Jordi Font Comas d’Argemir |
Barcelona (EFE) smile and activity
The benefits of art on mental and physical health, which will feature this Thursday in an international symposium on this subject at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), are palpable in this woman who radiates life in the theater of the Cavall School Bernat, in the Sants-Montjuïc district of Barcelona.
She is part of a group of about ten elderly people who, by medical indication, attend a theater session every Wednesday morning together with a group from this school.
“My doctor told me why I didn’t sign up for the theater, that they were setting up some sessions, and I was then very sad and tearful and I signed up, and now I’m very happy; and the doctor, happy to see me so happy, because the truth is that before it was all tears and now here I have a great time”, says María Rosa.
Her recent history is a chronicle of illness and widowhood: she suffered two strokes, then the illness that ended her husband’s life and later an inevitable mourning, which she also did not want to burden other relatives close to – “everyone already has their job ”, he affirms-, so the theater gave him an outlet.
The theater and also the children: “They are very beautiful and affectionate, you can hug them, they make you love them, there is one that a lady would take home”, jokes the woman, still with energy for irony after a session that has lasted about an hour.
In the first part, the group has practiced warm-up exercises with music -such as moving the navel to the sound of “No controles” by Olé Olé- and in the second they have taken the stage, by small mixed groups of schoolchildren and the elderly, to represent Free-form various scenes, like a day at the beach or an adventure in the jungle.
The session is orchestrated by a team from Plàudite Teatre, a performing arts school that develops 6 projects of this type (3 in Barcelona and 3 in L’Hospitalet) among older people and fourth or fifth grade students.
For the director of Plàudite Teatre, Eugenia Delgado, theater is “the tool” that makes it easier for the elderly to have “physical movement, creative memory and social relationships”, both among their contemporaries and with those who could be their grandchildren.
elderly and lonely
It is from the CAP that a specific profile is encouraged to sign up for this activity, which is usually that of a person over 65 years of age, who lives alone and who has traits of depression, sadness or little social relationship with the environment, highlights the nurse of the CAP of Manso of Barcelona Gemma Fanlo.
This and other health arts projects that are “prescribed” from some primary schools of the Catalan Health Institute (ICS) follow a scientific methodology, so the results are measured among the participants before and after the start of the activities. and, according to Fanlo, “significant changes” in mood are usually observed in the first sessions.
In addition, the inclusion of the arts in health is one more way to avoid medicalization in light mental health problems.
“There are disorders in which the medication cannot be avoided, but there are traits of anxiety or depression or sadness that, with different interventions, may be susceptible to not involving pharmacological treatment”, remarks the nurse.
For Jaume Hubermann, 82, the activity could not be more appropriate because, after all, “life is a theater”.
Before retiring, he worked in a nursing home, so he knows better than anyone, he says, that it is “more pleasant” to do theater with children than with older people, because they give “much more energy.”
For the students of the Cavall Bernat school, many of whom have their grandparents far away because they live in other countries, the affection of this group of elderly people is a gift.
“We feel as if we were family, because we talk together, they explain things to us about their grandchildren and what the neighborhood was like before, and we explain to them what we do at school”, sums up the young Aina.
