playing, reading children's books, making music together, doing all of those super essential creative things that kids sort of naturally gravitate to and adults are sort of shamed away from. That was some of the happiest years of my parenting, even as it was exhausting and stressful and depleting at times to have a kid ask for a bungee cord because now they're going to make a zip line over the clothesline and they're going to hook up a battery operated fan to blow the little stuffy across the zip line line, and oh, that didn't work. Puzzling out this kind of a thing. I'm there for it. So yeah, I think, at least subconsciously, but maybe consciously too, I knew that so much of my vitality was fed by creative stuff. I'd like to believe the more stronger dose of that that they got as kids, the longer it would take for it to be sort of trained out of them or talked out of them as adults.

Speaker 3: 20:51

I'm a Global Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. This fellowship has really blown open the world for me. I've recently come back from South Africa. I've been to Sao Paulo, brazil, I've been to Nepal, to Japan, to the Philippines, to Peru, to Dublin, to London, and looked at carers and artists and culture in all of these places. And so over the last five, six years, especially what I had sort of experienced as care and culture has shifted so much.

Speaker 3: 21:28

And one of the ways it's shifted is to see how in countries not like the US, where your kids go off to college and then they might live on the other side of the country from you, families are tighter and more intergenerational, as we've been talking about, and the model of care is almost more intrinsic, where the children are still very much living with the parents and looking after each other and the parents become carers of the grandchildren and this kind of care network, and then also a lot of life living outside of the house, so in the community, and so then the broader community becomes an extension of this care network.

Speaker 3: 22:14

You, you know, neighbor we were talking about neighborliness, neighbors really looking after each other's kids and families, supporting each other in these more expansive ways than we have here, where we're very relegated to our sort of lanes and our fenced in houses. We live a lot indoors, and so I've really seen these incredible family care networks Informal care is what we call it here, which is I don't know how I feel about that Whatever, we won't go there but that's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2: 22:50

I quite like you going to those places too. I think it's fine if you go there. We're not making a positive podcast, we're just making a podcast Part of what I think we you going to those places too. I think it's fine if you go there. We're not making a positive podcast, we're just making a podcast.

Speaker 1: 22:58

Part of what I think we're trying to do is to try to redefine some of these terms, and so it's really interesting. So informal care was the phrase that you are ambivalent about. Can you say more about that, and how else can we think about changing language to reflect the realities of what care and creativity need?

Speaker 3: 23:14

think about changing language to reflect the realities of what care and creativity need. If what we're talking about within formal care is that it's not organized or funded or based on an evidence-based model of care that is more formalized in these ways, formalized in these ways, Well, I don't know. That care neatly falls into that ordered model anyways. So we're talking about informal care and I think that has everything to do with the economics really, and I'm very heartbroken about the economics of care in the West and especially in the States.

Speaker 2: 23:54

I have friends and family who've inspired me to be a better carer, a more patient, more loving person, and I've also got artists that I massively admire who've got absolutely nothing to do with care, but the fact that they have put a painting into the world that cares for my emotional life means everything to me.

Speaker 2: 24:16

So when I saw some Kandinsky paintings at the Tate last week which had the most lively pink and green. I felt taken care of, and so I suppose it's that thing of how do we, and so I suppose it's that thing of how do we use the metaphorical glory present in a poem or a painting or a piece of theatre to nourish us and to actually do the caring.

Speaker 2: 24:46

It's like it's making us dinner because it is making us dinner, Although maybe you know, you never know. So would you be able to talk a little bit about art, the art that moves you?

Speaker 3: 25:00

Yes, well, as you were speaking, sophie, I was thinking of my daily vitamin, of Mary Oliver, so a Mary Oliver poem. I have a number of collections, I don't discriminate, I love them all. And you know, mary Oliver, one of the things I love so much about her poetry is how much she is using the natural world to make connections beyond person to person. It's like a metaphor for a relationship with a person, but tapping into nature. I think nature is so incredibly nourishing and important. The natural world is so important to me, but I think, given the opportunity, the natural world is so important to all of us and we need opportunities to be not behind our desks or our screens.

Speaker 3: 25:52

I think it's so good and I mean it relates to Mary Oliver for me too, because her poems I find like prayers. They're so spiritually uplifting. It's like a kiss or a hug or there's a sort of affirmation and zest and zeal and affection for life. A wonder Like the world is so profound and awesome and stupendous to Mary Oliver. And then you learn that she actually had a pretty fucked up time before then and I find like artists who have the most adversity in some cases channel this kind of very positive outlook through their art. But it means more to me. I don't take it for granted, like Mary Oliver's, proclamations of love and reverence for the world are coming through her, which was broken and damaged and hurt and full of pain, and yet she had this transformation. You know, these words are transformed through her into something that just feels like a blessing.

Speaker 1: 27:01

What should we hear?

Speaker 3: 27:02

This is called the Tall Distance it's from the collection Felicity. The tall distance where the clouds begin, the forge that pounds out the lightning, and the black porch where the stars are dressed in light and arrangement is made for the moon's path. It's these I think of now, after a lifetime of gold finches, meandering streams, lambs playing passionate hands of the sun, the coolness under the trees talking leaf to leaf, the foxes and the otters sliding on the snow, the dolphins for whom, no doubt, the seas were created, the spray of swallows gathering in autumn. After all of that, the tall distance is what I think of now. I was talking about. Poetry reminds me of when I was in London and one of the memory cafes I went to, a poet came and she brought the theme of love between siblings and friends.

Speaker 3: 28:32

Rowena would you take 20 seconds and just say what is a memory cafe exactly? Yes, so a memory cafe I want to is sort of franchised in the sense that they exist all over the world. It doesn't have to happen in a cafe per se, and I don't think there's a formula as to what happens at a Memory Cafe, but we all know that it's an umbrella term, for you are welcome here, you person living with dementia or Alzheimer's or cognitive impairment, and often your care partner. So it's part support group, part activity and gosh, you know, we've been talking a lot about isolation, really a community building event for people to continue to shore one another up as they go through this disease progression. So many people drop out of your life because of the stigma, because of the overwhelm, and so the idea that there is a Memory Cafe opportunity for people to have a chance to share company at a creative project together is brilliant, I think, and I'm trying to offer them here in San Francisco. I'm really working on collaborating with some people to make more memory cafe spaces, so stay tuned for that.

Speaker 3: 29:49

First she talked about the theme and then she sort of asked people if they have a brother or sister or a sibling or a friend. And oh, Raymond Carver wrote one of the poems and it was about young boys delivering newspapers. That were friends. And what she did was she passed out the poems, she read it first and then she invited people, or she actually called on people, and specifically she called on people with dementia that still had the capacity to read, to just read the poem. And it was so profound how hearing a poem in different people's voices changed or layered in meaning to this poem and I felt like it was an incredible act of care.

Speaker 3: 30:38

So sometimes the Alzheimer's changes the, especially the volume of your voice, Like sometimes people just become very, very soft and whispery spoken. And so there was the patience and the active listening of the rest of us. To be able to hear this one participant's whispery voice was really delicious. And then also there was a gentleman who was like I can't do it. I don't know if you know, but I have this thing in my head and she had a rapport with him. She knew that he had read.

Speaker 3: 31:14

She's like I've heard you read beautifully before, Would you try Again? Like so moving. He was a little bit halting at first and then it was almost like he got the lubricated brain and mind and his ability to speak. And then he added his own ending. That was cheeky and a little bit funny and we all had this awesome laugh. That was cheeky and a little bit funny and we all had this awesome laugh. And I was just again like, as an act of care, to trust it reciprocal, like the bravery that somebody who's so discouraged by this brain degeneration and but to put himself out there and then for all of us to like hold space for that and then for him to have this creative act at the end. It was so moving and inspiring that's a brilliant story to end with Rowena.

Speaker 2: 32:01

I love that. I felt I was really there with you, listening to those people, and I love what the poet offered there. And I agree that idea of listening to the different quality of different people. Reading is one of the things I do when I'm teaching as well. I get everybody to read the thing they just wrote and they're all so scared and sometimes they say you know, I've never done this before and I go, I know, but today's the day, and they just because one of them does it, then the other one does it, and it just actually creates a community right there and then because you've done something brave between you, yes, Rowena Ritchie.

Speaker 1: 32:43

Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 32:44

Thank you. My pleasure, my gosh, this has been again like the reciprocal experience of being in conversation with you is a gift for me, so thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 1: 32:55

Look forward to reciprocating again.

Speaker 2: 32:57

Total pleasure See you next time. Art and Other People dedicated to the support of healthy families and communities through the arts. Our theme music is composed by James Rolfe. Join our community at artandotherpeopleorg.