Dance for Parkinson’s Australia (DPA) provides high quality services to people living with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), partners, carers, friends, and the broader community of seniors. Established in Australia in 2013, our goal is to provide opportunities to improve quality of life and encourage arts, health and well-being in creative ageing. Our primary activities focus on providing accessible dance classes for the Parkinson’s community and broader communities of seniors. We also provide training and professional development and are leaders in creative ageing best practice. 2023 celebrates ten years of delivering the program, classes and workshops in Australia.
For people living with Parkinson’s disease, rigorous dance classes led by trained professional teaching artists are becoming internationally acknowledged as an important, beneficial, movement-based therapeutic intervention that is supported by published research. DPA is an affiliate of the internationally recognised Dance for PD program, which originated in New York at the Mark Morris Dance Centre in 2001.
Partnerships and connections have been developed across the arts and health sectors and include the Opera Australia, Queensland Ballet, DanceNorth, the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Dance Company, Belconnen Arts Centre, Arts Health Network Queensland, Arts Health Network NSW/ACT, Ausdance, MADE Tasmania, the University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, state Parkinson’s organisations, and leading neurologists and researchers.
Dance for Parkinson’s Australia (DPA) is a public benevolent institution and charity with DGR status.