At monthly Berlin dance.
For a small group of elderly people, an afternoon tea dance provides a few hours of respite and a window into the past.
A piece of Black Forest gateau is halfway towards his mouth when Herbert Wollschläger's eyes light up. He puts the fork down and motions for someone to ease him out of his chair and on to the dancefloor.
"That's a foxtrot," he says, raising his index finger in recognition of the big band music that has just started up. "That's my sort of dance."
The 78-year-old retired electrical engineer who has a form of dementia, probably Alzheimer's, takes his cue from a carer and suddenly Herbert's laboured shuffle has disappeared and they are gliding across the parquet floor. He hums to the familiar music, his eyes wide and smiling.
At the Dance Cafe Wilhelmine in the south-eastern Berlin district of Kreuzberg around 20 elderly people - the oldest is 98 - have been brought together to escape for a few hours the dementia that shapes their lives, trapping them in a sequenceless limbo.
"Music is like a silver bullet for those with dementia," says Christa Matter, psychologist and manager of Berlin's Alzheimer's Society, which hosts the dances every month.
"People with dementia are constantly being told they can't do this, they're doing that wrong, but when they're dancing they can suddenly move with much more confidence, they know the steps, the music triggers something in them. They might not remember the names of their spouses or children any more, but they haven't forgotten how to dance."
"The dance cafe makes them feel validated as people again," she adds. "It gives them the sense that 'I still exist' as a person."
These theories have been endorsed by the American neurologist Oliver Sacks who, in Musicophilia, his study of music and the human brain, talks of music's ability to transcend Alzheimer's. "Music of the right kind can serve to orient and anchor a patient when almost nothing else can," says the author.
The tea dances, which now take place across Germany, started several years ago. They were triggered initially by Alzheimer's specialists' recognition that patients with the disease were often able to recite poetry they had learned in the past - even if they could no longer speak. Psychologists worked on the theory that music might also belong to an almost indestructible form of memory even in those with advanced dementia. "That turned out to be the case," says Matter. "From what we observe here, it would seem that the response to music is preserved even when dementia is in a very progressed form."
When Herbert returns from the dancefloor a carer dabs the sweat from his upper lip. He starts tucking into a half-eaten raspberry flan, until the carer intervenes: "That's Ursula's."
Little is known about Ursula Richter, who sits opposite dressed in a copper-threaded scarf with henna-dyed hair, lost in her own world, and says little. "From photographs we know she was a good-time girl who travelled and danced a lot, and her wardrobe has lots of glitzy clothes in it," says her carer, Andrea Müller.
Asked if she has always liked dancing, Ursula smirks and mutters the name of a Berlin cafe famous in the 1950s as a "phone bar" whose patrons used bakelite telephones on each table to flirt and make contact with each other.
Then she points to Wolfschläger, with whom she is in a supervised flatshare, and says "He's my boyfriend," and beckons him to dance with her to Tulips from Amsterdam.
As the afternoon draws on, more snippets of the dancers' biographies emerge, piecemeal - randomly, but enough to give the impression of the people behind their ravaging disabilities.
"I dance at the Rose Theatre and at the Plaza," says Hildegard Gehrmann, sipping apple juice, who says she is in her early 20s but who was born in 1923. "Polka, tango, foxtrot, you name it, though step dancing is my favourite." She was indeed, say her carers, a professional dancer at the two leading Berlin variety theatres, both of which were badly damaged during the second world war, and closed down in 1944.
Wollschläger taps his thigh as Besame Mucho starts up. "Each time I cling to your kiss, I hear music divine, Besame mucho, Hold me my darling and say that you'll always be mine," sings Frank Sinatra, and Wollschläger starts talking about his wife, whose name he can no longer remember, and then about his time in the Hitler Youth movement, when they "had parties for Uncle Adolf".
This is Berlin after all and, like the city, all the dancers have a lot of their own history, much of which is prised open by the music as if it were a tin-opener to their memories. Some volunteer their memories of when the Berlin Wall went up, another, a Russian woman, tells how she met her soldier husband when he was in Stalingrad, a third talks of being expelled from Silesia as if it had happened yesterday.
"When we go dancing, they are simply more alert, much chattier and keener to make contact with others and with each other, and a lot of things come out," says Müller.
Bettina Maier, a carer in an eight-woman flatshare, says that by the next day many of them will have forgotten they were ever at the cafe. "We show them pictures of themselves, and sometimes they laugh and say: 'I'm not that old lady!'," she says.
Liese Steinbrinck, fragile and breathless off the dancefloor, but nimble and elegant as she waltzes to The Blue Danube, talks like a waterfall. Most of what the former haberdashery manager says makes no sense, and she appears to be sunk in a deep amnesia, until suddenly, as if she has had a flash of inspiration, she cups together her hands with their tissue-paper-thin skin and says: "Best thing is not to stop because when I'm here I'm elsewhere."
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