Dance Capers in Noosa – RIPE Dance continues to thrive
From Gail Hewton:
Reflecting on 2024, it’s been a full and incredibly busy year leading community classes, providing dance teacher training and partnering with university researchers – all with a focus on dance for older people for health & wellbeing.
In the 13th year of my community practice, RIPE Dance, I continued to offer 5 weekly tailored dance sessions for older adults of various abilities including for active & agile seniors, active seniors and seniors with mobility & balance challenges. Both mobility classes include people living with Parkinson’s. This year saw, across all classes, 134 choreographed sequences as well as a variety of creative tasks and cool downs. We explored a broad range of dance genres and styles with a wide selection of music to match. In Mobility classes we – warmed up with Fleetwood Mac, Manhattan Transfer, Henry Mancini and John Denver; ‘took it to the limits’ waltzing with The Eagles; strutted and go-go’ed with Leo Sayer who made us ‘…feel like dancing’; stepped out to Latin and Cuban rhythms including partnered salsa; went surfing with The Beach Boys; played in Las Vegas with Elvis; paid tribute to our ANZACs with Vera Lynn; went on a Summer Holiday with Cliff Richard and lots more.
Of our total 80 RIPE Dance participants, 55 will be gathering this Thursday for our annual RIPE Dance Christmas lunch. It’s always a great event, the one day of the year when we all come together and feel part of a bigger dance family – we celebrate our collective achievements and remember those dear dance friends we have lost during the year.
RIPE Dance’s sister organisation: Gold Moves Australia – progressing the field
Training – Together with my colleague Julie Chenery, through Gold Moves Australia, we delivered training for dance teachers to develop and apply relevant gerontological knowledge and upskill to work safely and effectively with older cohorts. In addition to our Foundational Course we held our inaugural Introduction to Falls Prevention through Dance for Adults & Older Adults Mini Course. We are delighted to know we now have some fabulous, experienced dance teachers across Queensland, NSW and Victoria, who are establishing dance programs for more older people to access.
Research – Julie and I have also had a wonderful time delivering 40 classes in Mango Hill (north of Brisbane) across two 10-week programs with ‘active’ participants over 65 years who we have not worked with previously. This is part of a Pilot Randomised Control Trial in partnership with researchers from University of Sydney’s Institute for Musculoskeletal Health who gained funding from the Australian Physiotherapy Association to look at the effect of our tailored approach on health, wellbeing and fall risk. The researchers subsequently gained further University funding to extend the study so we will be delivering another two 10-week programs in a different Brisbane location with different groups of participants in the first half of 2025. So we likely won’t see the research findings until late 2025. All very exciting with the possibility of scaling up the program so we will be looking for more dance teachers to incorporate a falls prevention focus in your offerings. In the meantime, you can read the findings of the first research study in an open access paper looking at participant engagement in which we collaborated with University of Sydney – Haynes et al. 2023. “It doesn’t feel like exercise”: a realist process evaluation of factors that support long-term attendance at dance classes designed for healthy ageing. Frontiers in Public Health, Volume 11- https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1284272
RIPE Dance and Gold Moves Australia sends everyone in the dance for health & wellbeing community best wishes for a relaxing, joyous and safe festive season and a rewarding and productive 2025!
. 