The Waiting Room: Using Indian Classical Dance to Explore Dramatic Role-Playing as a Teaching Tool for Cognitive Flexibility

This event is presented by the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS)’s Wellness Committee. GHHS is a program of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, whose mission is to promote compassionate, collaborative, and scientifically excellent care.

Shilpa Darivemula, in partnership with the Aseemkala initiative, utilizes Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam — a traditional Indian dance and its nine-dramatized emotions, hand gestures, and footwork — to innovatively introduce cognitive flexibility in clinical training. This workshop provides an immersive experience for all clinical staff and staff-in-training to understand their patients and themselves through telling stories with their bodies.

Wellness is more than just avoiding burnout; it is a dynamic process, requiring attention to one’s emotions, physical presence, environment, and responding accordingly. Recent evidence indicates that one factor contributing to clinical wellness is cognitive flexibility, which is defined as being able to hold multiple views or to reframe a thought, situation, or perspective. Greater cognitive flexibility is associated with higher resilience to negative life events and stress in adulthood and higher levels of creativity—two outcomes that further enhance the dynamic process of maintaining wellbeing.

Learn:

• about the concept of cognitive flexibility and its relationship to wellness training in clinical settings
• how the body, its movements, and the emotional mind all play a role in impacting cognitive flexibility and can improve awareness and flexibility.
• to apply the use of cultural performative arts as a technique to practice embodied cognitive flexibility.
• to utilize this technique to improve interpersonal communication between diverse patients, peers, and supervisors.

Free & open to all healthcare team members and students.

For more details and to register, visit the Gold Foundation website.