On a Sunday afternoon in October, the Discovery Theatre will fill with a sound Anchorage has rarely heard: elementary schoolers, middle and high school students, and Alaskans living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, all singing the same songs.
"One Voice, Many Lifetimes," set for 4 p.m. on Oct. 18, 2026, at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, is billed as an intergenerational benefit concert -- a celebration of music, memory, and connection, and a fundraiser for two Alaska nonprofits. It is a performance that, by its very design, blurs the line between who is on stage and who is in the audience, and between who is performing and who is being cared for.
The concert is presented in partnership by Keys to Life Alaska, an arts and cross-cultural nonprofit, and Alzheimer's Resource Alaska (ARA), the state's long-standing support organization for people affected by dementia and their caregivers. Proceeds support both groups' work in connection, education, and compassionate care.
The pairing is less unlikely than it first appears. Both organizations have spent years using music as a tool for reaching people that words alone cannot.
For ARA, that work runs through the Forget Me Not Chorus, a community singing program made up of people living with Alzheimer's and related dementias, their caregivers, and volunteers. The chorus is based on a model from the Giving Voice Chorus Initiative, founded around a simple premise: focus on what people can still do, rather than on what they have lost.
The Alaska chorus has grown to more than four dozen singers. In November 2025, it filled the Anchorage Senior Activity Center with music -- an afternoon that KTUU covered under the headline "Memory and Music." ARA chief executive Lisa Sauder described then what she has seen in her own family. Her late mother lived with vascular dementia, and Sauder became her caregiver, as she put it, "literally overnight."
"Singing is such a special way to express yourself," Sauder told the station. "As people struggle with cognitive loss or Alzheimer's or dementia, many times singing is one way they can still continue to express themselves, even when they can't speak."
That observation is not merely sentimental. Music engages multiple areas of the brain at once, and emotional memory often remains accessible even as other abilities change. In a February 2026 column for Senior Voice Alaska, Sauder recalled learning that playing her mother's beloved big band music could calm her almost immediately -- her mother would relax, begin singing along, and drift into a different time filled with positive memories.
"When you look around the room, many times you really can't tell who the person with Alzheimer's or dementia is," Sauder said, "because everyone is engaged. They're singing, they're laughing, they're smiling, they're dancing."
That erasure of the line between patient and partner, performer and audience, is precisely the theme the October concert takes up. The Forget Me Not Chorus itself is built so that, at a rehearsal or performance, you often cannot tell who is living with the disease, who is a caregiver, and who is a volunteer.
Keys to Life Alaska brings its own deep bench of music-as-connection work to the partnership. The organization was incorporated in 2015 and is led by executive director Shirley Mae Springer Staten, a singer and longtime community builder whose resume stretches back decades. She spent years coordinating Alaska Native culture camps for the Alaska Humanities Forum and directed a Home Base After School Program through which underprivileged students wrote and published books, learned instruments, made films, and traveled to Ghana.
Keys to Life's best-known music program is the Hiland Mountain Lullaby Project, which it brought to Alaska in 2016 in collaboration with the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center. Modeled on Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute Lullaby Project, it paired incarcerated mothers with community music mentors to write original lullabies for their children. The project was one of just 24 sponsored nationally by Carnegie Hall that year, and it produced an album of sixteen lullabies -- songs Staten has described as more than music: hope for the child, unspoken words from the parent, and the possibility of a better life together.
That instinct -- that a song can carry what a person cannot otherwise say -- runs through both organizations and through the October program. The concert promises familiar favorites alongside new and inspiring songs, chosen to spark recognition and confidence rather than to demand polished performance.
It is, in that sense, a benefit concert in the fullest meaning of the word. The money raised supports two nonprofits whose work is largely unglamorous and largely invisible: care navigation and coordination, support groups, memory screenings, educational programs, mini-grants for respite care and home modifications, and programs like the chorus that exist simply to create joy and belonging. ARA's mission is to support Alaskans affected by Alzheimer's disease, related dementias, and other disabilities to ensure quality of life -- and, as the organization puts it, to make sure no one faces the journey alone.
The concert runs about two hours. Children ages 2 to 6 are admitted free with a child ticket, and youth ages 7 to 18 are $10; adult tickets are currently available on a two-for-one promotion, with day-of-event pricing higher. Minors under 16 must attend with an adult 21 or older and have parental consent. Alcohol-free seating is available in the theater.
For a state where the population is aging and the number of families touched by dementia keeps growing, the event is also a statement of intent: that memory loss does not end a person's place in the community, and that a room full of voices -- young and old, healthy and declining -- can still find a single song.