PARACHUTE: The Coney Island Performance Festival: Memory Arts Café at Parachute

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Memory Arts Café at Parachute

Memory Arts Café at Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival A special session of the Memory Arts Café will take place as part of Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival, 10:30 to 11:30am, on Saturday, October 13th, at the New York Aquarium. People living with dementia, their family members and the general public are encouraged to attend the workshop. Participants will perform classic poems with Coney Island and ocean themes and create an original poem inspired the “Alien Stingers,” Jelly Exhibit. Poet Gary Glazner will lead the session.

Memory Arts Café is a new series of free art events for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, their caregivers and the general public and is co-produced by New York Memory Center and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.

Founded in 1983, the mission of New York Memory Center is to help older adults who have cognitive, physical, and emotional limitations, to maintain or improve their level of functioning so that they may enjoy their later years at home and within the community. Through an innovative wellness center, New York Memory Center meets the needs of individuals living with Alzheimer’s and related dementia disorders and their Caregivers.

Gary Glazner founded the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (APP) in 2004. The APP was awarded the 2012 MetLife Foundation Creativity and Aging in America Leadership Award in the category of Community Engagement. The National Endowment for the Arts listed the APP as a “best practice” for their Arts and Aging initiative. NBC's “Today” show, NPR's “All Things Considered” and Voice of America have featured segments on the APP.

Our Mission

Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival is a community-based literary organization. The cornerstone of Parachute's work is a free two-day festival featuring renowned poets and writers reading at the New York Aquarium after hours, in the Alien Stingers Jellyfish Exhibit. Throughout the year, Parachute also offers creative writing workshops and innovative poetic events.

Parachute celebrates Coney Island’s vivid literary present and past through readings, letterpress broadsides, workshops and attention to the literary luminaries that have walked across Coney’s shores and been inspired by it—Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, and Henry Miller, to name but a few.

About the Artistic Director

Amanda Deutch is a native New Yorker with Coney Island roots. She first got the sand in her shoes standing in her nana's kitchen while the adults talked about "The Half Moon Hotel," which was up the block from their apartment on 29th street in Coney Island. The words, "Half Moon Hotel," and "Coney Island" rang like mysterious poetry to her nine year-old ears. Amanda has had poetry published widely. Some of her recent work can be found in Esque Mag online and Boog City. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and in 2007, she was awarded a Footpaths to Creativity fellowship on Flores Island in the Azores. She lives in Brooklyn where she facilitates writing workshops, works at the Coney Island History Project and is a third generation skee-ball player.