”Visions and strategies for the arts and our ageing societies”
Webinar on Jan 13th 2021 – free of charge
Statistics show a drop off in engagement levels for cultural activities in later life. The webinar explores what kind of strategies have been used to secure cultural rights for older people. Webinar also showcases how creative and cultural participation of older people has been promoted around the world during the past decade.
Registration opens on Dec 21st.
Program
Helsinki time (UTC+2)
1 pm (UTC+2) 1st session (60 min)
Welcome
Kai Huotari, Managing director, Cultural Centre Kaapeli
Mari Männistö, Cultural Director, City of Helsinki
Introducing the program and the keynote speaker
David Cutler, Director, The Baring Foundation
Keynote speech: Creative ageing after Covid-19
Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England
Short break
2 pm (UTM+2) 2nd session (60 min)
Introducing the speakers
David Cutler
Developing cultural services for the Elderly
Mari Männistö
How culture is a driver for an age-friendly city region
Paul McGarry
Instructions for the breakout rooms
3 pm (UTM+2) 3rd session (75 min)
Around the World
4 parallel session in breakout rooms:
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- USA: Mark Morris Dance Group / David Leventhal
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- Japan: Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (Tokyo Met Concert Hall) / Yukiyo Sugiyama
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- The Netherlands: Literary Festival in care homes / Noortje Kessels
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- Finland: National Theatre Touring Stage / Jussi Lehtonen
Closure
David Cutler and Mari Männistö
SPEAKERS
Sir Nicholas Serota
Chair, Arts Council England
Nicholas Serota has been Chair of Arts Council England since February 2017 and is a member of the Board of the BBC. He is currently Chair of the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education and was a Board member on the recent Cultural Cities Enquiry.
He was Director of Tate between 1988 and 2017. During this period Tate opened Tate St Ives (1993) and Tate Modern (2000 & 2016), redefining the Millbank building as Tate Britain (2000). Tate also developed its national role by creating partnerships with 35 regional galleries across the UK in the Plus Tate network.
David Cutler
Director of the Baring Foundation
David Cutler has been Director of the Baring Foundation since 2003 which is one of the UK’s best known independent grant makers. David leads the Foundation’s arts programme which form 2010 – 2019 exclusively focussed on arts with and by older people. In that role he has written nine publications on creative ageing, including Around the World in 80 Creative Ageing Projects. Prior to the Baring Foundation, David worked in national and local charities focussing on social justice, as well as for a London local authority.
Kai Huotari
Managing Director, Kiinteistö Oy Kaapelitalo
Dr. Kai Huotari (b. 1972) has worked since 2015 as Managing Director at Kiinteistö Oy Kaapelitalo ( www.kaapelitehdas.fi ), the largest cultural centre in Finland. Previously, Huotari has held managerial positions at EIT Digital Helsinki, at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, and at DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival.
In 2010-2012, Huotari worked as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley School of Information. He is a member of the board of YLE The Finnish Broadcasting Company and he serves as chairman in the board of Kunsthalle Helsinki, in the advisory board of Creative Finland and in the board of Kaapelin Mediakeskus Oy.
Huotari has a doctoral degree in economics and business administration, an M.A. degree in filmmaking, and a M.Sc. degree in computer science. He has published in the areas of gamification, service marketing and social media.
Mari Männistö
Culture Director of the City of Helsinki
Mari Männistö works as a Culture Director of the City of Helsinki since October 2019. She manages a team of about 350 professionals being responsible for cultural policy, grants (approx. 17 million eur a year), institutions suchs as Helsinki City Museum, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Helsinki Art Museum HAM, as well as city’s seven Cultural Centers. Previously Mari has worked in the field of contemporay art as a gallery director and in book publishing and media business development positions. Mari holds an M.Sc in Economic Science from the University of Tampere.
Paul McGarry
Assistant director, Greater Manchester
Since 2003, Paul has led multi-agency urban ageing partnerships, and in 2016 was appointed as the Head of the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub. Paul has had a number of journal articles on ageing published, and given presentations to high-profile events in the USA, Asia, Europe and Australia. Paul has an MA in social gerontology and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Paul has been a member of the World Health Organisation’s Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities Advisory Group, and the Scientific Steering Board for the joint Age-friendly Environments in Europe project.
Twitter Handles: @GMAgeingHub @AgefriendlyMCR
Greater Manchester Ageing Hub website: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/what-we-do/ageing/
David Leventhal
Program Director, Dance for PD® Mark Morris Dance Group
David Leventhal is a founding teacher and Program Director for Dance for PD®, a program of the Mark Morris Dance Group that has been used as a model for classes in more than 300 communities in 25 countries. He leads classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease around the world and trains other teaching artists in the Dance for PD® approach. He’s co-produced five volumes of a successful instructional video and helped conceive and design Moving Through Glass, a dance-based Google Glass App for people with Parkinson’s. He received the 2018 Martha Hill Mid-Career Award, the 2016 World Parkinson Congress Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Parkinson’s Community and was a co-recipient of the 2013 Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award from the Parkinson’s Unity Walk. He serves on the board of the Davis Phinney Foundation, is an advisory board member for the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Arts and Humanities Program and the Johns Hopkins University/Aspen Institute NeuroArts Blueprint, and is a founding member of the Dance for Health committee of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS). As a dancer, he performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1997-2011, appearing in principal roles in some of Mark Morris’ most celebrated works and receiving a 2010 Bessie Award for his body of work.
David Leventhal
Program Director, Dance for PD®
Mark Morris Dance Group | 3 Lafayette Ave. | Brooklyn, NY 11217
office: +1.718.624.8400 x 240 | Dance for PD® toll-free line: 1.800.957.1046
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Yukiyo Sugiyama
Chief of Inclusion & Partnership Section, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan of the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture
Trained as a pianist, Yukiyo Sugiyama is a determined arts professional and researcher with 10 years of experience working both in Japan and the UK. MA(Distinction) from Goldsmiths College, University of London and Graduate School of Social Informatics Aoayama Gakuin University.
Her interests in creative learning lead her to explore a new practice in performing arts to generate arts as a creative catalyst and innovation enabler. Recent Project includes the evaluations project for senior citizens’ music workshops: https://www.t-bunka.jp/en/about/on_stage.html.
Noortje Kessels
Impact Producer, Wintertuin
Noortje Kessels works as impact producer at literary production house Wintertuin. In 2008, she graduated with honours at Utrecht University, where she studied both Sociology and Literary Studies. She worked as a critic (fiction and non-fiction) for online cultural magazine 8WEEKLY and was an editor of Frame, magazine for literary studies. In 2009 she started working at Wintertuin as a literary programmer. Noortje was initiator and project leader of Wintertuin’s nationwide platform for older people and their stories. Yearly, she organised multiple literary festivals, reading groups, writing workshops and Writer in Residence-programmes in retirement homes. In 2014, Dutch Minister Bussemaker (Education, Culture and Science) selected these activities as exemplary projects for innovative crossovers in the cultural sector. These days, she adapts the methods, programmes and festivals she developed for older people, towards creative writing projects for people with a migration background, terminally ill people and people in detention.
Jussi Lehtonen
Artistic designer of the Finnish National Theatre’s Touring Stage
Jussi Lehtonen is artistic designer of the Finnish National Theatre’s Touring Stage, where he also works as a director and an actor. The troupe takes theatre performances out on the road to places like health care institutions and prisons, and contributes community-oriented documentary theatre to the National Theatre’s repertoire. His latest works as director are Undocumented Love (2020), Other Home (2017) and Vapauden kauhu [Fear of Freedom] (2015). Lehtonen defended his Theatre Arts PhD on the actor’s contact with audiences living in care facilities in 2015 at The Theatre Academy of The University of Arts, Helsinki. Lehtonen’s writing credits include ”Documentary Theatre as a Platform for Hope and Social Justice” (in: Eeva Anttila and Anniina Suominen (eds.). Critical Articulations of Hope, Routledge 2018); “Imagining What it is Like to be You: Challenges of a Hybrid Community” (Nordisk dramapedagogisk tidsskrift 2019) and Samassa valossa: näyttelijäntyö hoitolaitoskiertueella (Avain 2010) [Under the Same Lights: An Actor on Tour in Care Facilities]. He was given the art award of The Finnish Ministry of Culture in 2011 and the Helsinki City Artist Award in 2020.
A Welcome Letter from your Host David Cutler
International Creative Ageing – Looking Beyond A Pandemic
I was delighted to be asked to host this uplifting event to start 2021. Not because of any belief in my hosting skills – clearly no one has been to one of my parties – but because I have learnt so much from my colleagues in Helsinki in recent years and because I believe passionately that creative ageing is a movement that is set to sweep the world.
As I write from London, the UK is in the depths of a second wave of Covid 19 with our hospitals dealing with more patients than at the height of the first wave in April 2020. As we all know the consequences of infection are so much worse for older people and this requires severe limitations on their freedom of movement and association whether in the community or in a care homes. In the UK arts organisations and residential care homes moved mountains to respond to the first stage of the crisis in the spring as they recognized that creativity was a lifeline both for care home residents and staff who were making huge sacrifices themselves. I sought to capture a little of this effort in our publication Key Workers; Creative Ageing in Lockdown and After. https://baringfoundation.org.uk/resource/key-workers-creative-ageing-in-lockdown-and-after/
It seems hard to believe now but the almost miraculous advent of the anti-Covid vaccines promises a return to normality later in the year for older people and society more broadly. But what should this normal look like? The Baring Foundation is considering starting a national conversation around what a guarantee of culture and creativity in every care home would look like and to launch this in time to welcome in this new, more hopeful era. There is a lot to build on in the UK as Older and Wiser? https://baringfoundation.org.uk/resource/older-and-wiser-creative-ageing-in-the-uk-2010-19/ from Kings College London showed when it examined developments in the last decade while this was the focus of our arts funding But there is much more to do.
I am convinced that a major part of the answer is improved international exchange around creative ageing, of which this event is such a prime example. One of the few benefits of this global public health emergency has been a realisation of how much can be done digitally. In 2019 we published a short report documenting some of the wonderful creative ageing initiatives taking place around the world, including all those taking part in this event https://baringfoundation.org.uk/resource/older-and-wiser-creative-ageing-in-the-uk-2010-19/. The realization that creativity is a human right due regardless of age, along with an ever growing evidence base of its benefits, especially around dementia, is only growing stronger. As will the phenomenon of an ageing world beyond the pandemic.
I believe strongly that there is a need for regular international exchange on creative ageing for learning, inspiration and mutual support. At the moment there is a gap here and international events on either the arts or on ageing have yet to fully incorporate the significance of creative ageing in their meetings. Digital technology means that gatherings do not need to be expensive or labour intensive. So lets commit to taking a lead from the City of Helsinki and To Infinity and Beyond and organize a follow-up meeting in 2022, when the pandemic is becoming a unhappy memory.
– David Cutler