18 min
Roger Hill recounts his life and work, the dementia dimension, the undefinable and the role of remembering Listening with...
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You’re listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool: a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15-minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more.
In this episode, storyteller and broadcaster Roger Hill recounts his life and work, the dementia dimension and the role of remembering.
We started with the idea that this would happen: that there would be a recording of some thoughts relating to the current Bluecoat project. The cultural force that is Roger Hill has actually gone into a number of territories. I mean, throughout there's been education, but also there's been the arts, both as performer, but also in that kind of workshop facilitator, somebody who helps other people to do their own art, and the other people itself has branched out hugely from what started out really is working with young people mainly of school, age to people older than that, through youth theatre and then moving on to older people, to very old people in fact, to people in there they're third age, but also to much younger children, so that now the work concentrates, for example, on babies.
So that spread out, and also it spread out geographically - what became something that was pioneered in the North West of England, all around Liverpool and beyond, then moved out through the rest of the country, through the national associations that I was involved in, and then went abroad to Europe connections and then round the world couple of times. So there'll be the geographic expansion as well.
If you said what's been consistent through that, I'd say: one, the enabling of other people to do things. The consistent offering of information, skills, and experiences that would help people to grow and develop individually.
I think also a real sense that there is a lot to be learnt from the other, from not this here now, but from the different things, the things that are culturally other than us and therefore a real hunger, a real taste for always finding something new and different to engage with and probably looking from this perspective, which I wouldn't have been able to do a few years ago a real interest in the way in which the individual engages with the wider reality. I suppose what we now call neuroscience, but the validity of certain kinds of personal experiences, which has fed into the other thing that runs through it all is writing.
Reading, writing, researching have been something that I've been able to do, even when there's been no other kind of work around. So I don't think I'd find it very easy to give myself a job description or job title, but it must have something to do with adventurer in ideas.
The one thing that people have always associated dementia with is a memory loss. It's a cliché. It's been going for as long as people have identified this thing called dementia, and Alzheimer's to a certain extent. I think it's really important at this stage of history to unpick the cliché, which is that you know that the person is experiencing dementia because they've lost their ability to recall. They seem to have lost their ability to deal with the present.
And that for me is the shift. It is indeed about the extent to which certain experiences which have happened in the past, aren't available anymore. But it's also about the ability to simply negotiate the present, even if those memories aren't there.
One of the things that I think was very important was the idea that people would develop the capability - in fact, they automatically have the capability thrust upon them - of getting through daily life, without reference to their past experiences, or to their recent experiences and things that they've recently learnt. This is a state which we're all actually getting into more or less because we do don't we. We spend a lot of time outsourcing our memory to our phones and to our computers and to our hard drives.
So basically, we're having a bit of a reality crisis
You’re listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool: a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15-minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more.
In this episode, storyteller and broadcaster Roger Hill recounts his life and work, the dementia dimension and the role of remembering.
We started with the idea that this would happen: that there would be a recording of some thoughts relating to the current Bluecoat project. The cultural force that is Roger Hill has actually gone into a number of territories. I mean, throughout there's been education, but also there's been the arts, both as performer, but also in that kind of workshop facilitator, somebody who helps other people to do their own art, and the other people itself has branched out hugely from what started out really is working with young people mainly of school, age to people older than that, through youth theatre and then moving on to older people, to very old people in fact, to people in there they're third age, but also to much younger children, so that now the work concentrates, for example, on babies.
So that spread out, and also it spread out geographically - what became something that was pioneered in the North West of England, all around Liverpool and beyond, then moved out through the rest of the country, through the national associations that I was involved in, and then went abroad to Europe connections and then round the world couple of times. So there'll be the geographic expansion as well.
If you said what's been consistent through that, I'd say: one, the enabling of other people to do things. The consistent offering of information, skills, and experiences that would help people to grow and develop individually.
I think also a real sense that there is a lot to be learnt from the other, from not this here now, but from the different things, the things that are culturally other than us and therefore a real hunger, a real taste for always finding something new and different to engage with and probably looking from this perspective, which I wouldn't have been able to do a few years ago a real interest in the way in which the individual engages with the wider reality. I suppose what we now call neuroscience, but the validity of certain kinds of personal experiences, which has fed into the other thing that runs through it all is writing.
Reading, writing, researching have been something that I've been able to do, even when there's been no other kind of work around. So I don't think I'd find it very easy to give myself a job description or job title, but it must have something to do with adventurer in ideas.
The one thing that people have always associated dementia with is a memory loss. It's a cliché. It's been going for as long as people have identified this thing called dementia, and Alzheimer's to a certain extent. I think it's really important at this stage of history to unpick the cliché, which is that you know that the person is experiencing dementia because they've lost their ability to recall. They seem to have lost their ability to deal with the present.
And that for me is the shift. It is indeed about the extent to which certain experiences which have happened in the past, aren't available anymore. But it's also about the ability to simply negotiate the present, even if those memories aren't there.
One of the things that I think was very important was the idea that people would develop the capability - in fact, they automatically have the capability thrust upon them - of getting through daily life, without reference to their past experiences, or to their recent experiences and things that they've recently learnt. This is a state which we're all actually getting into more or less because we do don't we. We spend a lot of time outsourcing our memory to our phones and to our computers and to our hard drives.
So basically, we're having a bit of a reality crisis
18 min