KANSAS CITY, Mo, September 29, 2020: In July 2020, Charlotte Street Foundation funded 10 public art projects for local artists to express themselves and bring together communities in socially distant ways throughout the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the Art Where You Are At recipients, local artist Julia Vering, is set to perform Re-Enactments this Friday, October 2nd outside of the Village Church and Child Development Center parking lot at 9900 Mission Road in Leawood, KS for an exclusive dementia day program attendees and collaborators and their families.
Re-Enactments is an experimental, multimedia performance Vering made in collaboration with adults experiencing dementia, for a socially-distanced audience of her collaborators and residents experiencing memory-loss. When she is not performing as Unicorns in the Snow, she works as a hospice social worker in the KC metro area. She specifically wanted to perform for residents of nursing facilities stating, “Residents have been hit the hardest in the COVID-19 epidemic. Not only with morbidity (40% total of all deaths), but in terms of restrictions on their movement, restrictions on their ability to see loved ones, and sometimes even restrictions on visits from their hospice nurse or chaplain.” Julia hopes the performances celebrate the strengths of her collaborators with dementia, provide an escape from reality for facility residents in the audience, and to inspire other nursing facility staff to utilize drama therapy techniques.
The first performance of the psychedelic musical that reflects experiences from adults with dementia was launched on August 4th in a storage shed behind Life Care Center nursing facility in Kansas City, KS for the residents who sat outside 10 feet apart with masks on. This Friday, the second performance gets expands for attendees who wish to drive-in to the Village Church and Child Development Center parking lot to watch the performance from the safety of their own vehicles.
The final performance will take place October 20th at Our Place Senior Care, a small memory care facility in Shawnee, KS. Vering will perform masked and distanced from the audience of residents, who will also be socially distanced. All performances will not be open to the public due to COVID-19 precautions and the desire to keep audiences small for safety.
ABOUT JULIA VERING
Julia Vering is a Kansas City-based performance artist, musician, animator and licensed clinical social worker. She earned a BA from the Evergreen State College studying electronic music, experimental animation and social work, and a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Kansas.
Vering’s projects include collaborations with residents of nursing homes, facilitating music recording workshops for incarcerated youth, an Andy Warhol funded Rocket Grant to produce a multimedia pieces “You Live Here Too” and “The Understudy,” experimental multimedia performance pieces featuring a collaboration with early stage dementia as narrators, dancers, and actors via duo video projections on two screens. She performed the piece in conjunction with a screening of her drama therapy work for an audience of the participants with dementia, their family members, and the community to celebrate their strengths.
Vering creates intensely personal introverted work to share with the public, reconciling her aptitude for listening to and fostering a sense of being understood in others with the longing to be understood herself. She currently works as a hospice social worker and conducts bi-monthly experimental video-based drama therapy with individuals with early stage dementia. Vering continues to perform locally and nationally as Unicorns in the Snow, pushing the bounds of storytelling.
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street identifies the needs and fuels the evolution of an ever-changing multidisciplinary arts ecosystem, acting as its primary provocateur. Charlotte Street cultivates the contemporary, the exceptional, and the unexpected in the practice of artists working in and engaging with the Kansas City art community. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $1.1 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
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