September 2025 Edition: Dance as a Healing Art
Photo credit: Carole De Santis
Dear friend,
The arts heal. This September, along with global leaders in the arts and health field, DanceStream Projects team and community partners embraced a celebration and amplification of this well-known yet largely under-valued fact at the UNGA Healing Arts Week. As Dr. Nisha Sajnani, founding co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, shared “the arts are not peripheral to wellbeing, but central to how we prevent disease, recover from illness, and sustain connection and dignity throughout life.”
In our work through dance in partnership with communities of older adults and people living with dementia, we see this daily. We witness individuals take risks as their physical mobility enhances, they take ownership of their creative voice to drive co-creative ideas and embrace the value and importance of their presence as part of a community they helped build.
It was truly remarkable to help illustrate this in a way that overpowers words at the UNGA Healing Arts Week Research Symposium on September 22 - through dance.
Moments after Dr. Daisy Fancourt, epidemiologist from University College London, Director of the WHO Centre on Arts and Health and unequivocal leader in the field, in her keynote address, emphasized the extensive evidence on how arts engagement has real quantifiable impact on health trajectories with significant health economic benefits, 20 LGBTQIA+ elders and allies performed a dance they created in front of an audience of >400. Ending in a standing ovation, the dance took the audience on a journey showcasing, through beautifully eloquent choreography, how arts engagement saves lives.
As one of the older adult dancers from the Queens Center for Gay Seniors who performed this week states:
Dancing is universal and communal. This is something everybody can and needs to do in order to not only enhance our health, but enhance international solidarity and community and bring us together. - Susan L.
Importantly, aside from housing the UNGA Healing Arts Week, September is also World Alzheimer’s Month, holding a shining light to the topic of brain health and dementia.
In this month’s issue we invite you to celebrate the role of the arts in brain health with us: dive into the UNGA Healing Arts Week celebrations, check out highlights from our culminating event with the RSS Adult Day Program for Memory Loss and listen to Mark Timmons, artist, advocate and person living with dementia reflect on the role the arts play in supporting dignity and purpose for people navigating a diagnosis of dementia.
In light and care,
