THE TANGO EFFECT: PARKINSON'S & THE HEALING POWER OF DANCE
If you missed...
the interview on The Tango Effect broadcast on Cambridge 105 on Sunday 10th May, you can listen here: thanks to Bookmark programme presenter Leigh Chambers for the seamless interweaving of 'Cachirulo', recorded by Anibal Troilo's orchestra in 1941
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qje63zaawx5tlr/KateFinalMix.mp3…
THURSDAY 16 APRIL 2020
70 UP! MINUS THE MILONGA...
So... the Easter Monday Bank Holiday came and went, sadly without the dancing. But I was joined by family and friends who helped celebrate the big birthday, complete with cakes and candles, various drinks, an assortment of pets (!), even a sung happy birthday. After some weeks of social isolation it felt good to see so many lovely faces and rather special to have many of those I hold most dear gathered together on the same page, as it were. Somehow the presence of old friends seemed to shrink the years, too. Suddenly having reached the 70s didn't seem so bad after all and the strange times we are living in make it seem likely that the celebrations will trickle on in various forms for some time to come. Plus, no washing up!
As for the book, it's out there on its own now, to sink or swim as best it can. The current crisis has naturally dominated the media meaning that The Tango Effect hasn't had the attention it might otherwise have attracted. Still, the Daily Mail's spread was published in the Irish Daily Mail last week and I have recorded interviews for Cambridge 105's Bookmark programme and the Life Happens podcast.
I have also been heartened by positive responses from a wide range of readers. If you have enjoyed the book, perhaps you would consider sharing your views on Amazon? Just a couple of lines would help to spread the word!
THANK YOU!
70 UP! MINUS THE MILONGA...
So... the Easter Monday Bank Holiday came and went, sadly without the dancing. But I was joined by family and friends who helped celebrate the big birthday, complete with cakes and candles, various drinks, an assortment of pets (!), even a sung happy birthday. After some weeks of social isolation it felt good to see so many lovely faces and rather special to have many of those I hold most dear gathered together on the same page, as it were. Somehow the presence of old friends seemed to shrink the years, too. Suddenly having reached the 70s didn't seem so bad after all and the strange times we are living in make it seem likely that the celebrations will trickle on in various forms for some time to come. Plus, no washing up!
As for the book, it's out there on its own now, to sink or swim as best it can. The current crisis has naturally dominated the media meaning that The Tango Effect hasn't had the attention it might otherwise have attracted. Still, the Daily Mail's spread was published in the Irish Daily Mail last week and I have recorded interviews for Cambridge 105's Bookmark programme and the Life Happens podcast.
I have also been heartened by positive responses from a wide range of readers. If you have enjoyed the book, perhaps you would consider sharing your views on Amazon? Just a couple of lines would help to spread the word!
THANK YOU!
The healing power of TANGO: How despite a devastating Parkinson's diagnosis at 54 - one woman was able to harness her talent for dancing
PUBLISHED: 23:36, 22 March 2020 | UPDATED: 23:38, 22 March 2020
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Running on the treadmill at the gym, I first noticed it in the big mirror in front of me. While my left arm was behaving normally — nice and relaxed, at waist height — my right arm was just hanging there, oddly.
Yet I wasn’t particularly worried and didn’t think to connect it with my increasingly spidery handwriting or the falls I’d had while running in the woods.
It was a teaching colleague who persuaded me to go to the doctor. Perhaps she recognised the signs.
Kate Swindlehurst, 69, from Cumbria, first started tango classes in 2002 in a remote town
The GP certainly did, although neither prepared me for what I was to hear from the consultant to whom I was referred.
‘I’m 99 per cent sure you have Parkinson’s disease,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you on your own to think about that for a few minutes.’
I remember having a little cry, then going back to work in time for the last lesson of the day, covering for an absent science teacher. I sat in the lab — foreign ground for an English teacher — stunned by the news and trying to make sense of this new world.
Had there been other clues? I was 54. Yes, I’d suffered more wobbles on the dancefloor than usual. I first started tango classes in 2002, in a remote town in north-east Cumbria, the county to which I first came with my then husband (now ex) more than 30 years ago.
Post-diagnosis, I scoured my memory for evidence of a deterioration and remembered a Thursday-night practise in Carlisle’s beautiful 15th-century Tithe Barn, dancing with a regular partner called Raymond.
Two or three times, as we approached a move called the barrida — that lovely moment where the leader sweeps the follower’s foot sideways with his own foot — I wobbled, froze and apologised. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Raymond said. ‘Though I wonder what it is?’
One study suggested that several step patterns in tango mimic the rehabilitation exercises
By the time the symptoms of Parkinson’s become noticeable, you have almost certainly been living with it for years. For most, at the time of diagnosis, the production of a neurotransmitter called dopamine has already decreased by 80 per cent in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, which controls movement and co-ordination.
With medication you may not get worse, at least for a while, but you won’t get better. At least, that’s what we are told.
Often, I wonder if there’s such a clear division between illness and health. For, when I’m dancing, something almost miraculous happens to me.
While my disease has, indeed, progressed in normal life, when I tango, I return almost to pre-Parkinson’s levels of energy and nimbleness.
Somehow, in its ability to persuade the damaged brain to work as if it were undamaged, tango overrides whatever it is that stops me moving. It returns a sense of grace to my limbs; it unfreezes me, giving me not only confidence but courage.
I suppose at the simplest level, it offers a radical alternative to the feelings of failure that come with Parkinson’s. For an hour, during each lesson, I am special, not in spite of the condition but in part because of it — refusing to be held back by its disabling aspects while working at the complexities of this most complex of dances.
How on earth does this happen? In normal life, those with Parkinson’s can rarely be said to move with elegance. It is common both to become ‘stuck’ — unable to move when you wish — and to be unable to be still when you choose, beset by tremors and twitches which rattle on despite your best efforts to stop them. You stop and start unpredictably, spend moments teetering on the brink of motion before suddenly lunging forward.
As my disease progresses — I am 69 now — I suffer more from bradykinesia, or slow movement. When I’m getting to my feet from a table, walking from A to B or eating a plate of food, my progress is often exasperatingly slow, both for myself and those around me.
And yet while I’m dancing, I can move more easily. I feel newly coordinated. At first, my partner may well find himself with an armful of twitch and jitter, or an upper body as hard and unresponsive as a girder. But when these initial tics fade and I manage to stop thinking about it altogether, I just… dance.
The pressure of expectation, the music, the way I am held — all require me not just to make the moves but to prepare for them, shifting the weight, engaging the muscles, re-awakening those sluggish feet.
It is not just physical. To step on to the floor into a close embrace with another person, you have to believe in yourself, your capability and your worth as a partner. It’s a big ask for any dancer.
Conditions such as Parkinson’s chip away at self-esteem. There is nothing attractive about its characteristics and it is difficult not to become preoccupied with what you can’t do.
Simple tasks (fastening buttons, putting on socks, getting change out of a purse) become tiresomely challenging, walking downstairs an exercise in mind over precarious matter.
In tango, surrounded by other, more beautiful, more experienced, younger performers, a dancer with Parkinson’s must find the courage to hold her head high. (For the most part, I refuse to be defined by the disease and dance with the able-bodied just as I always have.)
In fact, I spent years struggling with posture. The straight spine is fundamental to tango, but instead I tended towards textbook signs of Parkinson’s: a stoop, a poked-out head, a middle fold, a slumping chest. There were times when extreme fatigue made it feel impossible for me to hold myself upright, and I’m sure there were psychological issues, too, especially when I was feeling especially low or clumsy. Standing tall, head up, chest open, was the last thing I felt like doing.
But if you are serious about tango, you have no choice. While some support is derived from the partner, it is not acceptable to hang on to him, to pull on him or expect him to hold you up.
This means you have to get your core working for you, using muscles that may have given up expecting calls to action from the malfunctioning brain. If I hold back, nothing works. Settling for half won’t do.
Perversely, I have discovered that I like the harder moves. Being challenged on a continual basis is vital for my motor rehabilitation. Take one move in particular, the pivot. This is an integral part of the ocho — the figure-of-eight that the woman completes in two steps across the front of, or around, the man, while keeping her upper body turned towards him.
We practised this technique often in tango classes, but I felt my stomach muscles contract with anxiety each time.
My body became a lumbering weight, a sackful of turnips that slipped and lurched inside my skin, pulling me off-centre, gluing me to the ground.
For months, I managed without the pivot entirely when I could get away with it, substituting small steps for that ball-of-the-foot spin that looks so beautiful and easy when executed by an expert.
But it was precisely this sense of a step too far that took me towards a breakthrough. I would not let it beat me. I wanted it to be hard, and I took huge pleasure in the impossible demands of the dance. It felt like an electrical charge, waking up nerve endings, switching on responses, pushing through the lumpen heaviness of my condition.
I refused to give up my heels, too. There is a school of thought which recommends that Parkinson’s dancers should avoid them — but isn’t that like recommending paper aeroplanes for pilots?
Yes, I passed on my highest black-and-silver beauties. But, while I wobbled at times on the dancefloor, I was rarely troubled by real instability or fear of falling in the same way that I was out in the wider world.
I am not the only person to recognise the transformational power of dance on Parkinson’s sufferers.
More than a dozen studies have shown its benefits, some on the very part of the brain that is otherwise damaged. One suggested that several step patterns in tango mimic the rehabilitation exercises designed to target gait difficulties and the ‘freezing’ problem; the music and the moves themselves serving as external ‘cues’ to replace the missing internal ones.
The degree of difficulty is crucial: tango is a ‘multi-tasking activity’ that demands ‘dynamic balance and involves turning, initiation of movement and moving at a variety of speeds’.
Another study recommends that dance should become part of a ‘comprehensive management plan’ for people with Parkinson’s. I used to think tango would never be available on prescription, but who knows? Perhaps one day it will be.
What I’ve discovered, above all, is that tango is holistic. The world of medical professionals seems to operate piecemeal, my symptoms becoming separate entities. I took my tremor and fatigue to the neurologist; my depression and insomnia to the GP; my digestive issues to the nurse. And yet, tango treats all of me simultaneously.
Motor difficulties and muscular tension are addressed by the music, by the demands of the rhythm and by the lead of my partner. Struggles with balance are eased as I work at core strength and maintaining my own upright axis. Close contact with another human being —contact that feels safe, respectful and equal — is a powerful counter to alienation and gloom.
I still have bleak weeks. Sometimes I am near-overwhelmed by exhaustion and confronted by a black hole of depression that yawns in front of me.
To get to the point where several hours of tango will replace fatigue with energy, despair with optimism, I have first to get past the fatigue and despair sufficiently just to arrive at the dance. Sometimes the getting past seems too difficult.
But it remains the bedrock of my treatment, a fundamental part of my well-being and the mainstay of my social life.
There will come a time when I can no longer do it — and then I may DJ instead — but for now, I know that stepping on to the dancefloor is an opportunity for transformation. Each time I do it, as the music takes hold, the process of renewal begins.
- Kate Swindlehurst, 69, from Cumbria, persuaded to go to a doctor by colleague
- She said a dancer with Parkinson's must find the power to hold her head up high
- One study showed how several step patterns mimic rehabilitation exercises
PUBLISHED: 23:36, 22 March 2020 | UPDATED: 23:38, 22 March 2020
347shares
View comments
Running on the treadmill at the gym, I first noticed it in the big mirror in front of me. While my left arm was behaving normally — nice and relaxed, at waist height — my right arm was just hanging there, oddly.
Yet I wasn’t particularly worried and didn’t think to connect it with my increasingly spidery handwriting or the falls I’d had while running in the woods.
It was a teaching colleague who persuaded me to go to the doctor. Perhaps she recognised the signs.
Kate Swindlehurst, 69, from Cumbria, first started tango classes in 2002 in a remote town
The GP certainly did, although neither prepared me for what I was to hear from the consultant to whom I was referred.
‘I’m 99 per cent sure you have Parkinson’s disease,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you on your own to think about that for a few minutes.’
I remember having a little cry, then going back to work in time for the last lesson of the day, covering for an absent science teacher. I sat in the lab — foreign ground for an English teacher — stunned by the news and trying to make sense of this new world.
Had there been other clues? I was 54. Yes, I’d suffered more wobbles on the dancefloor than usual. I first started tango classes in 2002, in a remote town in north-east Cumbria, the county to which I first came with my then husband (now ex) more than 30 years ago.
Post-diagnosis, I scoured my memory for evidence of a deterioration and remembered a Thursday-night practise in Carlisle’s beautiful 15th-century Tithe Barn, dancing with a regular partner called Raymond.
Two or three times, as we approached a move called the barrida — that lovely moment where the leader sweeps the follower’s foot sideways with his own foot — I wobbled, froze and apologised. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Raymond said. ‘Though I wonder what it is?’
One study suggested that several step patterns in tango mimic the rehabilitation exercises
By the time the symptoms of Parkinson’s become noticeable, you have almost certainly been living with it for years. For most, at the time of diagnosis, the production of a neurotransmitter called dopamine has already decreased by 80 per cent in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, which controls movement and co-ordination.
With medication you may not get worse, at least for a while, but you won’t get better. At least, that’s what we are told.
Often, I wonder if there’s such a clear division between illness and health. For, when I’m dancing, something almost miraculous happens to me.
While my disease has, indeed, progressed in normal life, when I tango, I return almost to pre-Parkinson’s levels of energy and nimbleness.
Somehow, in its ability to persuade the damaged brain to work as if it were undamaged, tango overrides whatever it is that stops me moving. It returns a sense of grace to my limbs; it unfreezes me, giving me not only confidence but courage.
I suppose at the simplest level, it offers a radical alternative to the feelings of failure that come with Parkinson’s. For an hour, during each lesson, I am special, not in spite of the condition but in part because of it — refusing to be held back by its disabling aspects while working at the complexities of this most complex of dances.
How on earth does this happen? In normal life, those with Parkinson’s can rarely be said to move with elegance. It is common both to become ‘stuck’ — unable to move when you wish — and to be unable to be still when you choose, beset by tremors and twitches which rattle on despite your best efforts to stop them. You stop and start unpredictably, spend moments teetering on the brink of motion before suddenly lunging forward.
As my disease progresses — I am 69 now — I suffer more from bradykinesia, or slow movement. When I’m getting to my feet from a table, walking from A to B or eating a plate of food, my progress is often exasperatingly slow, both for myself and those around me.
And yet while I’m dancing, I can move more easily. I feel newly coordinated. At first, my partner may well find himself with an armful of twitch and jitter, or an upper body as hard and unresponsive as a girder. But when these initial tics fade and I manage to stop thinking about it altogether, I just… dance.
The pressure of expectation, the music, the way I am held — all require me not just to make the moves but to prepare for them, shifting the weight, engaging the muscles, re-awakening those sluggish feet.
It is not just physical. To step on to the floor into a close embrace with another person, you have to believe in yourself, your capability and your worth as a partner. It’s a big ask for any dancer.
Conditions such as Parkinson’s chip away at self-esteem. There is nothing attractive about its characteristics and it is difficult not to become preoccupied with what you can’t do.
Simple tasks (fastening buttons, putting on socks, getting change out of a purse) become tiresomely challenging, walking downstairs an exercise in mind over precarious matter.
In tango, surrounded by other, more beautiful, more experienced, younger performers, a dancer with Parkinson’s must find the courage to hold her head high. (For the most part, I refuse to be defined by the disease and dance with the able-bodied just as I always have.)
In fact, I spent years struggling with posture. The straight spine is fundamental to tango, but instead I tended towards textbook signs of Parkinson’s: a stoop, a poked-out head, a middle fold, a slumping chest. There were times when extreme fatigue made it feel impossible for me to hold myself upright, and I’m sure there were psychological issues, too, especially when I was feeling especially low or clumsy. Standing tall, head up, chest open, was the last thing I felt like doing.
But if you are serious about tango, you have no choice. While some support is derived from the partner, it is not acceptable to hang on to him, to pull on him or expect him to hold you up.
This means you have to get your core working for you, using muscles that may have given up expecting calls to action from the malfunctioning brain. If I hold back, nothing works. Settling for half won’t do.
Perversely, I have discovered that I like the harder moves. Being challenged on a continual basis is vital for my motor rehabilitation. Take one move in particular, the pivot. This is an integral part of the ocho — the figure-of-eight that the woman completes in two steps across the front of, or around, the man, while keeping her upper body turned towards him.
We practised this technique often in tango classes, but I felt my stomach muscles contract with anxiety each time.
My body became a lumbering weight, a sackful of turnips that slipped and lurched inside my skin, pulling me off-centre, gluing me to the ground.
For months, I managed without the pivot entirely when I could get away with it, substituting small steps for that ball-of-the-foot spin that looks so beautiful and easy when executed by an expert.
But it was precisely this sense of a step too far that took me towards a breakthrough. I would not let it beat me. I wanted it to be hard, and I took huge pleasure in the impossible demands of the dance. It felt like an electrical charge, waking up nerve endings, switching on responses, pushing through the lumpen heaviness of my condition.
I refused to give up my heels, too. There is a school of thought which recommends that Parkinson’s dancers should avoid them — but isn’t that like recommending paper aeroplanes for pilots?
Yes, I passed on my highest black-and-silver beauties. But, while I wobbled at times on the dancefloor, I was rarely troubled by real instability or fear of falling in the same way that I was out in the wider world.
I am not the only person to recognise the transformational power of dance on Parkinson’s sufferers.
More than a dozen studies have shown its benefits, some on the very part of the brain that is otherwise damaged. One suggested that several step patterns in tango mimic the rehabilitation exercises designed to target gait difficulties and the ‘freezing’ problem; the music and the moves themselves serving as external ‘cues’ to replace the missing internal ones.
The degree of difficulty is crucial: tango is a ‘multi-tasking activity’ that demands ‘dynamic balance and involves turning, initiation of movement and moving at a variety of speeds’.
Another study recommends that dance should become part of a ‘comprehensive management plan’ for people with Parkinson’s. I used to think tango would never be available on prescription, but who knows? Perhaps one day it will be.
What I’ve discovered, above all, is that tango is holistic. The world of medical professionals seems to operate piecemeal, my symptoms becoming separate entities. I took my tremor and fatigue to the neurologist; my depression and insomnia to the GP; my digestive issues to the nurse. And yet, tango treats all of me simultaneously.
Motor difficulties and muscular tension are addressed by the music, by the demands of the rhythm and by the lead of my partner. Struggles with balance are eased as I work at core strength and maintaining my own upright axis. Close contact with another human being —contact that feels safe, respectful and equal — is a powerful counter to alienation and gloom.
I still have bleak weeks. Sometimes I am near-overwhelmed by exhaustion and confronted by a black hole of depression that yawns in front of me.
To get to the point where several hours of tango will replace fatigue with energy, despair with optimism, I have first to get past the fatigue and despair sufficiently just to arrive at the dance. Sometimes the getting past seems too difficult.
But it remains the bedrock of my treatment, a fundamental part of my well-being and the mainstay of my social life.
There will come a time when I can no longer do it — and then I may DJ instead — but for now, I know that stepping on to the dancefloor is an opportunity for transformation. Each time I do it, as the music takes hold, the process of renewal begins.
- The Tango Effect: Parkinson’s And The Healing Power Of Dance, by Kate Swindlehurst, will be published on April 2 by Unbound at £14.99. To pre-order a copy for £11.99 (a 20 per cent discount, p&p free) go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until May 31, 2020.
EARLIER RELATED FEATURES/PUBLICATIONS
PechaKucha presentation: 'The Tango Effect'
07 08 2018 Cambridge
That's Cambridge TV: 'How tango has helped one woman to accept her Parkinson's disease' 11 06 2018
'Dancing helps me to deal with my disease' Cambridge News 06 06 2018
'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect: my Year on the Dance Floor' Feature story: Connect (ARU Alumni magazine)
May 2018
'Once a Dancer, Always a Dancer' People Dancing: the Foundation for Community Dance 10 04 2018
Parkinson's & the Tango Effect medium.com 05 04 2018
'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect': ACNR online (print edition followed) 15 03 2018
'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect: Writing as Response to Diagnosis. Fight or Flight?' Melbourn Magazine Spring Issue 2018
Parkinson's Life: 'Tango Treatment: dance to improve your Parkinson's' 07 02 2018
Cambridge 105 Radio: drive with Julian Clover 'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect' 10 01 2018
PechaKucha presentation: 'The Tango Effect'
07 08 2018 Cambridge
That's Cambridge TV: 'How tango has helped one woman to accept her Parkinson's disease' 11 06 2018
'Dancing helps me to deal with my disease' Cambridge News 06 06 2018
'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect: my Year on the Dance Floor' Feature story: Connect (ARU Alumni magazine)
May 2018
'Once a Dancer, Always a Dancer' People Dancing: the Foundation for Community Dance 10 04 2018
Parkinson's & the Tango Effect medium.com 05 04 2018
'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect': ACNR online (print edition followed) 15 03 2018
'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect: Writing as Response to Diagnosis. Fight or Flight?' Melbourn Magazine Spring Issue 2018
Parkinson's Life: 'Tango Treatment: dance to improve your Parkinson's' 07 02 2018
Cambridge 105 Radio: drive with Julian Clover 'Parkinson's & the Tango Effect' 10 01 2018
DANCING WITH PARKINSON'S
This World Parkinson's Day we are delighted to share the long awaited performance film from the CID Project which took place at Poplar Union in July 2019, directed by Danielle Teale Dance and Jaka Škapin. 'A Single Thread' is inspired by the poetry of one of our fantastic dancers Kate who wrote these words in response to our process of enquiry. The performance included vignettes of dance exploration alongside live and recorded music performed and directed by Jaka Skapin. We hope you enjoy this moving and inspiring work and that it brings you hope and life on this difficult day of isolation #WorldParkinsonsDay #WorldParkinsonsDay2020
Argentine tango & Parkinson's: the view from the dance floor
Article published in Animated, the magazine of the Foundation for Community Dance Edition: Winter 2013
The article developed from Kate's collaboration with John Connatty, a tango teacher and tango event organiser and Dr Ellie McKenny, tango teacher and psychologist interested in inclusive communities . Given the growing evidence base of research on the therapeutic benefits of dance for people with Parkinson’s disease, they felt it was time to contribute to this discussion with observations and reflections from individuals on the inside; learning, teaching and dancing within a community.
Read the full article here
The article developed from Kate's collaboration with John Connatty, a tango teacher and tango event organiser and Dr Ellie McKenny, tango teacher and psychologist interested in inclusive communities . Given the growing evidence base of research on the therapeutic benefits of dance for people with Parkinson’s disease, they felt it was time to contribute to this discussion with observations and reflections from individuals on the inside; learning, teaching and dancing within a community.
Read the full article here
'Dancing with Kate': the film
Lovely broadcast journalist student Marie Vejvodova spent many patient hours in London and Cambridge filming the short documentary 'Dancing with Parkinson's' for her final assessment.
Watch the trailer here
And here's a link for the film
Lovely broadcast journalist student Marie Vejvodova spent many patient hours in London and Cambridge filming the short documentary 'Dancing with Parkinson's' for her final assessment.
Watch the trailer here
And here's a link for the film
Parkinson's disease & Argentine tango: a Personal View from the Dance Floor
In March 2014, an Open Day at the Barker Lab in the Brain Repair Centre, Cambridge included a poster outlining our experiences of Argentine tango and its impact on Parkinson's disease.
You can view the poster here:
In March 2014, an Open Day at the Barker Lab in the Brain Repair Centre, Cambridge included a poster outlining our experiences of Argentine tango and its impact on Parkinson's disease.
You can view the poster here:
