Performing the Lived Experience of Dementia: Revealing Humanity through Evidence-Based Collaborative Creation

Abstract:Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experience of Dementia (RTC) is a five-year collaboration between education, arts, and health care that uses community-based, arts-engaged, participatory research approaches, including theatre, to work with participants with the lived experience of dementia. This article is based on interviews with the three project leads as well as one project participant, and details RTC’s key elements of creative practice, its core values that influence collaborative creation processes, and the ways RTC differs from common models of working with people living with dementia. Examples of the project’s theatre and performance activities and practices are woven throughout.