 I'm from a place in New Zealand that I can pronounce. So three is all the way to five. Hello and welcome to everyone. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, we have two official languages. Te Reo is the language of indigenous Māori and English. Te Reo is widely used in our education system, in our public sector and in our news media. So much so that many New Zealanders, particularly younger ones, are fractionally bilingual without even realising it. Language has been bringing up Te Reo after decades and decades of it being banned from being spoken in our schools and in most of our public spaces. Re-serving Te Reo and bringing it up into an elevated state has just been one way that our nation has tried to address the massive inequities of colonisation. And language has been an important part of the journey that we have been on at voice artists. I'm going to attempt the tricky thing. I'm going to attempt the tricky thing. I'm going to attempt the tricky thing. We are a charitable trust which means that we are not a prophet. We work to support the development, the cognitive and social and emotional wellbeing of older people, including those living with dementia. We work with approximately 200 odd people every week in open and closed community settings. We like to say that the exercise of the mind, the voice and the body and the fact that joy and laughter was the medicine and the class of voice arts is the prescription. We are a pākehā-led organisation. Pākehā means white European and our practice is a white European practice. Over the last 18 months, as an organisation, we have tried to discover ways that we can make our service and our spaces more recognisable to Māori kaumātua, Māori elders, and more aligned with tiau Māori, tiau meaning the world view of Māori, and language was where we standed. We recently adopted in New Zealand a te reo term for dementia after a range of consultations would come out to identify that the word dementia does not sit well with them. It's a Western word that has a lot of fear and stigma attached to it. So, we now have, I'm going to use the pākehā-led name. Yes, beautiful. We now have this term, mate wai wai. Mate refers to being simple, aiming wai wai means to forget. And so now we talk about dementia, mate wai wai, or sometimes just mate wai wai. In that same consultation, Kaumātua will ask, what is it that you need to feel agency and dignity in the support services that are now wrapped around you with a diagnosis of mate wai wai? And this is what one of the names of key things that they ask for. Tīkana, phenomena, which directly translates to social connection. They also ask for tātumādua, which directly translates to spaces for the open and healthy expression of emotion. They also wanted spaces that practiced. So, tīkana is the process and the protocols that work around spaces and are culturally sensitive to Māori and the tīau view of the world. If you are doing the phenomena, social connection, that you need kāi food. And if you are doing kāi, you need kaakia, which is prayer to acknowledge land and ancestors. So what we recognise as an organisation is that we were doing all of those things, but we were calling it that. And so that is the first thing that we had done, is now, can you look back? Yeah, awesome. So now that's what we do, and not just the material that we use to raise awareness about classes which are pretty evident to attend, but also in the classes themselves. And we use the language without the translation. So we talk about, we're going to take a break for kai, let's do a kaakia, and we come back with no use in passing on our language. And even in spaces where we do not have Māori participants, or we just have Akihau participants, the feedback on that change has been significant for us because people feel like it adds an element to the space that feels important for New Zealanders as we transition through this very nifty time. Every so often we get resistance because we work with older people and these changes are happening very, very fast and some people do not like them, but very rarely do we as facilitators need to deal with that because the group generally always call it out. The second thing that we try to do, so language is easy, right? We can do that really efficiently. The other thing that we wanted to try and look at was how we align the practice. And that's our pattern, but I had the beautiful gift of meeting an Acherangi, a teacher of Indigenous Māori games, and discovered, of course, the clay's universal. And he taught us a couple of beautiful Māori games that we now use in our dementia spaces. I just want to talk you through one very quickly. So this is a hand activity that's used to teach children the life cycle of planting from seed to harvesting. There's eight movements, and the first one, tāhi, is the ground, the second one, rūa, is the seed that goes into the ground, and toro is the first sprout that comes up. All together it looks like this. Tāhi, rūa, tō, whā, rīma, onu, vitu, wil. So eight movements, and we teach this game, we teach the purpose of it, we teach it in te reo, and when you use your hands like this, I don't know if you have a bird yet, but you know, brush your teeth with your non-dawn and hand, it's really amazing for your brain. This game is like that on steroids, and for people particularly with dementia, sometimes the movement of hands becomes incredibly difficult, so if you can teach activities, it's beautiful work for the brain, and then we ask people to build with their vines closed, and it doesn't matter what you've got, it's just about feeling it because we are embodied practice, and then when we've got it, we ask you to speed it up so you do it super fast to the point where there's cognitive chaos, the brain has tried too hard and now I can't do it. We create spaces in the work that we do for a lot of that. People who are living with dementia struggle with that experience all of the time, and they feel out in the world that there is judgement attached to that, and try to create that same experience of working the brain, but when you get that onto chaos, you celebrate it. Somebody, a lovely woman in one of our classes, young onset dementia, described it like catching a ball, if you throw in your ball and I catch it, I put the ball and I feel good because I put the ball, but if you throw in your ball and it goes over and I have to lean my body and move my hand and I go like this and onto the floor and the ball drops just past my hand, I did not get to the ball. But look what I've done in my body, look at the stretch and look at the energy that I have used, and if you can make the not getting the ball a celebration which you constantly will do, then there is beauty in that and a space where people really work their brains in ways that they don't in other spaces because it's safe. We like to say that if everybody does this right, it's very boring, so please don't. The third thing, I think I've only got a couple of minutes to speak to her quickly, the third thing that we did, and this just wasn't in prostitution, this was across the wall where people were asking for a service that travels the length of the disease. We really nice that we were doing a lot of work with people with young onset in those first mild dementia stages that as they advanced with the disease and to advance, Mātia Waiwai, that the work that we were doing just wasn't a line of cognitive gains and exercises. They were no longer able to participate in, but what they could still do and love to do was to perform. And so we did a pilot project last year where we ditched all of the games and exercises and we simply went in as improvisers and all we facilitated was scene work because we know how to make our scene partners look good, how to keep them safe, how to follow them on a journey to go wherever they need to be in that moment and that's an incredibly powerful project to be involved in because no matter where you are on this journey of life, or Mātia Waiwai, the capacity to be playfully performative never goes away and it was beautiful to see the agency awarded to those people by coming in and working as improvisers. Final slide, I just want to talk very briefly on the fact that when we did that pilot project we also wanted to get some dada, daga, daga, dada, dada and it's really hard to have a whole lot of money and a lot of time which we didn't, but what we used was we used clinical observations where we had clinicians come in and sit with us and observe the participants of five key things. Did they witness joy, the use of imagination, social connection, the use of physical body, overall engagement? We agreed that three was the average, three was a good day for people and anything over three was an extension brought on by the engagement in the program and that piece of dada, dada, for the first time got our organisation Health Funding from Tofashima Wai so now we sit very firmly on the crossroads which we've always knew we did the crossroads of art, social education and health and it's a hellishly difficult place to be in but an incredibly important place to be in so I just do not want you to be at crossroads they want you to be one or the other but we are holding firmly on to this case.