Time Slips Time Slips is an interactive, intergenerational community project that involves people who have Alzheimer's disease and related dementia with students in inventing stories together. Directed by Anne Davis Basting, Assistant Professor of English at UW Oshkosh and Adjunct Professor of English at UWM, Time Slips is designed to explore the creativity that continues in the face of Alzheimer's disease. Beginning in fall 1998, each week, for an hour a week, a team of undergraduate student volunteers have facilitated creative storytelling with a group of up to ten people with dementia at the adult care centers.
Students bring a provocative image, and ask the participants questions raised by the picture.
One student records responses and occasionally reads back the story as it unfolds. Students accept all answers, and the stories that emerge are a rich blend of memory and creativity, experience and illness. In this setting, people with dementia whose difficulties with language bar direct communication are often able to express themselves clearly in the creative realm of metaphor and symbolism. Discussions facilitated by leaders in community-based art, aging, and health care will follow each performance. Time Slips is housed at the Center and supported by the Brookdale Foundation, the Helen Bader Foundation, and Alterra.