Imagine holding a show ticket, not quite sure what to expect.
You walk into a once-familiar room that now looks nothing like the theater, town hall, cafeteria, or auditorium you’re used to. Music plays in the background; a mixture of classics you recognize and a few you’d love to know. As you settle in and other audience members grab their seats, a middle-aged man in a black hat walks onto the stage wearing a black t-shirt with the word ‘Love’ boldly emblazoned across his chest. His jeans and a pair of earthy clogs look somewhat out of place for a live theater show. “Am I in the right place?” you wonder.
The man’s voice booms to you. “Hello, I’m sure this probably isn’t what you were expecting.”
Welcome to the Changing Aging tour, where we infuse insight and depth with music and play in a format called non-fiction theater. The ChangingAging tour is a live-stage celebration of aging, featuring Dr. Bill Thomas, world renowned for his radical innovations and thought leadership in elder care, and his team: Dr. Jennifer Carson, Samite Mulondo, Nate Silas Richardson, Kyrie Carpenter, and Namarah McCall.
The tour explores the possibility of accepting and maintaining life within healthy community living until death. The cast is intentionally intergenerational and diverse; exactly reflective of the culture we hope to inspire, one that no longer segregates elders from the rest of society.
The tour features two distinct performances and an interactive lobby experience before and after the shows.You will learn what it means to engage with elders living with alzheimer’s and dementia and how they’d like for you to understand what we all search for. You will feel how the journey of life has caused you to be molded by experience and transition, and you will see how we have chosen to believe what is the best way to continue in life’s most dangerous game.
The ChangingAging Tour likes to tell you the truth, and we share those truths in stories – some are personal, others we’ve gotten permission to share. Those stories have made us laugh, they have made us cry and they have made us want to grow. We hope this happens for you and in every city we touch. More information about the tour, tickets, dates, location can be found at ChangingAging.org/tour.
Namarah A. McCall, cast member of the ChangingAging tour, is a Philadelphia-born singer-songwriter and creative consultant exploring the connections of social exchange through performance art.