Dementia, bilingualism and the insights of performance-based research

Abstract

First paragraph: As memories unravel and disappear with the onset of dementia, what the arts often do best is preserve some sense of an irreducible self. From Shakespeare’s King Lear, to the 2014 award winning film Still Alice, and later this year the much-anticipated film adaptation of Florian Zeller’s play, The Father, creative, performance-based forms offer a compelling means of imagining the fate of individuals as they live with this condition. And yet, although loss of language skills is understood as a common effect of dementia, there have been few arts-based approaches to understanding the specific challenges that arise in the context of bi- and multi-lingualism