Saturday, January 24, 2009

Parkinson's effects eased by classes

Oakland Tribune

Dec. 28, 2007

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Staff writer

IN A SUNLIT dance studio, a pianist plays a flurry of arpeggios. Men and women sitting on metal folding chairs slowly bend and stretch.

One man's hands tremble; a woman's legs remain rigidly bent. As one woman moves her hands, her feet involuntarily go along. These dance students have Parkinson's disease.

By the end of this class, they will have waltzed, stretched and marched, relaxed deeply and laughed loudly.

"It is more damn fun," said Joan Hodgkin, 75, a tall champagne blonde who drove herself to this class at Oakland's Danspace -- something many with Parkinson's patients cannot do. The class was a gift from the Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, while it was in the East Bay to dance "The Hard Nut."

In New York, class meets weekly. It had its genesis with Olie Westheimer, who founded and directs the Brooklyn Parkinson Group. A former dancer, Westheimer approached Morris about a therapeutic dance program. It seemed a natural for Morris. The edgy choreographer engages public school students in a dance and poetry project and conducts an after-school program. He agreed immediately.

A central nervous system disorder, Parkinson's often impairs the sufferer's motor skills and speech. The therapy cannot reverse the course of the illness, but it can help ease its effects, said teacher and Morris company dancer David Leventhal.

"Parkinson's is such an individual disease," Hodgkin mused. "What is hard for one isn't hard for the other. It is nerve wracking because you never know how it will affect you."

But one thing tends to hold true for many people afflicted with the degenerative disease: Movement to music helps them fare better, an observation of celebrated neurologist Oliver Sacks among others. Sacks talks about the power of music in his new "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" (Knopf, 2007). Music therapy for people with Parkinson's triggered his interest in the subject, he said in a recent AARP interview.

Parkinson's sufferers struggle to coordinate speech and movement, but music, while it lasts, "gives them precisely what they lack, which is tempo and rhythm and organized time."

Sacks "talks about becoming 'unmusicked,'" Leventhal said. "Parkinson's disease is the premier example of that. (Music) is a neurological glue that holds us together."

On a recent day in Oakland, Leventhal teamed up with company dancer John Heginbotham who sported outsized pink nails (He was Mrs. Stahlbaum in that evening's performance). The men led the students through stretches and progressive relaxation exercises. One by one, the students called out their names accompanied by a signature personal gesture.

Carol Brian, a tiny, silver-haired woman with purple bangs, opened her arms wide. Lee Shapiro, a slim man in wire glasses, jeans and gray fleece jacket leapt up and lifted a knee in the air. The group duplicated each move, laughing heartily. Fun matters here.

Leventhal said fun spurs production of dopamine, a chemical messenger between nerve cells that enables smooth, coordinated movement. People with Parkinson's have abnormally low dopamine levels. A videotaped dance class won rave reviews at the International Congress on Parkinson's Disease in Berlin in 2005.

"People are having fun and chemically that is very important," one participant commented.

In Oakland, a photographer asked the group's permission to shoot from inside their circle.

"Sure, as long as you wear this nose," said a man brandishing a bright red rubber clown's nose. The group howled as he tucked it back into his pocket.

While seated, the students rolled up onto the balls of their feet. They kicked, pointed and flexed.

"This wakes up those nerves and can help you balance," Leventhal said.

Toward the end of the class, the students stood. A man who had sat squarely now listed to one side. Another bent forward. Some struggled for balance as they took a step. They bent deeply and swung from side to side as pianist Lucy Hudson played "The Waltz of the Flowers."

"You really want to be down low, like speed skating," Higenbotham told them. "Make little fists that are like pendulums."

They joined hands for a circle dance as Hudson played "Never On Sunday." At the end, they sent a pulse around the circle with a squeeze of hands.

Student Martin Baron describes himself as "one of the stiffest people in the world." The class makes him feel "more musical, more loose," he said.

"I love it," said Brian, 60, a jeweler who has had Parkinson's for 10 years, the past eight months of which have brought exhaustion, stiffness and memory problems.

"I get really teary and emotional. It's so upbeat ... the music and the people. Everyone knows what everyone has."

A debilitating illness, Parkinson's can restrict a person's human contacts to doctors and therapists.

"This counteracts that isolation," Leventhal said. "It builds community."

Like the company's dancers, the students seek to move with focus, intention and commitment, Leventhal said.

"They want structure," he said. "They want form. That's the only way they can initiate movement."

Friday, January 23, 2009

Legendary dancer doesn't rest on her laurels

Contra Costa Times
Nov. 13, 2003

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Times staff writer

HER DANCING was sublime, her celebrated autobiography a spellbinding glimpse into the creative process.

Tall, angelically beautiful and sumptuous, Balanchine ballerina and muse Suzanne Farrell danced with an almost palpable intelligence, setting a deliciously high standard at New York City Ballet.

Now, as artistic director of her own company, George Balanchine's muse and interpreter says she wants to take her own dancers to "a another level."

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet Company performs at Zellerbach Hall Friday and Saturday. The program promises much: "Divertimento No. 15," "Serenade," "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux," and "Tempo di Valse" from "The Nutcracker."

"I want to take all the ballets we do and my dancers to another level," Farrell says, in the same light, tawny voice viewers will remember from the 1997 documentary, "Elusive Muse." She spoke on the phone in between rehearsals in East Lansing, Mich., where her company was performing.

An awestruck Maria Tallchief, who preceded her in the company and in Balanchine's affections, compared Farrell to "quicksilver" in a role Balanchine created for her: that of Dulcinea.

Farrell danced her last at age 44 in 1989, showered with roses by a loving New York audience.
Since then, she has been staging ballets and teaching. She launched the Farrell Ballet first as a touring company based at Lincoln Center in the nation's capital, now newly rooted there as a permanent company.

Even her critics say there was likely no one closer to Balanchine -- he once told her, "You are the other half of my apple" -- and he created more than 20 ballets for her, beginning with "Meditations," a passionate duet that spelled out his intense feelings for her, when she was 18

The Farrell national tour heralds a year of international festivals, new ballets and special programs celebrating the 100th anniversary of Balanchine's birth (the legendary choreographer died in 1983 at age 79).

"Nobody worked with Mr. Balanchine longer than I did," she says. "It doesn't make me better, it just puts me in a position to have that information, information to draw on."

That information includes Balanchine's own insistence on keeping his dances fresh, recreating and reinventing.

"I don't want to keep his ballets just alive in the sense of memory, I want them to be memorable," she says. "His dances, even if they were old, they had an immediacy, an urgency -- a life in the present.

"Even 'Apollo,' which he did in 1928, he kept revisiting. He said it was the ballet in which he learned to eliminate. When you're young and you cook, you want to put everything in that cooking pot. You don't have to put everything you know about ballet into one ballet."

She declines to critique other companies' interpretations of Balanchine ballets. However, she does say generally there are "misinterpretations, oversimplifications." She was abruptly fired from the New York City Ballet in the early 1990s by artistic director Peter Martins, her longtime partner, after openly lamenting that she was given too little to do, despite her wealth of "information.

"The steps are only one aspect of (Balanchine's) dances," she says. "If you teach the steps without the musicality, it's not Mr. Balanchine. If you have the musicality without the philosophy, it's not Mr. Balanchine. It has life, breath, a circulatory system."

Farrell sees very little dance, but enjoys theater and always takes note of how other kinds of performers claim stage space.

No mirrors
Born Roberta Sue Flicker in Cincinnati, she went to Manhattan with her mother and sister to train with the New York City Ballet, and at 16 joined the company. Her big break came when another dancer got pregnant before the premiere of Balanchine's "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" and Farrell was chosen to replace her. She was an instant hit.

While she was still technically on staff at the ballet in the early 1990s, James Wolfensohn -- a die-hard fan since his days as an investment banker in New York, when Farrell would frequently dance more than one role a night -- offered her support to launch a program at the Kennedy Center. She began teaching a three-week summer program called "Exploring Ballet with Suzanne Farrell." Since then, she has also joined the faculty of Florida State University and teaches there for part of each year.

"I'm always telling my students, 'Don't look in the mirror! Don't look in the mirror!' You can't be an honest performer and a spectator at the same time," she says. "Also, what's in the mirror isn't the true reflection of who you are. I take my students to the National Gallery, and we see Monet's paintings of Notre Dame. You see the real thing, then you see the reflection of Notre Dame in the Seine. It's different, there are those wavy lines from the water."

Farrell commands the kind of fearless risk-taking from her dancers she used to embrace on stage. But as ABT great Cynthia Gregory commented in her talk at Herbst Theatre last year, the extreme-sports trend that has taken hold in many companies sometimes stops short of artistry.

"We have excellent dancers nowadays, but they are not necessarily more interesting because of it," Farrell says. "A dancer needs a mind, a vulnerable intellect, the ability to tap into her musicality. Where you are in time, where you want to be in time -- all those things play into your performance."

Because she looked so seldom in the mirror herself, staging ballets after her retirement brought some surprises. She had been dancing the role of Terpsichore from the age of 17, accompanied by two female dancers and one male.

"Suddenly, there was this extra girl in the way," she says, laughing. Although Farrell never performed a role the same way twice -- in his own autobiography, Martins spoke of it as her "genius" -- her own dancers bring their own surprises to roles she has danced, which she says will happen with care and nurturing.

Your life, in dance
In a generous gesture characteristic of Farrell's complete devotion to the works, she cast ABT alumna Christina Fagundes in "Meditations," in which Balanchine "had choreographed our lives."
"Fagundes . . . was down to earth -- a mezzo type -- and she did 'Meditation' in her own way," New Yorker writer Joan Acocella wrote. "When Farrell danced it, the ballet was something that happened to the man; when Fagundes danced it, it was something that happened to her."
Farrell loves this.

When she watches her dancers, "I often think, 'Gee, why didn't I think of that?' " she says, laughing. "I want their contributions."

Inevitably, just as often, a young dancer will not, cannot, bring more to a role. Farrell says she doesn't expect them to bring 20 years of experience to a part -- and inevitably, more life means more life to bring to the dance.

Yet, "as you perfect your craft, you lose that vulnerability."

"You need that innocence and freshness," she says. "I tell my dancers, every time you come (to perform), think of it as the first time you came."

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Expert helps fundamentalists overcome guilt, grief


Oakland Tribune

May 19, 2007

by Rebecca Rosen Lum

The graphic imagery from an end-times movie forms one of Michelle Lyerly's most vivid, and most horrifying, memories.

The hellfire-and-brimstone Christian high school she attended in North Carolina screened "A Thief in the Night," in which the forces of the Anti-christ push a college student from a bridge to her death because she failed to convert in time for the Rapture.

"You can imagine a bunch of 12-year-olds," Lyerly said. "This could happen tonight. This was ingrained in us."

Lyerly and former fundamentalists from five states flew into Oakland earlier this month for a workshop, "Release and Reclaim."

They're losing their religion.

The three-day event offered role-playing, sharing of personal histories and guided imagery -- tools to develop a sense of self and bonds of support.

Their God was a capricious, vindictive, punishing figure. Now they need help learning to trust themselves, said workshop lead-

er and Berkeley psychologist Marlene Winell.

Fundamentalism encompasses evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic faiths. They share a belief in original sin, a final judgment day and reliance on the Bible as the literal word of God.

The percentage of people who believe the Bible is the actual word of God has shrunk from 34 percent in 2004 to 28 percent in 2006, according to a Gallup poll.

But more than 60 percent of born-again Christians in this country believe they will suffer if they disobey their religion, according to a 2003 survey by the University of Rochester and Zogby International.

That's a damaging belief, Winell said.

Those who leave punitive faiths struggle with confusion, grief, anxiety and anger, she writes in "Leaving the Fold," an autobiography and guidebook on letting go.

Winell knows this world from the inside out. As a high school senior, she chose the University of California, Irvine, over Oral Roberts University, knowing the public school promised more souls in need of saving.

Today, Winell performs a different kind of rescue.

Helping children learn to articulate their ideas and feelings is "the psychological food parents are supposed to give their children," she said.

But in the fundamentalist world, "before they have the cognitive ability to process it, they are given these images of a bloody Christ on the cross and told they are responsible."

She spurns the combat metaphor fundamentalist leaders employ in place of a loving God. She calls on the helping professions to study and treat the recovering adherents as they do for other traumas and addictions.

At one time or another during the workshop, each participant broke down in tears. All spoke about guilt, shame and fear.

Common touchstones, like witnessing, salvation, speaking in tongues and "Christian counselor" resonated -- and spurred laughter.

"If you have doubts about the faith, going to a Christian counselor wouldn't help at all," Winell said. "Doubting is defined as sin."

In one exercise, they paired up and related bits of wisdom they had developed. Winell calls that "remedial nourishment."

They took turns sporting a headband with a mischievous pair of red sparkly devil's horns.

"There ain't no atheist like a former fundamentalist," participant Geraldine D'Arc said.

Today, Valerie Tarico is the author of "The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth."

But as a fundamentalist, she struggled with suicidal feelings -- the result, she said, of evangelical beliefs.

She suffered from an eating disorder and "according to my spiritual guides I should have been able to get rid of those horrible, sneaky, deceitful, humiliating behaviors through prayer -- if only I had faith the size of a mustard seed."

It didn't work.

"The last straw for me was working at Children's Hospital in Seattle and listening to all of the self-serving rationalizations used by believers to justify the suffering of innocents," she said.

It took several years for Deborah Thornley to make a break. Thornley embraced fundamentalism at age 18. "I had my fill of 'us' and 'them.' I walked out of Sunday school one day and I never went back. I went cold turkey."

Over the years, Lyerly's spiritual leaders trained her to not trust her own instincts. There were no mistakes, no errors in judgment, no missteps -- only sin.

Lyerly later earned two master's degrees, and celebrated Episcopal Bishop John Spong praised her book, "From Rapture to Revelation."

Still, she struggles, but "I'm not as alone as I thought," she said.

Winell, who will hold another workshop in September, asked her charges to write a note to someone who is taking baby steps away from an authoritarian faith.

"Just get yourself to this retreat," wrote one.