Dance connects people and is part of every culture. Anyone can dance even if they think they’re not good. The Dance in Medicine for Aging Populations seminar on Feb. 11 proved this.
The seminar included Juan Carlos Claudio, co-founder and CEO of Minding Motion for Graceful Aging, founder of Grey Matters and adjunct professor in the dance department at Weber State University.
During the seminar, Claudio showed the ways dance connects people and the benefits it has on the body as it ages.
Claudio has some students with Down syndrome in one of his classes. He explained they were all shy and didn’t want to talk to him or any of the other students at first. However, after a few classes, they started warming up and were dancing, wanting to be around everyone.
He now has them front and center and believes dance made that connection between them.
Claudio had audience members on their feet and dancing throughout the meeting. Although the audience members had masks on, smiles and laughter could be seen and heard throughout the room.
Fharid Calderon, an audience member, said he was surprised by how much dance made him smile. He was smiling at random people while dancing when it would be weird in day-to-day life.
In the aging populations, this gives them a sense of belonging, which then helps in many other different areas.
Staff members and students have told Claudio that some of his students have reduced or stopped taking anti-depressants due to the dopamine released in the brain.
Claudio explained how one of his students told him that her husband knows when Monday and Wednesday are now. He gets up and practices his dancing and is excited about class because they’re “dancing days.”
Dance doesn’t only benefit the brain and body but the heart as well.
Claudio explained that one’s ability to create complex patterns and bilateral lateral movement decreases as they age. In his classes, he works on those motions.
Claudio had audience members participate in a dance that works on complex patterns and bilateral lateral movement and explained which parts his students struggle with.
Stepping forward twice, then stepping backward twice or putting one leg forward and the opposite arm forward would be examples of troublesome movements.
To some, that may seem easy, but as Claudio explained, the aging group sits and struggles to try to figure it out or just does it wrong, so he comes up with ways to help them.
Instead of saying right foot or left, he wears mismatch socks and says follow the red sock or the blue. This way, it takes away part of that struggle for them.
Dance helps the aging group in many ways. Claudio says that many say they feel young again after class.
Dance releases the brain’s good chemicals, allowing people to come out of it with new connections and a happier, healthier body.
