Part 1: Jenny's Reflections

Jenny assists Emma with her dance classes at the SENSE centre in Robin Hood, a day centre for people with complex disabilities. Here she reflects on her experiences so far.

Names of participants have been changed.

I started assisting Emma with her dance classes at the Sense centre in Robin Hood back in early November 2021. She was halfway through the 12 weeks by the time I joined. I had been looking for volunteer work and this seemed like the perfect thing to get involved with given my background in dance. As a child I had trained in ballet at a prestigious dance school and had intended to make it my career, but I changed path and went to university to read Fine Art instead. I left the dance world for almost 2 decades, then came back to ballet classes and helped my sister with her ballet school. Then the pandemic hit, and we all know how this has changed our lives forever. In June 2021 I found Emma’s Dance Tribe classes, and this helped me restore my confidence which had been knocked by difficulties caused by the pandemic. But I wanted to give something back to the world, and I knew that volunteering would be a good way to do this. When Emma offered the volunteer work to me, I snapped it up, and I can’t thank her enough for it because it’s been life changing.

Every Monday at SENSE Robin Hood is completely different. Emma is an amazingly gifted leader of creative dance, and her enthusiasm and energy is unmatched. I don’t know how she does it, and as her assistant I often go home exhausted, and I don’t even lead the classes! She leads the classes with movement choreographed by her and the team at Ascendance, to uplifting pop songs. The dances are designed to make you use all parts of your body whilst feeling and interpretting the music.

We don’t know who is going to turn up to dance class week by week. Sometimes the centre is short staffed and sometimes it’s a full house. At first, we would get several wheelchair bound individuals, with support workers who pulled up a chair and sat down for the whole session.  Understandably they like to sit and maintain eye contact with the sighted individuals in wheelchairs - but we didn’t know for a while that most of the individuals can stand and walk a bit, aided by the support worker. Emma really wants everyone to participate because it’s good for everyone to get moving. It is particularly good to encourage the individuals to get out of their chairs to maintain muscle and bone strength, and now we have Caleb and Susan out of their wheelchairs regularly, which is fabulous. Sometimes Karen and James attend class, who are both able bodied. Karen is completely deaf with learning difficulties and James has Down’s Syndrome with learning difficulties. Karen is very happy to be in class and loves to have a laugh and play. Her smile is infectious, and she loves to communicate to us in sign, although personally my signing is hugely limited. James has to be the most expressive, creative and intuitive dancer at the centre. But he often forgets about the classes, so needs reminding to come, but he loves dancing and enjoys performing, making people laugh and having praise from us. Emma calls him her little Billy Elliott as he is very gifted. He needs the exercise, and it aids his digestion (he does lots of burps in class).

Over the weeks we have had to adapt and shift focus as we all get to know the individuals slowly, and what their needs are. Things can be chaotic, you can easily get distracted and multitasking is a given (you can sometimes end up being a dance teacher/ assistant and a support worker). Sometimes an individual for instance might want to hold your hand for the whole session, which is great but there’s always the curiosity about knowing what they can and can’t do. It’s tempting to stretch their arm out, and want them to benefit from stretching, but some don’t respond to that at all, and they don’t feel safe, or they just want to do things their own way. I noticed this with Susan and Caleb. Susan reached out for my hand but didn’t want me to do anything else with it. Caleb came to me to ask me (by guiding my hands) to put pressure on his arms and his head. I did this quite a lot for him on one session and the affect was amazing. Apparently, pressure is a comfort, and he was very relaxed after one very long period of head pressure and then enjoyed watching the rest of the dance session without asking for more head pressure. I felt very moved by my interaction with Caleb. I often get very moved by my experiences with the centre attendees. Kara is a very small and delicate lady who curls up into a ball to feel safe. When I first met her, I felt very protective of this tiny little, delicate soul. I feel a lot of things when I am at the centre...

Part 2 of Jenny's Reflections Coming Soon...