Moving along: A co-produced graphic novel about Parkinson’s dance

Meet Hugo, Karen, Alma, Helene, Anne-Marie, Poul, Lone, and Eskild, who go to Parkinson’s dance class together. They are characters in this graphic novel, which is based on many stories about Parkinson’s. The stories come from participants in Parkinson’s dance who have talked about how dance involves bodily, aesthetic experiences, including the feeling of bubbles in their bodies and flying together. Dancing brings joy, energy, and community, and thereby strengthens the will to live, all important when a chronic illness turns your world upside down.
This book, a co-produced research-based graphic novel, is designed for use in the fields of arts and health, medical humanities, graphic medicine, and narrative medicine. It is also written for people with Parkinson’s, or other chronic diseases, and their families. The book invites dialogue about the existential dimensions of chronic illness, especially Parkinson’s, and long-term caregiving.

Preface
In a nutshell, this book is about Parkinson’s dance, that is, special dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease (or Parkinsonism), which may include dancing with their partners or other relatives. It is also about the potential healing of telling and sharing stories about the challenges of life through dance and the other arts, resulting in this book, an example of graphic medicine.
We find that the Parkinson’s dance classes offer the dancers ways of creating bodily and aesthetic experiences together that can have great significance in terms of living a meaningful life with Parkinson’s. We hope the book is informative and inviting. In particular, we hope that the book’s topics, narratives, and characters will touch and move you as a reader, providing insight and promoting empathy about living with a chronic disease.
The book stems from a research project titled “Dancing with Parkinson’s,” which took place from 2019 to 2022. The project is a collaboration between Roskilde University, Tivoli Ballet School, and the Parkinson’s Association in Denmark. A group of people who have Parkinson’s and their partners/relatives, who go to Parkinson’s dance, participated in the project as co-researchers. The co-researchers created knowledge together with three university researchers in a series of arts-based story-telling workshops in 2019-2020, where we worked with stories about dance as part of everyday life with Parkinson’s. The workshops were based on prior fieldwork at five dance classes and interviews with 43 co-researchers. The graphic novel section in this book is based on the knowledge, ideas and materials co-produced in the workshops. Here, we developed the central characters and their actions through collaborative, artistic and iterative processes. The Parkinson’s dance class instructors played a valuable part in the project, helping the university researchers to build relationships with, and recruit, co-researchers, sharing their knowledge about dance practice, and contributing to the project’s symposium and conference.
Many committed participants in the research project have contributed to the content of the book – it is truly a joint work. It has been a difficult balancing act to analyze, select, and intertwine stories as a way of making what we researchers call “composite narratives” based on the many unique stories that have been told in the research project. We are thankful and incredibly pleased with the contributions from the fieldwork and workshops, which have led to this book. Hopefully, we have brought the various ideas together in a diverse work that represents many “different voices”.
We are grateful to Peter Lang Publishing for inviting us to join the Medical Humanities: Criticism & Creativity book series with an English version. We thank Tivoli Ballet School and the Parkinson’s Association, Denmark for a rewarding partnership. Last but not least, thanks go to The Velux Foundations for funding the research project through their HUMpraxis program, which focuses on new forms of collaboration between practice and research in the humanities and social sciences.