Aliveness Through Arts

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Judith-Kate Friedman stands singing with her guitar at the Aging in America conference in 2004.    Gary Wagner Photo   [/caption]

by Angela Downs

How do we fortify a community?

This is so often the question on the minds of counselors, shop owners, parents, medicine workers, artists, farmers, and many others. One major sector of society that needs consideration, and at this time receives far less fortification than deserved, are the seniors and elders of our communities. Judith-Kate Friedman is the founder of Songwriting Works, steward of Myth Legacy Project, coach of Aliveness Through Arts, and an award winning performing artist. She plans to be active in her truth by writing songs with elders in care facilities, and guiding others to their authenticity through coaching.

A college major at Oberlin conservatory, Friedman studied ethnomusicology,  produced concerts, wrote songs, played with other musicians, and was part of ensemble singing. After graduating, Friedman got music gigs from friends in social work with elders in long-term care settings.

”I was originally playing some popular music, but mostly folk music from different parts of the world. I was doing a combination of blues ballads, traditional ballads, and originals.” Friedman said.

She began writing with people in the late ‘70s after a hand injury. Funded by the California Arts Council, Friedman was hired on to a team of artists who were serving elders out of the San Francisco Institute on Aging.

“It was the team of artists, the mentoring, the field notes that we shared, and the different kinds of training in how you talk about illness, dementia, Parkinson's, stroke, death and dying. What  are these topics for us, not only as musicians, but there was a mask maker, a silk painter, a muralist, a clown, a theater artist, a poet,” she said.

Family members of the elderly wanted to be involved, so they made a pilot program for families.

“They started getting awakened in their own confidence and creativity about what they could do with their loved ones,” she added.

Friedman articulated a whole methodology, which is Songwriting Works.

“I wrote that methodology backwards. It's reverse engineered based upon articulating what I had come to do in the field and replicated over and over for a number of years.”

After moving to Port Townsend, the National Endowment for the Arts launched a new grant program, 25K to Creative Aging in America. Friedman’s Songwriting Works was one of 14 organizations that received the grant. At that time they were not yet a non profit organization, and were sponsored by Arts Northwest, a service organization based out of Port Angeles. With the grant and sponsorship, Songwriting Works was allowed to establish programs here and train other artists. Six artists were trained on that program.

Reports of elders remembering the choruses to their songs after losing short-term memory brought about two different research projects. One is now called the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Life in California, and the second includes artists from five states who came here to Fort Worden to train with Friedman.

After fanning back out to everyone's home regions, the results of their work with elders residing in low-income, HUD housing communities for seniors showed even more efficacy.

“There's great repetition in the folk process, and it is often nonlinear, so it turns out to be a very effective kind of thing to have group songwriting with people who have memory loss,” Friedman said.

Since the pandemic, there hasn’t been much work locally, but Friedman hopes in 2025 they will get started in town, or in the county.

Judith-Kate is also working with people in small groups and individually to free their voices—their spoken voices, their creative writing voices, as well as their instrumental musical voices—through a coaching she calls Aliveness Through Arts.

“It's the essence of everything that I do, it’s about supporting aliveness through arts and using arts to support aliveness.  I'll always help people connect with the ancient technologies of unleashing intuition, listening, and communing with the living world.”

Friedman studied somatics with Anna Halprin, learning her unique integration process.

“The dance we were doing was what she called movement ritual, akin to some kinds of yoga or positions, asanas, the inside-out experience. You move for 20 minutes and then draw what you moved in order to then see what it told you. Move until you feel the changes, then draw them out, bring it till it just naturally comes to an end and then to something else and then what is that something else? I use these tools and paths to assist others in finding them. This is why I became a coach,” Friedman shared.

When shared in a group people may have similar colors or shapes that echoed each other which Friedman refers to, as showing us our collective existence.

If you are interested in working with Judith-Kate in her coaching sessions, want to check out the legacy work, or are interested in her work with writing music with elders, check out these websites:

SongWritingWorks.org, AlivenessThroughArts.net, and MythSingerLegacy.org